On Tech Ethics Podcast – Use of RealResponse in Fostering Safe and Inclusive Work Environments

Daniel Smith: Welcome to On Tech Ethics with CITI Program. Our guest today is David Chadwick, who is the founder and CEO of RealResponse, which is a platform that helps create safe, ethical, and inclusive educational and workplace environments. Today we are going to hear more about RealResponse, including its origin story, how it works, and how it can help institutions create healthy cultures, successful programs, and positive experiences for all. Before we get started, I want to quickly note that this podcast is for educational purposes only. It’s not designed to provide legal advice or legal guidance. You should consult with your organization’s attorneys if you have questions or concerns about the relevant laws and regulations that may be discussed in this podcast. In addition, the views expressed in this podcast are solely those of our guests. And on that note, welcome to the podcast, David.

David Chadwick: Thanks, Daniel. It’s a pleasure to be here. I appreciate you having me.

Daniel Smith: Absolutely. It’s wonderful to have you. So I know RealResponse has an interesting origin story. Can you tell us more about yourself and why you founded this platform?

David Chadwick: Sure. So like many companies, this actually began as a collegiate class project for me. In 2012, I was taking an entrepreneurship class at Rice University. Admittedly, at the time, I didn’t even know what entrepreneurship was, but I knew it satisfied a credit that I needed to get to graduate, and one of my teammates invited me to join. So I said, let’s take it.

At the time I was playing basketball, and had to come up with an idea for that class and saw a pretty consistent frustration among my student athlete peers of not feeling like they had a way to speak up and to use their voice and to share everything from suggestions to feedback, to maybe questions that people didn’t feel comfortable tagging their name to.

To obviously more serious concerns as well in really helping and enabling the administration to better understand our culture and the experiences that the student athletes were having, and obviously to address concerns that they might have.

So it was actually during that class that I talked to our athletic director at the time, and I pitched him on this concept and he said to me and validated it further, David from an AD’s chair, an athletic director’s chair, it’s really hard to get feedback from student athletes. We might try to do an exit interview while someone’s on their way out, but even then we’re asking them, Hey, how’d the last two, three, four years go?

It’s much too late to actually address those things. We might do a survey, but we get very little participation. And then he used the magic phrase, if you could help me collect student athlete feedback, I would pay you for it. So I said, great, let’s try to find a way to make this happen. So I asked him, I said, who are three athletic directors in your network that I could also interview to validate that there’s an opportunity here?

He gave me three names. At the end of those three calls, I asked those three people for three names, and literally over a year period during that class, I interviewed over 200 division one athletic directors. And to put that in context, there’s roughly 350 across the country. So I got a huge sample size, and I heard enough validation from them too and a similar response from our athletic directors of frustration, right?

We find out about stuff when it’s way too late. If we would’ve known about it earlier, we could have addressed it. Student athletes don’t provide feedback in real time, et cetera, et cetera. So we ended up launching a survey instrument in our first year of operation to help these athletic directors that we had talked to do that exact thing, gather feedback from their student athletes, and really the more holistic student athlete experience, coaches, support areas, service travel, gear, you name it, and to help them also not only understand their results but benchmark against national averages so they could see what’s going well and what needs to be improved.

What happened that to this day, I say was totally unexpected and got us into the lane that we’re going to talk about today, was the student athletes used that end of year survey to bring forward really, really serious things and stuff that should have come out much, much earlier.

To this day, I’m not sure why. My guess is the confidentiality around it, maybe the user-friendliness, but they disclosed things like, my teammates are selling drugs and my coaches know about it. My team’s breaking NCAA rules. There’s hazing going on, sexual misconduct, mental health needs, you name it.

And the immediate response from those schools that we were working with beyond the disbelief was, holy smokes, we can’t wait until surveys anymore. We need that real time mechanism for people to be able to come forward at any time. So that sent us off to the races.

We added a real time anonymous reporting portal. So these athletes had a way at any time to raise those concerns versus just anchoring at the end of the season. And then we listened to our clients on what they needed next, and they told us they needed better ways to document and to track how these issues were being handled, and perhaps when they looked in their campus partners or other key stakeholders like Title IX and general Counsel, et cetera.

So we found a niche really quickly and expanded within college athletics and grew to a hundred plus schools across the country within that four or five year period. The last few years has been especially interesting as well. I know we’re going to get to this, but we always knew there was an opportunity for growth beyond college athletics because the types of things we deal with are not unique to college athletics that go on all over the world.

And we’ve now seen expansion into new verticals such as professional sports leagues and clubs, Olympic, national governing bodies, integrity groups, both here in the US and beyond. Even some universities that are starting to expand our system campus wide to call it the broader campus population. So it’s been really exciting. I tell people what I appreciate most with this growth is the ability to stay true to our mission, which is simple, helping people in need and providing them a safe way to be able to speak up and to use their voice and to position leadership to be responsive in a timely way.

So really appreciate the opportunity to talk about this further because obviously the tech and the ethics one is one that we’re narrowly focused on right now and seeing a lot of success with the folks that we’re working with.

Daniel Smith: Absolutely. And that’s a really interesting story, and I can see how this is a much needed platform for people across different settings, and I want to hear about that in a bit. But first, just to get a little bit more specific and clarify, can you talk about some of the different products that RealResponse offers and how they support safe, ethical, and inclusive environments?

David Chadwick: Yeah, absolutely. So as I mentioned, surveys were our starting point, and that has evolved as well. So I’d say in years past, and really in that first year anchoring more as an end of year survey where you cover the whole gambit of someone’s experiences.

More recently in the last few years, and this is not unique just to college athletics. We’re seeing this with a lot of our partners, using that survey to really get feedback and measure experiences on a number of different areas.

We’ll see people do ad hoc surveys, so they’ll do surveys around sports betting or mental health needs or things along those lines. We’re also transitioning this into a more corporate environment where we’ve had some of our professional sports clients use the survey instrument to gather feedback from their employees on their experiences as an employee at that specific place.

And it’s interesting, we’ve seen people also tie in some of those more specific ethical, inclusive environment questions, safe questions, et cetera, to really narrow in on that specific topic because the reality is a traditional hotline or whatever the form of communication is, should not be the only place where you’re inviting that type of feedback on those areas.

And something that’s really important to our entire process is it’s not just one way communication. So if someone does provide a concern or an issue in one of those areas, what you don’t want is the recipient to be stuck, right? Because now they know about a potential issue that someone anonymously share, but they can’t act on it and they’re stuck in the mud.

Versus in our system, we have a two-way component. So if someone did share a concern around an ethical issue or an environment not being inclusive, et cetera, they’d have the ability to respond back to that person to ask further questions, point them to resources, and make sure that that person is aware of next steps and where it needs to go. So the survey product, what we call, is really that holistic experience where you could cover a number of different areas.

Our anonymous threads product, and that’s kind of the reporting one that we’ve talked about this far. We see people use that in a number of different ways. So it could be just focused on the equivalent of a hotline, urgent issues that fall into these specific areas, ethical issues, safety issues, etc.

Some of our partners frame it more as a helpline, which I love seeing this becoming more of a common occurrence in the ethics world where people come in and they ask questions, people come in and they provide feedback, things that maybe isn’t at the point yet where they need to report something, but they might have a question about, is this something I should or should not report? Or I see this happening, what should I do? And casting a broader net from a help perspective can make it more likely that people come forward where maybe if it was just a hotline equivalent, they wouldn’t do that.

In terms of our product specificity though, we really try to people with where they are and to use a form of communication that they’re comfortable with, recognizing that there is and will always be a place for the traditional phone line that someone calls with an issue or the more robust web form where they’re filling out a bunch of different fields and making a more formal report.

But knowing that we want to meet people where we are, we see a lot of success is through channels like texting and WhatsApp and the mediums that they’re using not only on a daily basis, but usually hourly, because the reality is it’s fast, it’s efficient, it’s quick. So we now have features where someone can leverage text in WhatsApp and never have their phone number associated with their submission.

So they could come in, send a text message, send a WhatsApp message to the organization, and again, in that two-way communication, they’d be able to go through the back and forth and offer resources, ask for their questions to help facilitate their investigation.

And then lastly, we do have the terminology case management. We call it our documentation repository, helping these organizations really centralize their notes and how they’re tracking these matters. Again, that could be a wide spectrum, that could be more general. Hey, Daniel, thanks for coming my office than today to discuss XYZ. I wanted to make sure we’re on the same page.

So obviously the more serious performance improvement plans and things along those lines. So again, we want to leverage technology and systems that people are comfortable with, but most importantly, make communication easy and make sure all the right stakeholders are aware of what’s going on and what the follow-up needs to be after that.

Daniel Smith: So I can see how RealResponse could have great benefits on the student or employee level, the compliance level, and also just overall for the institution. So first, from a student or employee perspective, what are some ways in which RealResponse could help me experience a healthier campus or work environment?

David Chadwick: Sure. So let’s start with the student and really I think specifying because there is a difference, right between student, student athlete. The student athlete deals with a very unique power dynamic, right?

Where I have things potentially like financial aid or playing time or just generally not wanting to rock the boat on my network if I want to stay in the sports world. So the data shows student athletes are much less likely to speak up with these types of issues, for fear of repercussions, and they deal with some more unique things as well where maybe it’s an athletic training need. We see this a lot. I don’t feel like my knee injury is being handled appropriately.

Maybe it’s an issue while there’s travel occurring to an away game. We heard an example once where a coach was texting while driving, so these are probably things the general student is not dealing with, but in that athletic sphere, there’s just a lot that could fit into that bucket.

But we’re already seeing similar challenges in the broader campus environment, let’s call it the greater student population, et cetera. One of the crossovers is hazing. It’s just an unfortunate reality that maybe in years past, someone thought more of going on in the sports world. But that is a pretty consistent and serious challenge that we’re seeing in the broader campus population, especially with some of the traditions around Greek life.

So that’s definitely one where someone was aware of a hazing situation, they could use our platform to be able to report that directly to the institution. Again, leveraging some of that more modern technology through text through WhatsApp. If they are using text or WhatsApp, they could actually take a picture or take a video of something in real time or a screenshot that they see to be able to easily send that to the administration versus again, having to file a more formal report where that might not be as easy.

Other types of issues facing the broader campus population. Hazing, mental wellness is a really common topic that we see too, where someone may have a concern about oneself and they’re looking to seek help. But what we see and hear a lot is sometimes someone has a concern for someone else because they’re their friend and they’re their roommate and they know what’s going on in their very deep personal life and recognize and maybe can identify the challenges more quickly than a professor or someone else may.

So we’ll see students come in and say, Hey, I’m really concerned about my friend Daniel. I know he’s going through this issue right now. What should I do for him or her? And in that time, the administration’s able to provide resources and suggest next steps, et cetera, et cetera. So that’s been really great to see.

There’s a long list of things, obviously in a campus setting, you’re talking about ethical concerns, fraud, it could be things around bias, Title IX reporting. A newer one we’re seeing is sports betting, which we can go down that path if you want, but both in the athletics and the non-athletic sphere is more and more states are legalizing sports betting.

So there’s a number of different areas that, again, traditional reporting channels have been set up on campuses, but where we’re seeing a lot of success is disrupting that and providing some of those modern technologies where if you walk into a common area on campus, what most students are doing is they’re staring at their phone.

And I joke with people, they’re probably texting with each other even if they’re a few tables away, but it’s just the world that we live in. That’s unique to the campus environment. I’d say in the broader HR corporate world, it’s similar to what we’ve seen in the athletic sphere where again, there’s this more pressured environment because oftentimes people are taking pay cuts.

They may be starting a little bit lower where they would be outside of a sports world because they really want to work in sports. In some examples, it might be this is the specific pro team that I grew up following. I’m a huge fan and I want to support this organization and be a part of the organization. So we see people really frame real responses, an opportunity to share feedback and concerns. It could be among a number of different areas. It could be workplace conduct issues, it could be health and safety violations, mental health needs, discrimination, harassment policy, et cetera.

But what we’re seeing a lot of our folks, and maybe this is a little bit of a difference in the demographic, right, the 18 to 22 year old college student versus the adult, but really putting the accountability back on them. There’s a terminology that we’ve seen people use at our application where they say comments can be about major issues or minor challenges.

Just in short share whatever you think is important for us to hear. Our tagline we use a lot is elevate voices. And I think that aligns here. Well, right? If this is something that you think is important to speak up on, please do so and the appropriate people will, number one, know about this. But number two, be able to respond back and hopefully resolve this for you in a timely way.

So again, I keep saying broad because it’s a flexible system with a lot of different ways that it could be utilized, but those are some of the common ways that we’ve seen both on our campuses and kind of in a corporate environment.

Daniel Smith: I want to take a quick break to tell you about CITI Program’s On Campus podcast, hosted by my colleague Ed Butch. On Campus explores current issues that impact higher education institutions. After listening to this conversation with David, I encourage you to check out On Campus where you can hear more from David and Ed regarding the use of RealResponse on college and university campuses. You can listen and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Now, back to my conversation with David. And you alluded to this a bit when talking about the ways in which students or employees can utilize this, but from a compliance perspective, how can RealResponse help administrators and staff facilitate compliance with various laws and regulations and standards across different settings?

David Chadwick: Sure. So it’s interesting because we don’t necessarily always frame as reporting hotline, et cetera. We do see a lot of people leverage RealResponse just to ask questions. Again, my name’s not tagged to this. My contact information’s not tagged to this. I can come in and ask a question about a number of these different areas.

So maybe someone’s coming in and asking for specific clarity around sports betting. Am I allowed to do this? Is this illegal? Et cetera. Maybe someone’s coming in with questions around Title IX compliance. Maybe someone’s coming in and asking, is this ethically allowed or not?

Oftentimes that can help address these issues before they actually happen because someone’s more likely to ask the question, they get the clarity, and then they don’t do the behavior versus if they didn’t know, maybe they just do that behavior out of ignorance, and then that’s a bad place to be in for everyone.

So we encourage dialogue, we encourage communication, and sometimes it’s just people asking those questions that can help get the information that they need to be able to prevent those behaviors from happening.

Daniel Smith: And then lastly, in our kind of tiered approach to breaking this down, from a broader institutional perspective, what are some examples of the positive effects that RealResponse has had on campus or workplace communities?

David Chadwick: This goes back to what I mentioned earlier about mental wellness and how we’re seeing people oftentimes come in and ask questions or share concerns about a peer. Again, I know that this person’s going through something because they just had a death in their family, or their significant other broke up with them, or they’re failing a class or they want to change their major or whatever. There’s just so many different things, and our students now live in this pressure cooker environment where there’s just a number of different areas that could affect their mental wellbeing.

We had an example at a university, and I should probably preface this by saying we don’t see the submissions, we don’t see the information that comes through. We are really that conduit. So the only reason I know about this is because a school called me, which is a little bit abnormal, but I think because of the gravity of the topic and the relationship too, they wanted to tell me, they said, David, we think we saved a life through RealResponse.

And I said, well, what happened? And they said, that a student came through our platform to anonymously alert us that a roommate had not come out of their room in the last 24 hours. Now, that person did not realize how serious it was at the time. It was more of just that first step of, I have a concern, I wanted to make sure you knew about this, et cetera.

So the institution obviously looked into this immediately and did find out that that person was on the brink of self-harm. We call it the puzzle where there’s different pieces that go into the bigger picture of what’s going on. If they didn’t have that initial puzzle piece to begin to put the pieces together of what was happening, they may have never identified this.

But by creating that way for communications to happen quickly, breaking down barriers, inviting, not just reports of issues, but again, questions, potential concerns, et cetera, they were able to flag this immediately put it on their radar loop in the right people on campus, hospitalized this individual.

And again, we’ll never know, but to have potentially prevented a tragedy, at the end of the day, there’s nothing more precious than life. So we encourage those types of behaviors and use cases within our partners, which has been really great to see.

Another one more recently was we had a institution go live literally last week, and they announced it on their website. They pushed out their internal comms, and they for years have had hotlines in place and web forums and conduct reporting and some, again, those more, I don’t like to use the word outdated, but we’ll say more traditional ways of reporting. And they too called me and said their first day they had nine reports of hazing. And it was interesting when we talked to them and looked at the data, the appeal was just that text. What’s that? The efficient way where all I have to do is pull up my phone, type in that number and send a text.

It’s something I’m familiar with. I call it the TikTok generation. The attention span is a little bit shorter than perhaps you or I when we were in college, but if we can capture them where they are in that moment, they have the ability to do that. And it’s interesting as well. I’ve had some of these schools tell us when they’ve had hazing situations be reported through our platform in years past, they have not been able to follow up on it.

So maybe someone in the heat of moment comes to a web form and just types in this fraternity is hazing, yada, yada, yada. And the challenge is they can’t act on it, right? Like, okay, well what fraternity and who was involved and when did this happen? And do you have any supporting documentation, et cetera, versus what we’re seeing and hearing is, it’s sometimes when you have that person right in the moment of communicating, you can ask those follow-up questions and get the information that you need to be able to act on in a timely way.

Again, who was involved, when did this happen, et cetera, et cetera. The last example I’ll give you in kind of a workplace environment was we had a very high profile professional sports client launch our system, and they told us that they had had a hotline in place for almost a decade, and they had received, they said we could count it on one hand, so what three, four, five calls they launched that day.

And similar to the example I just gave you with you, they immediately had ones come through, but there was a couple that came through and said, we just wanted to thank you for implementing this system and really prioritizing our wellbeing and experiences. So at the end of the day, that’s the most important part, is making people feel appreciated, making them feel valued, that their wellbeing, that their experiences are a priority.

And then again, when there are those types of things that are going on that they can be addressed in a timely way, whether it is hazing, ethical issues, et cetera, et cetera.

Daniel Smith: Those are all great examples and definitely sounds like a very powerful platform for people and also just an easy way for them to raise issues that they’re encountering. So on that note, do you recommend any additional resources where people can learn more about RealResponse, and then also just safe, ethical and inclusive educational and work environments in general?

David Chadwick: We are not focused on the education component yet. It’s interesting. We see a lot of our partners see gaps in education and especially on college campuses, right? Picture the student where their head’s just spinning with all this information dump that’s been given to them on day one.

Okay, where do I go for this and how do I do that? And where do I do for this? And it can sometimes be challenging to then also learn, oh, this is where I go to report and this is where I go if I have an ethical concern or inclusive concern, et cetera, et cetera.

So there’s a lot of really great platforms that can educate, whether it is a student or employee on policies, procedures, where to go, et cetera. I personally believe that AI is going to be a part of that future as well. There’s some really interesting chat boxes and text lines and other services where that type of information can be shared at a more automated basis where someone’s not having to be on the back end and kind of do the traditional customer service, like, sure, I’m happy to point you in the right direction.

So I’m really excited about technology helping to increase education and get us away from maybe the traditional, I’m sitting in a meeting and someone comes in to talk about the importance of a workplace environment or in the sports world, and it’s focused on sports betting.

I got to sit in a meeting and listen to someone talk about the pitfalls of sports betting and how they lost their eligibility. They bet it on a game. It’s just how do we get beyond that? Because education is so important in making sure that people are aware, policies and procedures are sometimes just the first step to be able to do those things.

We have tried our best, again, to position ourselves by being able to answer questions and linking to pages and things like that. But I think the best is yet to come over the next couple of years on some of those educational components.

Daniel Smith: Certainly, and I could definitely see how something like AI could help create a more personalized experience for people in that specific context. On that note, do you have any final thoughts you would like to share that we’ve not already touched on?

David Chadwick: What I would say and this is my final send off and encourage people to think about is, where we see issues oftentimes is when there are silos. Again, let’s use a university setting as an example. There’s so many different offices. There may be a Title IX office, there may be a compliance and ethics office. There may be a student conduct office, and then maybe even that it’s separate from the dean of students office focused on ethical standards and reporting.

Sometimes each of those have their own reporting line, right? I’m reporting to compliance and ethics, I’m reporting Title IX, I’m reporting to the dean of students office, student conduct. It can be really confusing. This goes back to your last question just around clarity and education, what to do.

So I encourage the people that we talk to, the organizations that we talk to, collaborate as much as possible, and we’re starting to see a little bit of a trend in that direction, where I’ve spoken to actually two universities in the last couple of weeks that are doing a complete audit of their system for that exact, or of their systems rather plural for that exact reason, because they said everyone has their own systems.

No one speaks together. These issues happen and we’re operating in silos. So how can we break down barriers and make sure the right people are involved when these types of things come through and are operating in a succinct way?

We did one case study a couple of months ago where the organization used the analogy of an orchestra, right? Campuses should be like an orchestra where there’s different skill sets, different expertise, but in the event of something happening, everyone’s coming together and it makes a beautiful sound as a result of it.

So I just think it’s critically important as we talk about ethics and reporting lines and detecting potential issues that need to be addressed, that everyone is operating in a succinct way and breaking down barriers internally as well, so people aren’t trying to silo off their own systems and their own reporting lines, and thus making it even more confusing for the end user when they want to raise a concern and communicate with someone.

Daniel Smith: Absolutely, and I think that’s a great place to leave our conversation for today. So thank you again, David.

David Chadwick: Thank you, Daniel. I appreciate the opportunity and the great work you guys do to spotlight important topics in the tech and ethics space.

Daniel Smith: And I also invite everyone to visit citiprogram.org to learn more about our courses and webinars on research, ethics, and compliance. You may be interested in our Safe Research Environments course, which addresses ways to create and maintain healthy workplace environments in various research settings. And with that, I look forward to bringing you all more conversations on all things tech ethics.