Emily Triplett Lentz: Inclusive Content – Episode 52

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS

Emily Triplett Lentz is committed to making her content as welcoming as possible to everyone who encounters it.

Her inclusive-content work not only ensures that traditionally excluded groups feel included. It also delivers stronger business results and promotes better writing.

We talked about:

• her background as a writer and content strategist
• their focus at Help Scout on the customer experience, including their attention to inclusive content
• how easy it is to carelessly use non-inclusive language
• how Help Scout audited their content for commonly used phrases that could be replaced with more inclusive words and phrases
• how replacing non-inclusive language can improve your writing
• how phrases like “open the kimono” might seem fine in some contexts but offensive in others
• the importance of recognizing that “we’re all works in progress” – that we’re all at different points in our journey
• how privileged people – whether it’s racial, economic, class, gender, or other types of privilege – can benefit from recognizing that folks without those privileges “have a harder go of it” and that “the work of inclusivity rests with people who have more privilege”
• the business case for inclusivity: “it’s just not good business to alienate anybody”
• “how frequently and reflexively we use the discourse of disability to signify that which is undesirable”
• how they codified the findings of their inclusivity audit in Help Scout’s style guide, including guidelines on seeking out diverse subject matter experts
• how listening to their customers led to accessibility efforts like captioning all of their video content
• how she loves it “when people respectfully call me out and help me continue to learn”
• the importance of acknowledging the difference between “content your company is publishing on its website and casual chit chat you’re having with some friends”
• the difficulty of changing deep-rooted, long-established language habits – for example, using “guys” to refer to mixed groups, or “Dear sirs” as a correspondence salutation
• how using inclusive language internally can help with recruiting and retaining diverse employees – for example, not referring to a sales team that includes women as “the sales guys”
• the importance of being mindful of the context in cross-cultural and similar conversations
• her top take-homes on inclusive content:
  • “just listen to people”
  • “there are almost always neutral synonyms that generally strengthen our communication, make our writing better”
  • “it’s not that hard, so why not default to neutral language and better writing and clearer communication, why not just make that simple choice and make our content as welcoming as possible to everybody who encounters it”

Emily’s Bio

Emily Triplett Lentz is the Content Strategy Lead at Help Scout, the customer messaging platform and certified B Corporation. She’s passionate about the intersection of marketing and social issues, and advocates for approaching content through an inclusive lens.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast Intro Transcript

When you create content for websites and other digital products, it can be tempting to just default to the same language that you use every day. Unfortunately, our habitual word choices can sometimes make folks who are different from us feel excluded. Emily Triplett Lentz has some great ideas about how to make more mindful language choices so that your content is as welcoming as possible to everyone who encounters it. I really enjoyed our conversation about inclusive content and I hope you do, too.

Interview Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 52 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Emily Triplett Lentz. Emily is currently a senior editor and a content strategist at Help Scout the software that helps support people and others who have helped use manage what they do. Before that she worked at Basecamp and she’s been a virtual worker for eight years, so I don’t know if that’ll come up in the conversation but she’s worked for two of the coolest remote companies out there. Emily, let me have you tell the folks a little bit more about what you do there at Help Scout and how you came to be interested in the topic I want to focus on the day about inclusive content?

Emily:
Sure, yeah. I started at Help Scout as a writer just producing content and then have kind of gotten deeper and deeper in the content strategy world, and I’m loving it. I focus primarily on … Help Scout has a really wonderful and well respected I would say blog and education platform and we are a customer service software company. So we write a lot about customer experience. And, I guess kind of a good segue into what we’re talking about here today, inclusivity. We’re also a certified B Corp and we talk a lot about diversity and inclusion and we support organizations that advocate for things like human rights and equity and diversity inclusion in tech. And so that’s been kind of part of our company values for a long time.

Emily:
And last year our VP of engineering, Megan Chinburg, she just posted something in Slack about specifically the word cripple. And she was saying, “I realized this is a common word, but there are other words that work just as well and they don’t call attention to anyone’s physical capabilities.” And I was like, “Huh, that’s super interesting.” I’m pretty attuned to language like words or my whole job, but cripple wasn’t really a word that was on my radar. And so that’s kind of what started this whole inclusive content journey is that point.

Larry:
Right. I think we all have that awkward moment. When we use a term like that or unintentionally sleight someone or, and so that’s how it came up, she made that observation. And then you’ve done things subsequently at Help Scout to be, I guess from that point on, it sounds like you’ve been pretty proactive about addressing inclusivity in your content.

Emily:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. That was kind of the impetus for it. And it just sort of made me think if I have to be reminded that cripple isn’t a word we should be throwing around. How many other times have we been careless and with what other words, there’s eight years of publishing history at Help Scout. So I decided to audit our site for problematic language, but I didn’t really know what to look for at first. So I consulted various sources and I invited the team to contribute to the list and we came up with a list of, I don’t know about 25 terms and they were words like blind and crazy and cripple and insane and lame and OCD and psycho words like that. And then we crawled our site, we used The Screaming Frog SEO Spider, although whatever you’re using will work. We just chose that tool because it lets you search for up to 10 terms at a time.

Larry:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Emily:
And it spat out a list of 72 times, we had inadvertently used those words, variations of those words on our site. And like I was saying, we’re customer service software, so we write a lot about customer experience and there were a lot of customer experience cliches that used those terms, like there are no stupid questions and don’t leave your support team flying blind and stuff like that. So we could kind of just sweep through it and make more inclusive changes. But we couldn’t just do a global find and replace because not every instance of those words is inappropriate. Blind isn’t a bad word, it’s just when you use it in a way that disparages someone by equating their physicality with something negative, but it’s okay to talk about a blind person or a visually impaired customer or something like that, there’s no problem with that.

Emily:
And then the other thing is we use words like crazy and dumb and things like that to mean all kinds of different things. They’re usually kind of lazy stand-ins for more precise terminology. So as I was making all these updates, I was improving our writing by choosing more specific language like the word dumb would become trivial or the word crazy would become hectic. It was pretty enlightening how they’re just sort of lazy fallback placeholder words that we use when we’re not being more careful.

Larry:
I hadn’t thought about that, but sort of being proactively inclusive as a way to improve your writing, not just to account for inclusion.

Emily:
Totally.

Larry:
But it actually that’s super, well there’s another benefit we can add to the list.

Emily:
Absolutely. And actually that’s my favorite benefit to sell to people who are skeptical about it. Even if you aren’t on board with this or you think that I’m just an annoying feminist social justice worker who’s picking really tiny little battles and you want to roll your eyes at me, I get it.

Emily:
But also, I actually had this conversation with one of the leaders at my company who the conversation we were having and it was very amicable, it was just like, “I don’t want to stop using the word crazy, that word is everywhere. I don’t want to stop using it.” And I was like, “Fine, you don’t have to stop using it but just, we’re not going to use it in our content that we publish on our website. Go ahead, if you want to keep using it in personal conversations, that’s fine. We’re not going to publish that word anymore.” But also think about how crazy when you use the word crazy you usually mean something else. And if you can substitute that more precise language, your communication is going to be clearer, your writing is going to improve and then just as a side effect, nobody’s going to be offended.

Larry:
Right. I love that and it’s sort of a way to, I don’t, it’s like … Well let me ask you about that interaction with that pretty senior person at your company. Is that a common occurrence? Because I think that’s the concern. It comes up a lot that as you try to address these, it’s easy enough to enumerate all the reasons why you should be more inclusive and and less, like committing fewer microaggressions and then sexist enabled comments and things like that. But it seems like that, well how common is it that you have to have a little conversation like that?

Emily:
It’s funny, it kind of comes in waves. It feels like just yesterday, on Twitter, I had a very respectful interaction with someone who would use the phrase “open the kimono” and that’s not a phrase that everyone is familiar with. I feel like it’s older, it comes from mad men days, but it’s this phrase that sales people use to talk about revealing hidden secrets or something like that. And it’s just like, “Why don’t you just say that? Just say take a look behind the curtain, or take an inside look.” And so I just said like, “Hey, can we maybe retire this phrase?” And the person who used it was like, “Yes sir.” It was like, “all right, that’s great. And I try to always approach these things from a position of respect because we’re all works in progress.

Emily:
It’s like there was definitely a time in my life when I didn’t know all this stuff and I used words that I didn’t realize were potentially hurtful and I want to honor that everybody is in a different place in their journey. But yeah, the world is still kind of a tough place to live in sometimes, and that’s especially true for people who have lower amounts of privilege, whether that is class or race or sex or gender, wealth, physical mental capabilities, whatever, I’m sure I’m leaving a million out. But people who have few of those factors working in their favor have a harder go of it, in a society that is structured on favoring certain characteristics most of them, none of us have any control over. So inclusivity is important because it acknowledges that reality and it functions in a way that kind of attempts to level the playing field a little bit.

Emily:
And I think it’s important to note that the work of inclusivity rests with people who have more privilege. Historically it’s taken a combination of the people who were directly affected by oppressive cultures and policies and people who realized that was wrong to effect change, whether that was selfridge or civil rights or same sex marriage, it’s taken the people who were directly affected. And then their friends who are like, “That’s messed up and we’re going to help you get there.” So I think there’s a lot of responsibility that lies with people like me who have higher levels of privilege. I’m a white person and I’m American born and educated, I’m pretty able bodied and it’s on me to listen to people who maybe don’t have those things going for them as much and use my power and my influence to try to make the world a somewhat more welcoming place for everybody.

Emily:
But like I said, there are other probably more cynical, I shouldn’t say cynical but more business oriented, more marketing oriented reasons for inclusivity. And the main one is it’s just not good business to alienate anybody, like to make anybody feel bad. If I’m using words in my coffee that make a segment of the population feel uncomfortable, both people aren’t going to buy from me.

Larry:
Exactly. Why would you alienate 1%, 3%, 12% of your audience?

Emily:
Totally. Totally. And then additionally, if you have a brand that actually allows you to showcase your company’s values and your commitment to diversity and inclusion and that can be an incredibly powerful brand- and community-building tool.

Larry:
Nice. Is that sort of explicitly part of your job at Help Scout? Is this like-

Emily:
Yeah, I would say so. We do kind of like … that’s another thing that comes and goes in waves is really focusing on, technical SEO and traffic and these like very numbers-oriented KPIs and then we’re just going to announce to everybody that we’re a B Corp, and there are deep discounts for your organization if you’re working towards environmental sustainability or something like that. So yeah, I would say it kind of goes back and forth, but we do believe in those very top-of-funnel, larger brand plays. That’s an important piece of content.

Larry:
Yeah. A lot of what you’ve talked about is I think the first reason to be inclusive is everybody should be welcome and everybody should be included and not just welcome and included, but kind of, what’s that thing? Verna Myers said this great quote, “diversity is being invited to the party, inclusion is being asked to dance.” There’s that sort of, but that gets into sort of like, so I think you’ve made a good case for the why, the top level why to be inclusive. But there’s also like, and you’ve kind of hinted at it a little bit, there’s this sort of, well there’s the legal requirement to be accessible for a lot of websites, but also just good inclusive practice to be accessible. Is that … and I know I do a lot of work with and in the UX world and there’s a whole concern there about technical accessibility and other things, but content needs to be accessible as well. And that’s like you can see how this fits in. Have you given that much thought and how does that fold into your . . . ?

Emily:
Yeah. Yeah. And actually that project of auditing the site sort of led into all of these other changes we started making at Help Scout as well. I think it just kind of highlighted, all of these updates we made, it kind of highlighted how frequently and reflexively we use this discourse of disability to signify that which is undesirable. So we just wanted to make sure that it wasn’t just that we were finding and replacing all of these instances. We wanted to codify it in our style guide. So the next step was to update our style guide to clarify what we mean about using inclusive language and neutral language. So now our style guide gives examples like using folks or people rather than guys and staffed and handled rather than unmanned and go between rather than middleman.

Emily:
So, that’s in our documentation now. And we also added language about quoting subject matter experts from underrepresented groups, like not just citing a bunch of white guys when you’re writing a piece, soliciting images that showcase different axes of diversity like outside the standard stock images you’d expect from a software blog. We have a beautiful new visual brand with lots of illustrations and they depict all different kinds of people, different races and there are people who use wheelchairs and there are people who have headscarves and it’s not just homogenous representation of the kinds of people who live in the Help Scout universe.

Larry:
Well how about if you’ve codified it in your style guide, do you do specific training? Your role as an editor do you work with a lot of different bloggers and writers there? And have you done workshops? Or how else do you convey the knowledge besides the style guide?

Emily:
We’re still a pretty small team, so it’s a small enough team that everybody at Help Scout is pretty much on board. And because of our internal value system, there’s not a lot of internal resistance to using this kind of language, everybody’s pretty much on board with that. And then when we do work with contractors, we just show them our style guide and say this is what we expect and our copy editor we contract with knows what our values are too. And yeah, I think we also try to do a pretty good job of listening to our audience. There’ve been people who are like, “Hey, why don’t you caption your videos, which is a very easy thing to do. It’s not hard to caption your videos.” And so we’re currently working on captioning all of our videos, and aiming for greater accessibility across our projects or our products, excuse me, in general.

Emily:
But when we wrote about this audit, people started raising their hands to tell us what else we might want to be careful about, which was pretty cool. We had one person say … I think I had used the phrase “run amok” like “PC culture run amok” in that blog post. And somebody pointed us to this Wikipedia page that defined running amok and how it’s connected to a specific culture and it is now in a manual of mental disorders. And I had no idea that was what the origin of that phrase was. And now I know and I love when people respectfully call me out and help me continue to learn.

Emily:
But we were like, “Oh, okay. We’ll get that changed too.” People called us out on using other synonyms for crazy that we hadn’t thought about, like madhouse or mental I think is more common in the UK. And we got those changed too. But it was just really cool to see our community come forward and say, “You want to do a better job making me feel included, here’s how you can do that.” And we were like, “Great, thank you. We will change that.” And people responded really positively to that.

Larry:
Well I love what you said earlier that we’re all works in progress and because I just realized I use, it’s amok, it’s just a great words, a great Scrabble word. It’s good cognitive. But now I’m like, “Oh crap, I’m going to be more thoughtful about that in that article you just mentioned.” Because if it’s –

Emily:
So, when I talk about this stuff on stage, I always, I use a lot of copy ads because I don’t want to make anyone in the audience feel bad. I put that list up there of all of the words that we’re looking for and I know the people in the audience are sitting there thinking like, “Oh darn it. I’m a jerk, or like whatever lady,” one of those two reactions. And I want to say like, I want people to take it with a million grains of salt because there’s some nuance there. There’s a difference between content your company is publishing on its website and casual chit chat you’re having with some friends. And I want to admit to people that I’m a big work in progress too, 10 minutes before I got on stage at MozCon to talk about this stuff I was backstage talking to Rob Ousbey and I used the word stupid in a conversation 10 minutes before I was going to go out and tell, I don’t know 1500 people maybe to think about not using that word in their content. It’s tricky stuff, it’s messy, and I think the main idea is just bringing a little bit more thoughtfulness into our communication, being a little more mindful about what you communicate.

Larry:
Right. Several years ago I had occasion – I really went to school on a behavior change and habit formation project – and this kind of gets in that realm. It’s like so much of this is so deeply ingrained that – I see this all the time. Even among like I have a ton of lesbian friends and anyhow I run in a lot of different circles like that and the word guys is just permanently embedded in a lot of peoples’ vocabulary and it’s hard to get out even of those. That’s one of my last vestiges of old – I still slip into that and a lot of other people do. And I just wonder if we just need to be more habit hackers around this, like try to figure out, maybe – I’m thinking just off the top of my head, this guy B.J. Fogg at Stanford who’s done a lot of research on habit formation and behavior change and he came up with this thing called “tiny habits” where if you want to instill a new habit, you just pair it with an existing habit.

Larry:
Like if you want to floss your teeth, you already brushed your teeth, so after you brush your teeth, you’ll floss just one tooth. And it has to be that ridiculously easy. And then you’re in there like, “That’s stupid, I’m going to floss them all.” I think maybe we just need, as professionals practicing this, just figuring out more, not tricks but techniques to maybe pair up where we have made a lot of progress with the areas where maybe we’re lagging a little bit. So anyway that just the thought just-

Emily:
That’s a really interesting point. And when I’ve done work to remove certain words from my vocabulary and like – “guys” – I am like, “Okay well what does that habit get replaced with? Folks or people or team or what else can I use that is more inclusive?” I got started in tech, in customer support. So can we talk about dear sirs? Have we talked about that?

Larry:
No, tell me about that, because that’s one of the common salutations . . .

Emily:
Yeah. “Dear sirs,” and there are definitely places where people are still being taught to open their correspondence with dear sirs and even emails to customer support teams. And every once in a while we’d see a customer support inquiry that began dear sirs. And I would always reply like, “I’m not a sir but I’m happy to help you.” And I know that some people on that team started even doing it with, hey guys, because that’s a pretty common casual way to open an email, hey guys. But a lot of support people are women or not guys. And so I think some people now are just like, “Not a guy, but I’m happy to help.” But I think that is so ubiquitous, like crazy and these words that we might never get rid of. And I don’t want to be the word police, ever.

Emily:
I’m not in meetings when someone is like, “That’s crazy. That’s stupid.” I’m not like, “We don’t use that word around here.” But “guys” is one of those words that I have brought up from time to time. We have at Help Scout, one woman on our sales team, she’s amazing, her name is Anna and I love her so much. And the rest of the people on the team are men. And I just don’t think it’s cool to refer to that team as sales guys. And I’m pretty sure she doesn’t love it either. And it also doesn’t send a good signal hiring wise. If we’re talking about our sales team in this way and maybe we want to bring more women onto that team, it sends a signal to them that like, “Oh, maybe this is a bros club if it’s being referred to in that language.” So I think just, yeah, bringing a bit more mindfulness to the language is helpful in lots of ways.

Larry:
No, there’s so many dynamics like that, just vestiges of how things have been done and then the change is just so hard to implement. But yeah, I wanted to go, something you said earlier made me think that a lot of this I think is being brought to the fore by the fact that we’ve got the internet now and you’re corresponding with maybe it’s some guy who went to grammar school in some village in India where they just thought you always politely address people as “dear sirs.” That’s just how he does it. And so that’s why you get that lesson. And you’ve worked for two companies, both Basecamp and Help Scout. Those are completely virtual SaaS, service things that work with people all around the world. Do you feel like you’re at the leading edge of this? That you have the best kind of sample size of examples and people you’re dealing with?

Emily:
As far as inclusive language does or . . .?

Larry:
It just seems like, because I’ve used Help Scout and I was using it in the context of working on the WordPress Community Team, handling community team issue tickets and just in that, I was dealing with people in Nigeria and South Africa and Bogota, Colombia and Brazil and all over the place. And you could just feel, it was part of it to me was like there was sort of a flattening out of style over time to accommodate everyone. But there was still … I just wonder how much of this is culturally embedded things . . .

Emily:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I do think that we’re just kind of starting to talk about this stuff and I also think that it is pretty US-centric as is most of Help Scouts’ customer base currently, I think. And there are very different styles of customer service globally, I think in Europe it’s much more common to be kind of direct and just get out of the way, like, here’s the answer you need, the end. Whereas our brand, Help Scouts’ brand is much more casual and conversational and kind of chit chatty. But, part of – and this is a customer service skill that I think is one of the … I hate the term “soft skills,” but it’s one of those things that makes customer service challenging and not something that everybody is cut out for and good at.

Emily:
The best customer service professionals will read the room, they’ll get a conversation from somebody and they’ll be like, “Oh, okay. This person started out their email with, dear sir/ madame like,” and they’ll have a complaint and you want to mirror that language. And that kind of goes back to what I was saying about mindfulness. You wouldn’t want to respond to that email with, “Yo dog. Sorry about the trouble you’re having with your email.” You wouldn’t do that if you were an empathetic customer service professional. You would respond in a way that mirrored the language that they brought to the table. But I also think that being mindful of inclusivity is just one simple thing that customer service teams can start doing to sort of spread the message and help, their whole deal is trying to be helpful and positive and make it so that people walk away from that experience feeling better about the company that they’re working with. So this can tie into that pretty beautifully.

Larry:
Yeah. Nice. Hey Emily, I just noticed we’re coming up close to time and I always give my guests – just if there’s anything last, anything that hasn’t come up during the conversation or that’s just on your mind about inclusive content or content strategy in general anything we haven’t touched on that you’d like to share with my folks?

Emily:
Yeah, sure. I mean, again I do want to reiterate that we’re all works in progress and myself included especially, my main suggestion is to just listen to people. Do your own research and your own Googling and read some firsthand accounts of what it feels like to constantly be on the receiving end of microaggressions and thoughtless language. And then just consider that English is this massive language. It’s really rich and there are almost always neutral synonyms that generally strengthen our communication, make our writing better and then practice substituting those more inclusive words. Like you were saying that habit formation, just replacing those words with better words, because I think when it comes down to is that the desire to make a particular word choice, the desire to be like, “I’m going to keep saying the word insane,” and that’s never for me at least it’s going to supersede someone else’s need for safety or inclusion, and it’s not my place to put more pressure on already marginalized groups of people to defend themselves or to explain why it’s hurtful if I make certain language choices, there’s already enough they’re dealing with. I can just be like, “Okay, I hear you. I will make different choices in the future.” And it’s not that hard, so why not default to neutral language and better writing and clearer communication. Why not just make that simple choice and make our content as welcoming as possible to everybody who encounters it.

Larry:
That’s great. That’s a perfect note to end on. I love the way you just summarize all that there. That was great. Well, thanks so much, Emily. It’s really been great chatting with you and catching up again. Will you be at Confab next year?

Emily:
I sure hope so. I’ll be at Inbound in a few weeks and yeah I had bad Confab FOMO this year, so hopefully I’ll be there next time.

Larry:
I missed you at the breakfast table, so next year for sure. Okay. Well, thanks so much.

Emily:
Thank you, Larry. It was my pleasure.