Content strategy as social justice & inclusivity work

B Cordelia Yu — @thebestsophist

CONTENT WARNING

I didn’t have to to tell you that while we would be discussing issues that affected marginalized communities such as racism, sexism, and ableism, it would be relatively high-level. I didn’t have to tell you that while we might discuss police brutality and current events—I would have no graphical content and would include warnings to tell you what is coming up. I didn’t have to tell you that it would be totally okay if you had to get up and leave the room and that it would be clear when it was safe to come back.

But november happened. which meant january happened. and while about 95% of the content of this session is exactly the same, it seemed to build a new level of urgency and so while this is the title y’all got in the program, if I’m completely honest, ☟

Content Strategy As Antifa

B Cordelia Yu — @thebestsophist

What is within the scope of content strategy?

What is within the scope of design?

…and what is the content strategist’s role in creating social justice?

What is inclusivity?

Case Study 1: United Airlines

<content warning>

it’s going to include a brief description of what the police did. and a discussion of racism. if you need to leave the room, that’s fine, ☛ I’ll have this slide when it’s safe.

United wanted to get some crew to a different city. Normally what happens is that they’ll ask whether anyone is willing to volunteer to give up their seat for a voucher—nobody did. So they used an algorithm. first choosing a young couple, who were unhappy, but got off. Then it chose a chinese american man, he said he couldn’t he had patients he needed to see, he was a doctor. the airline staff didn’t care, they had an algorithm, that’s the process, that’s the way things are done and the algorithm chose him.

he told them, he had patients he had to see.

That’s the process.

Those are the rules.

The whole damn process is guilty.

</content warning>

What is within the
scope of content strategy?

Case Study 2

Fossil-Free Banking & Divestment

Green America promotes social and environmental justice through economic action.

They it by promoting structural change to our economic system through individual, community, and societal action.

A screenshot of Green America’s Fossil Free Divestment guide

This is the microsite my team built.

To decide what to build I go through my normal process: gather requirements, help the authors understand what is possible for their content, help guide the overall storytelling process. Which is all well and good.

The guide had fantastic content on telling people why they should move their money away from places that invest in fossil-fuels to socially responsible ones. And while other organizations have done great work helping guide major investors and entities (such as universities) away from fossil fuels, Green America is basically the only organization that concentrates on helping individuals move their finances to socially responsible institutions.

So disclaimer: I’m speaking here as myself and my views are not representative of Green America, but if you have investments or a retirement fund, I really do suggest looking at it. The feedback we receive most is from financial advisors saying that it’s helping them help their clients navigate the world of socially-responsible investing. In all, it’s touted as a success within the org and the industry.

But here’s the problem: “the industry”.

Divesting & Reinvesting

Green America promotes social and environmental justice through economic action.

We do it by promoting structural change to our economic system through individual, community, and societal action.

The language of sustainability—as commonly practiced—is in the language of affluence.

The problem of
banking desserts

Low income people, communities of color…own smartphones at a greater rate than the population in general but they lack a banking relationship.

Bill Bynum, CEO of Hope Credit Union

Case study 3: Facebook

This is about as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find.

John Relman, civil rights lawyer

Content strategy and design are inseparable from social justice.

And that is why say my work as a content strategist is inseparable from social justice: how do the tools we work on and build contributing to or disrupt existing power structures? Does it hurt those in marginalized communities? What protections are built into the system? These are all questions our content strategy plans need to consider.

For a company whose primary product is to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected” and has more than a billion users every day, this is dangerously ignorant.

“build now and fix it after abuse happens” causes irreparable hurt to those who can least afford it. It means queer kids who are not out to their are suddenly ostracized and tossed on the street. It means people voted based on a worldview spun on a web of lies.

What is within the scope of content strategy?

Communications is at core of everything we do.

Content strategy is about creating spaces to communicate.

Building an Inclusive Content Strategy

Think of this as building a box for putting together your own inclusivity toolkit.

Building an Inclusive Content Strategy

Content audit
Building your content team
Creating new processes
Building inclusive organizations

Discovery

Organization: “Who are we?”
Market: “What does the world look like?”
Audience: “Who are our constituents?”

Organization Research

What is the mission?
Who does this effect? Who has a stake?

Green America promotes social and environmental justice through economic action.

Organization Research

What is the mission?
Who does this effect? Who has a stake?
What are the products? Who are they made for?

Who should we be serving?

Market Research

User Constituent Research

>50% were middle-class white women +50 years old.
Geographically diverse, not strongly centered around cities.

I won’t say too much about the details of our particular user research methods. we had several hundred to several thousand responses to email surveys, dozens of phone calls and in-person interviews.

High level results ☟

And this is how we started making a set of archetypal user personas.

So a thing…archetypal personas are growing out of favor in our work, and for good reason. they’re often not useful. if we’re testing UI elements or workflows, behavior personas are much more useful.

But these are for designing programs and campaigns. After creating constituent personas, I look at the gaps in my venn diagrams. the folks weren’t being reached or were barely being reached by others in the industry. I created personas for the people from communities who should know about this work but aren’t having their needs addressed.

I then gave these personas to all the staff who were involved in creating content or managing projects. In workshop, I taught them the basics of how to read and think about a persona.

Editorial and Programatic Process Audit

aka “strategic assessment lite”

Reading a report is not enough, turn it into embodied and experiential knowledge.

What yer looking for

Who is involved in the process?
Who is in on the product decisions?
What does the RACI chart look like?

As an example: we might act out the process for depositing a check, so I would pretend to be the mail carrier, and put an envelope in the inbox, and whoever opens the mail would hand it to a customer service rep who might hand it the data entry and so on until it goes to accounting and is saved or destroyed. While people are acting this out, I would diagram it with sticky notes on the wall. So at the end we would both have the experience of walking around the room seeing how many people touched one check, how many times it got passed back and forth, have that visualized out on the wall, and realize how long it took.

For product processes, work backwards to find critical decision points to put in checks—for instance if it’s for creating a new campaign, we might go back through a constituent mapping process similar to what we did in the org research, to understand what communities we should be talking to, or if it includes building a coalition of other orgs, and research organizations from marginalized communities we should bring into the coalition.

Now, I said that this was the least successful part of the process for me, the reason was that the teams were skeptical, they had a hard time seeing how it would be valuable. So that’s what I had to really look at and understand next.

Audit yer silos.

Here’s what mine looks like…

people on the left
milestones and decision points on the top
Each cell shows what level of engagement and responsibilities someone has at each stage

I created a chart for every project and team in the organization. GA had about 30 staff. We officially had 10 departments, but about 14 teams, across about 40 projects—and I never finished an assessment of all the processes—which is what happens when you have an organization with a lot of legacy projects.

But I do all this for a point. Together with mapping your major processes, you know where the major decision points are and who is in those decisions. Because once you have those, you can start finding answers to these questions:

What marginalized communities are represented in decision making processes?
How much say do they have?
Really? Have you asked them while in a safe space?
What happens to feedback? What is the process for acting on it?
Do your staff know about the processes?

Are marginalized voices empowered to make change in your organization?

Yer Content Inventory & Language Audit

I spun up a CMS and set up content models for every channel and content type just to handle all the diversity of records—and for those of you who are about to embark on a huge inventory and would like to know what that looked like, I can show you afterward. Luckily, making the inventory an inclusivity audit of all the content was one of the easier parts of the whole process.

Because through the discovery training the team already knew what they were looking for to make content inclusive. I added fields to capture whether a persona was part of the audience, how relevant and inclusive the content was for them.

This let me capture a detailed information on how good a specific piece of content was. Now, one difficulty here is that it doesn’t capture how inclusive the content within a particular program. To do that would have required an amount of meta analysis that I didn’t really have time or resources for. But because we knew a lot of content was going to be rewritten or archived, and people were already making plans to make sure programs as a whole were inclusive as they were rewriting, the analysis wasn’t as critical.

Does your content satisfy the needs of marginalized audiences?
What changes when you’re talking to voices outside the primary audience?
Do you words that are only meaningful to subject matter experts?

In trying to be reassuring, it became patronizing instead.

Inquisitive ignorance allows for fresh perspective.

Audit Yer Products

Look at the whole constellation of products.
Who is in on product decisions? When do they have input?
Whose input shapes decisions the most?

29:10

At an organization like Green America, the content is the product…sort of. If you’re also a not-for-profit, your product not just the website or campaigns, but also the change you are trying to make in the world. ☟

It is okay for certain products to be aimed at a particular demographic, but it’s not okay if all of your products miss entire groups. It was totally okay to have a guide dedicated to investors but as one of very few voices whose focus was on individuals wanting to participate in fossil-free and ethical banking, not also having programs and accessible content for non-investors was a problem. ☟

Go back to your raci chart. Who has life experiences from communities you’re not reaching properly? And not just the stuff that goes onto the CV. Do they have substantive input to what decisions are being made? Are their concerns being overridden? ☟

Finally, whoever has final say has the most power. Do they have a habit of saying “i hear you” and then overriding people’s decisions? Be real about institutional politics. The unsaid things need to be acknowledged somewhere. Because if you don’t, your audit will only provide a gilded picture of the truth.

Building Yer Inclusivity Team

Yer gonna need allies co-conspirators.

How to find co-conspirators

Empower/amplify those who are already doing it.

Train people who care.

Flatten your team structure.

You are the safe space.

This empowers the less-experienced to ask the inquisitive ignorant questions that bring new understanding. This is how folks from marginalized communities coming through the pipeline don’t give up and leave for less toxic spaces. This is how we train them to get into management. All of us together are the ladder that creates the next generation of leaders.

And this touches on something that is core to the sort of manager i’ve become. My job is not to tell people what to do. My job is to making sure those who work with me have tools for the job and make space for them to do it. If they’re under-resourced, I have to fight for more resources. If I can’t do that, I help them prioritize. If they don’t have the right training, I help them learn. I put my people first. and that’s because when it comes to inclusivity work…

Life experience matters more than work experience.

Creating & Implementing the Strategy

Teaching the process.

Content strategy as empowerment

“I hear you” is not enough if nothing comes of it.

Design is no longer about designing the thing, you design the conditions for the thing to emerge–the conversation.

Indy Johar—Democratizing Cities

Restructuring yer staff

Hiring for inclusion

Yer JD

Are you using male pronouns?
Is your language full of jargon?
Are you demanding physical ability for a desk job?
College degree? Really?

At a minimum ☛ joblint.org

How are you reviewing applications?

Now the hard part

Inclusion has a price. And it is not small.

Inclusion is a team effort

“Everyone genuinely seems to care. Collectively, not much changes.”

Paul Delaney

We are all guilty and victims under late capitalism.

Diversity numbers and and quotas are not enough.

Several veteran reporters refused to assist us and act as teachers and mentors to young minority hires and trainees.

Paul Delaney

Realtalk: Chatham House Rule for this slide.

Change is inevitable.

Content strategy is about creating spaces to communicate.

Content strategy is about creating spaces to ~~communicate~~ listen.

How does the algorithm choose?

They knew they were overfilled the moment the last seat checked in.

they didn’t stop people at the check-in counter. the gate agent didn’t stop them from boarding—they waited until people were on the plane.

a few weeks ago, a gate agent refused to allow two women to board because they were wearing leggings—they were black. was it really about the leggings or was the flight overbooked and blaming a bunch of black girls will go over better with the crowd? two weeks ago when i was coming home from detroit—a black woman found another in her seat—they both had tickets for the same seat. the gate agent came in and demanded to see the person’s ticket, she refused. luckily, they found the woman another seat on the plane.

three cases, four people of color. three cases do not signify a trend. But they should spark questions.

United overfills flights as a standard business practice.

Efficiency demands having processes in place to deal with common problems.

This is the Milgram Experiment as customer service model

This is an anti-pattern for inclusive content strategy.

Social change will not come to us like an avalanche down the mountain. Social change will come to us through seeds in well prepared soil—and it is we, like the earthworms, who prepare the soil.…

…We realize there are no guarantees as to what will come up. Yet we do know that without the seeds and the prepared soil nothing will grow at all.

Ursula Franklin—The Real World of Technology

Yeah, this is emotional labor.

That means our normal deliverables aren’t enough. To change culture we need to change the hearts and minds. This means building relationships and friendships. Make your office a safe space, even if you’re not in a management role, try to keep a couch or a comfortable chair in your office so someone can come in, shut the door, escape for a moment and vent.

It’s about being human with one another. It’s confronting our own biases. It’s about making space to be vulnerable and listen.

And that means lot of the things you recommend will probably take years to implement, because unlikes sprints and deploy schedules—culture change is a long game. You might not even be there to see them through. That is why building a team and processes that outlives you or any single person is so important. This is social justice work just like those marching on the streets. So also take time to take care of yourself.

We stand between the darkness and the light.

ancient Mimbari prayer

We can’t change the whole system overnight. But we need to know what we would put in its place…

…and we can take advantage of the present crisis to begin working to create new models with the teachers, principals, and parents all over the city who have given themselves permission to think differently from the powers-that-be.

Grace Lee-Boggs

Thank you

More @ Confab Central June 7–9 (“`YU17`” for $200 off).

This talk ☛ cordeliayu.com/s/7u

Newsletter ☛ tinyletter.com/thebestsophist

@[email protected]

Content strategy as social justice & inclusivity work

B Cordelia Yu — @thebestsophist

CONTENT WARNING

Content Strategy As Antifa

B Cordelia Yu — @thebestsophist

What is within the scope of content strategy?

What is within the scope of design?

What is inclusivity?

Case Study 1: United Airlines

<content warning>

That’s the process.

Those are the rules.

The whole damn process is guilty.

</content warning>

What is within the scope of content strategy?

Case Study 2

Fossil-Free Banking & Divestment

The problem of banking desserts

Case study 3: Facebook

What is within the scope of content strategy?

Communications is at core of everything we do.

Content strategy is about creating spaces to communicate.

Building an Inclusive Content Strategy

Building an Inclusive Content Strategy

Discovery

Organization Research

Organization Research

Who should we be serving?

Market Research

User Constituent Research

Editorial and Programatic Process Audit

What yer looking for

Audit yer silos.

Yer Content Inventory & Language Audit

Audit Yer Products

Building Yer Inclusivity Team

Yer gonna need allies co-conspirators.

How to find co-conspirators

Flatten your team structure.

You are the safe space.

Life experience matters more than work experience.

Creating & Implementing the Strategy

Teaching the process.

Content strategy as empowerment

Restructuring yer staff

Hiring for inclusion

Yer JD

At a minimum ☛ joblint.org

How are you reviewing applications?

Now the hard part

Inclusion is a team effort

We are all guilty and victims under late capitalism.

Realtalk: Chatham House Rule for this slide.

Change is inevitable.

How does the algorithm choose?

Yeah, this is emotional labor.

We stand between the darkness and the light.

Thank you

More @ Confab Central June 7–9 (“YU17” for $200 off).

What is within the
scope of content strategy?

The problem of
banking desserts

More @ Confab Central June 7–9 (“`YU17`” for $200 off).