San Francisco, Sept. 20, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Choir, the financial industry’s first diversity-tech platform, is turning up the volume on representative voices with its newest offering, Voices: Search™. Now available in beta for media companies and financial organizations, Voices™ makes it easy for journalists and event planners to connect with hundreds of people of color, women, and nonbinary professionals who are qualified sources and speakers across the financial ecosystem. With this launch, Choir is also proud to announce respected FinTech innovator, speaker, and Envestnet executive, Dani Fava, has joined the company’s Board of Advisors.
Voices is a search platform that connects reporters, conference planners, and other industry content producers with new-to-them sources and speakers who bring diverse expertise representative of the world around us. On Voices: Search, users search by broad topic areas of interest – such as asset management or cryptocurrency – or specific topics like fixed income, 401k, equity compensation, behavioral economics, or charitable giving, for example. Search users can filter by title, professional designation, location, race, gender, and other personal identifiers.
Individuals - or "Voices" - listed on the platform each have their own digital media kit containing: links to media appearances and videos of them speaking; the types and size of speaking roles, print, and digital media they are willing to participate in; downloadable photos; social media and professional website links; fee requirements (if any); and contact information.
“Conference committees and journalists are up against major time constraints and limited networks, contributing to an ongoing cycle of homogenous speakers and sources – Voices is going to change that,” said Liv Gagnon, co-founder of Choir. “Before we launched the Certification, Voices was the original idea for Choir. We asked, ‘What if you could search from a pool of brilliant speakers and sources that was entirely made up of people of color, women, and nonbinary professionals?’ Now, we’ve built it, and we are so excited for the industry to see a new face of thought leadership.”
More than 200 Voices have already signed up and are on the platform in beta. Choir has started signing financial trade and national top-tier media to Voices: Search, as well as conference planning teams and financial organizations.
“News publications, financial institutions, and conference organizers largely have good intentions and have told us they want to include the expertise of women and people of color in the spotlight. Until now, they haven’t had an efficient and scalable way to do so,” said Sonya Dreizler, co-founder of Choir. “We want to turn intention into action. Voices removes many of the barriers that have been in the way for too long.”
Voices is a natural continuation of Choir’s mission to lift the voices of people of color, women, and nonbinary professionals on stages and in the media. In January, the company launched its flagship Choir Certification, a diversity certification and assessment for financial conferences that includes consulting, year-over-year benchmarking, and helpful Diversity, Equity and Inclusion resources for conference planning teams. The Certification is based on Choir’s proprietary algorithm that quantifies how well a speaker lineup reflects the U.S. population. Dozens of conferences have already begun working with Choir and a list of Certified events is listed on the website.
“An industry’s ability to innovate is directly correlated to how effectively it listens to and addresses the needs of all of its consumers. This can only happen when diverse leaders are at the table,” said Fava. “I’m inspired by the platform Choir has created and am excited to help scale it so that we can all reap the benefits.”
Organizations interested in joining the beta version of Voices can email liv@hellochoir.com or visit hellochoir.com/voices for more information.
From early-career professionals to C-Suite executives, anyone who works in finance can join Voices today at no cost by submitting a profile at hellochoir.com/voices.
Enterprises interested in providing Voices as a resource to their employees can contact info@hellochoir.com.
All media requests: media@hellochoir.com
About Choir
Choir, LLC (“Choir”) is the financial industry’s first conference diversity certification and a diversity-tech platform focused on amplifying the voices of financial professionals who are women, non-binary people, and people of color. Creator of the Choir Certification™ and Choir Score™, the company aims to make conferences more representative of the U.S. population by helping organizations identify and reach clear and actionable speaker diversity benchmarks. A full list of Choir Certified Conferences is available at https://www.hellochoir.com. The company is based in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Choir and Envestnet are separate and unaffiliated firms. This release should not be construed as a recommendation or endorsement of any particular product, service, or firm.
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Attachments
- Dani Fava, Envestnet’s Group Head of Innovation and Member, Choir Board of Advisors
- Choir Voices Web Page
