NASCAR partners with Charlotte-based company so drivers, other personnel are heard
NASCAR has added an important line of communication.
On Thursday, NASCAR announced its partnership with RealResponse, a platform that enables members to send and receive safe, secure and anonymous feedback.
The partnership essentially gives NASCAR personnel a secure line of communication to ask questions, share feedback and express concerns about virtually anything — all in an effort to “ensure that NASCAR is aware of the culture of their ecosystem” and is able to address those concerns in a timely way.
“We have a lot of experience in the sports domain,” said David Chadwick, founder and CEO of RealResponse, “and while each organization might have its unique needs of what they’re trying to receive and respond to, there’s a unanimous need of wanting a way for people to speak up in a safe and accessible way.
“So when it comes to NASCAR, we are really excited about the opportunity for RealResponse to be able to provide a way for people to do exactly that.”
Chadwick grew up in Charlotte and attended Charlotte Latin. He went on to have a college basketball career at Rice and then Valparaiso, which is where a business-school entrepreneurial class project turned into the RealResponse product he has now. In a May 2022 story from Business North Carolina magazine, Chadwick said that the inspiration behind the company was simple: “I wanted to come up with something that would solve a direct challenge that I and many of my peers experienced: The absence of a confidential, real-time accessible way to bring issues forward to administrators and coaches.”
Since then, the company has continued its ascension, and now it has found NASCAR, too.
“Any type of concern where a driver felt like they needed a confidential space or an anonymous space to be able to speak up, RealResponse creates exactly that type of solution,” Chadwick told The Observer. “And maybe it’s not reporting something more formal, right? It could be asking a question they want to get clarity on. It could be providing feedback. Or obviously it could be sharing a concern as well. But if NASCAR felt that those types of concerns should be shared confidentially, and that’s an OK forum for those things to come through, then absolutely, RealResponse would be a very suitable form for people to do that — the drivers especially — in a very accessible and safe way. And then NASCAR could engage with that person to make sure that they need the information and the feedback to ultimately make decisions moving forward.”
There’s no denying that communication between NASCAR and its drivers was a hot topic of discussion in the highest levels of the sport in 2022. The season saw drivers, owners and other personnel publicly express their frustrations about not being heard on a variety of urgent issues, including driver safety within the Next Gen car.
The driver safety issue was largely rectified by the end of the season, thanks to weekly meetings between drivers and the sanctioning body. NASCAR president Steve Phelps said in his annual state of the sport address in November that those weekly meetings would continue until the drivers felt like NASCAR was “over-communicating, if there is such a thing.”
But NASCAR, with the introduction of RealResponse, wanted to be proactive in making sure even more communication lines were open.
“As an industry, we had been looking at several different ways to offer resources and support to our community and industry,” said Meghan Miley, managing director of racing operations for NASCAR, “and one of the things we needed to jump on — and for no reason other than to be proactive and to offer additional resources to the industry — is to give a safe place, an opportunity, for our NASCAR members to reach out anonymously and report a number of different things.”
NASCAR launched this program in October, right before the race weekend at Miami-Homestead Speedway, a NASCAR spokesperson said. This tool is used by a bunch of other sport entities, including Major League Baseball, the National Women’s Soccer League, select NFL teams and select college athletic departments.
One of those departments is at Wake Forest. Deacons athletic director John Currie told The Observer in an interview that RealResponse is a “critical part of our communications, accountability, risk management and experience assessment process.”
In other words, the program gives anyone associated with the Wake Forest athletic department the chance to be heard — and that’s what NASCAR is trying to accomplish in its partnership with RealResponse.
“There is no question in my mind that RealResponse is an important tool that does help promote an atmosphere of safety, inclusion and belonging,” Currie said.
This story was originally published December 15, 2022 at 10:00 AM.
