Inclusivity: Make products and teams accessible with content strategy
B Cordelia Yu — @thebestsophist
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Inclusivity: Make products and teams accessible with content strategy
B Cordelia Yu — @thebestsophist
Content note
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 are accessibility and inclusion?
What is content strategy?
Define justice in less than 10 minutes? nbd 👍🏽
Also define content strategy? lol glhf 😂😭
Fossil-Free Banking & Divestment
“Define your mission in 10 words.”
Green America promotes social and environmental justice through economic action.
They do it by promoting structural change to our economic system through individual, community, and societal action.
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.
As commonly practiced, the language of sustainability is in the language of affluence.
The racist history of the environmentalism in the US, abridged
When you think about a cop shooting you, it’s an immediate death.…But climate change—with [related] pollution that’s mostly in our backyard—is still killing us. Respiratory diseases, asthma, and various cancers are slower killers, but connecting them to Black Lives Matter is really important.
Sustainability must care for every community.
…not just the communities that can afford it.
Low income people, communities of color…own smartphones at a greater rate than the population in general but they lack a banking relationship.
What are accessibility and inclusion?
A term or illustration offensive to, say, an ethnic minority or to women taints a book meant for wide distribution…. A line editor…must be intensely—no, philharmonically—in tune with the thinking and language of the target audience—and sensitive as well to peripheral audiences.
Content strategy and design are inseparable from social justice.
Building an Inclusive Content Strategy
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.
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?
Audit yer silos verticals.
- 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?
This is about as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find.
Content strategy and design are inseparable from social justice.
Content strategy is asking hard questions.
Yer Content Inventory & Audit
In trying to be reassuring, it became patronizing.
Inquisitive ignorance allows for fresh perspective.
- Does your content satisfy the needs of marginalized audiences?
- What changes when you’re talking to voices outside the primary audience?
- Do you use language that is only meaningful to subject matter experts?
Skills & Experience > Documentation
Audit Yer Products
- Look at the whole constellation of products.
- Who is part of product decisions? When do they give input?
- Whose input shapes decisions the most?
Building Yer Inclusivity Team
Yer gonna need allies co-conspirators.
How to find co-conspirators
Flatten yer team structure.
Content strategy is mentorship
You are the safe space.
Life experience matters more than work experience.
Creating & Implementing the Strategy
Teach the process.
Content Strategy is making space
Restructuring yer staff
Hiring for inclusion
Yer JD
- Are you using male pronouns?
- Is your language full of jargon?
- Are you making references to insular communities that are often dominated by a specific type of person
- Are you demanding physical ability for a desk job?
- College degree? Really?
At a minimum ☛ joblint.org
How are you reviewing applications?
If you are on a hiring committee, and you are looking at applicants and you see a stellar white male applicant, think long and hard about whether your department needs another white man.…When you hire a non-marginalized person, you are not just supporting this one applicant whom you like, you are rewarding a person who has been rewarded his whole life. You are justifying the system that makes his application look so good. You are not innocent. You are perpetuating a system that requires your participation if not your consent.
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.”
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.
Realtalk: Chatham House Rule.
Change is inevitable, but content strategy is change management.
Content strategy is about creating spaces to communicate listen.
Where were their content strategists?
This is an anti-pattern for inclusive content strategy.
What is within the scope of content strategy?
Communications is at core of everything we do.
Content strategy as nurturing community
“I hear you” is not enough if nothing comes of it.
Content strategy is empowerment
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.
This is emotional labor.
We can’t change the whole system overnight. But we need to know what we would put in its place.
Design is no longer about designing the thing, you design the conditions for the thing to emerge–the conversation.
Thank you ✨💞
@thebestsophist[@scholar.social]
(These slides ☛ cordeliayu.com/s/7M)
Deleted slides
We stand between the darkness and the light.
We design for the problems we know.
But we’ve been failing at it.
Though it’s not entirely our fault.
Systemic injustice is like technical debt.
Inclusion is deeply context dependent.
We must understand cultural contexts of our work and the systems we work in and perpetuate.
Think of this as building a box for putting together your own inclusivity toolkit.
Fossil-Free Banking & Divestment
“Define your mission in 10 words.”
Green America promotes social and environmental justice through economic action.
They do it by promoting structural change to our economic system through individual, community, and societal action.
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.
As commonly practiced, the language of sustainability is in the language of affluence.
The racist history of the environmentalism in the US, abridged
When you think about a cop shooting you, it’s an immediate death.…But climate change—with [related] pollution that’s mostly in our backyard—is still killing us. Respiratory diseases, asthma, and various cancers are slower killers, but connecting them to Black Lives Matter is really important.
Sustainability must care for every community.
…not just the communities that can afford it.
Low income people, communities of color…own smartphones at a greater rate than the population in general but they lack a banking relationship.
What are accessibility and inclusion?
A term or illustration offensive to, say, an ethnic minority or to women taints a book meant for wide distribution…. A line editor…must be intensely—no, philharmonically—in tune with the thinking and language of the target audience—and sensitive as well to peripheral audiences.