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Jess SandJess Sand organizes the Content + UX Slack, a vibrant community of 15,000 content professionals.
While it may be best known for the salary-transparency requirement in its very active jobs channel, members of the community also appreciate the wide-ranging conversations there and the support of their fellow content practitioners.
We talked about:
- her take on the current state of the content strategy profession
- her ongoing reflection on community and professional relationships
- professional authenticity and the risks of bringing your true self to work
- the role of the Content + UX Slack as a professional support group
- the rapid changes in the growth and nature of content professions, and its reflection in the rapid growth of the Content + UX community
- the globalization of content practice
- the challenges of staying intentional and conscientious about her stewardship of the Content + UX community
- the Content + UX Slack community’s decision to mandate salary disclosure in the jobs channel
- the importance of self-care practices like meditation to find personal agency, power, and influence
Jess’s bio
Jess Sand is an independent digital experience strategist who helps risk takers and change makers center their content around the communities they serve. She has nearly two decades of experience practicing content strategy, information architecture, and systems and process design in pretty much every sector. She currently manages contentandux.org, one of the largest and most visible online content communities.
A natural-born rabble-rouser, Jess strives to inspire people to embrace their own agency, uproot the status quo, and develop online experiences that fuel more just systems and practices in the real world.
Connect with Jess online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 127. As the field of content strategy evolves and grows, one online neighborhood attracts more of the profession’s members than any other. Jess Sand organizes the Content + UX Slack community, which hosts 15,000 content practitioners. The community is probably best known for the salary-transparency requirement in its very active jobs channel, but its members also appreciate having a place to congregate with knowledgeable, thoughtful, and supportive peers.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hey everyone. Welcome to episode number 127 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really happy today to have with us Jess Sand. Jess is an independent content strategy consultant in the Bay Area. She works mostly with nonprofits. She also runs the Content + UX Slack channel, which is huge, I think is almost 15,000 people in there now. But welcome to the show Jess. What are you up to these days? What’s on your mind about content strategy?
Jess:
Ooh, thank you so much for having me. What’s isn’t on my mind these days about content strategy? I feel like there’s a lot of big conversations kind of happening and all kinds of different pockets, and going in different directions. And I think for me … And my work has been slowly shifting over the course of, I guess the pandemic, really the last couple years, and sort of how I do my work has been shifting. And so I have been spending a lot of time thinking about just how we work, and how we do the work, and the sort of practice of the work itself.
Jess:
I think our field is always grappling with different ways, different tools and processes and approaches and applications. And I have found myself sort of trying to step back from that a little bit, from the weeds of that, and thinking more about how all of that works together. And what’s the stuff that kind of binds all of that together? And ultimately that’s the people doing the work. So that’s kind of a broad, vague answer, but should give us a good starting point.
Larry:
No, I-
Jess:
I feel like there’s a lot of threads to pull in there.
Larry:
Many threads to pull, just that idea of … Well, usually this comes up towards the end of these interviews, but it always comes back to people. And you brought that up right off the bat, which I’m not surprised, as a community steward, that you might be a little more focused on people, or have that more front of mind than some folks. But I love how thoughtful you are about, like you said, how we work and how that’s changed the last couple years. This is maybe kind of overly broad, but are there … Obviously for you this has prompted some reflection and introspection about how we all work, and how it’s affected your practice. Are there big ideas in there that are kind of guiding your work now, that have come out of that insight?
Jess:
Yeah, I think a lot of this has been an outcome of my own personal exploration around how I work and how I want to work with people, with my clients in particular, and with the communities that I circulate in. Because we all have our different communities and we often have many different communities, even if we don’t necessarily think of them as community. I mean, a workplace as a type of community. And as somebody who works as an independent with multiple clients, I end up having lots of different relationships and different relationship contexts. And so each sort of client engagement is a new opportunity to set those contexts, and change things that have been working or not working in past relationships. So I’ve been thinking a lot about that and that’s sort of, I think the pandemic did that for a lot of us. Like, “Is this really what I want to be doing with my time, and how I want to be relating to people?”
Jess:
And so a lot of this has come out of that process I think. And I feel like, especially as somebody who hosts this community, this very large community that is very diverse … And I mean we have members from all over the globe at every stage of their career, all different disciplines and specialties within content and adjacent to content. And so it’s a really beautiful sort of way to get a sense of just what matters to people. What are the conversations coming up? Where do people gravitate? What are people struggling with and grappling with?
Jess:
And I feel like I’m not alone in a lot of my self exploration. And I think the Content + UX community is an opportunity for people to sort do that together, or to do that for themselves, but within that larger context, and just understand what exactly are the options and possibilities for the work we’re doing. And I don’t know if that directly answers your question. But to me really it comes down to, and I’ve been grappling with this, it’s something that I’m continually, I’m practicing and finding myself better and worse at it on any given day, but this sense of, “How do I exert my influence and make decisions, and share decision making with the people around me, in a way that isn’t just about the product output?” Right? Because we all have these very business oriented goals when we kind of go into these projects and do the work that we do.
Jess:
We don’t show up to work to hang out with our coworkers. That’s probably not what we would be doing voluntarily if we didn’t live in this capitalist system. We might show up to other groups and communities in different ways, but the workplace probably isn’t the first one of those that we would end up in. So how do we bring that in and balance that with the actual work, and the output, and the business goals? And that’s a really difficult question to answer. And more and more I’m feeling like it just starts personally, one at a time. But that process and practice I feel like, kind of has to be done in community, because that’s where we interface, that’s where our decisions impact the world around us.
Larry:
Yeah, and I’m wondering, I keep looking for silver linings in the pandemic, but I wonder if one of them might be that, whereas before these, all the stuff you’re talking about, they’re all things that people … People have been thinking about being authentic at work, and balance, and all the things that have been amplified in the pandemic. But do you think that having a big community like that where you can kind of process interpersonal dynamics at scale? I don’t know if that makes sense. But back to thinking in industry lingo, but is that kind of what’s going on there, part of what’s going on?
Jess:
Yeah. I think that’s a big part of it. I think online communities are really interesting, and I think Content + UX is a particularly unique one, especially given its size. It’s very risky to bring our authentic selves to the workplace and especially risky if you are not somebody who identifies with the dominant culture that drives most of our workplaces. So having a space where you can still talk shop, still sort of put your cards on the table, not necessarily have all the answers, be successful out of the gate, this work is practice. And so having a space to do that in that is not high risk, where you’re not going to lose your job, you’re not going to piss off your boss, I think it’s really critical. And Content + UX provides that. And I think we’ve spent a lot of time reinforcing an inclusive set of values and practices, and ways of communicating with each other in the group, which is unique to an online space.
Jess:
Online communities as we know can be incredibly scary places. And so we’ve worked hard to try to counter that, and really lean heavy on support and inclusivity and kindness and compassion. And I think that, I mean, it makes all the difference. And especially when you’re talking about professionals, this is still, I mean at the end of the day this is kind of a professional affinity group. We call it a professional support group. And I think that’s unusual having that kind of support and compassion and care sort of be the underpinning values for this kind of discussion, for these kinds of discussions that are often specific to the work we’re doing.
Larry:
Yeah, and I think the way you just said that it’s like, we all want to bring that support and compassion and care to our end users, our customers that we’re working with. But I wonder if that’s another opportunity that’s shifted both with the different social dynamics of the pandemic, and the presence of communities like yours, that there’s again, different ways to approach those and hone those kind of people skills that benefits you, both in your … It sounds like mostly the benefit of that community is the people feeling supported. And it doesn’t sound like you’re articulating it as like a community of practice. It’s more like a supportive community of people who practice the same things or similar things.
Jess:
Yeah, and people are there, people are in the weeds in that group. It’s like we’re getting writing advice, and should it be this word or that word. And it’s very in the weeds often. But it’s often not. And there’s often a lot of camaraderie, and there’s a lot of conversation around how do we build and design and distribute content, and tech products ultimately, and technology experiences, in ways that support the people who are impacted by them. Which typically is the user, but it can go beyond that.
Jess:
And as we see with things like social media products, misinformation, it’s not just users that are impacted, it’s democracy, it’s everything. And I was just talking about this with Jessica from Ditto actually, just before this talking to you, this idea that we are often, when we talk about inclusive products or equity in technology or ethical technology, we’re often talking about the outputs. What are we building? How are we building it? And what are the decisions we’re going to make to shape the outcome of the content we’re creating, or the sort of output? But unless the way that we work together is really, truly honestly reflective and manifests those values, you can’t produce content and products that are equitable and ethical and compassionate. It has to come out of a process that is also ethical and equitable and compassionate. And so you got to start upstream.
Larry:
Yeah, that kind of gets into the whole world of, I think a lot lately about enterprise-level UX, designing for internal customers. But you’re doing that one level up, providing a place for those kind of values to develop and be expressed and explored. I’m wondering if that gets … Another thing that we were talking about before we went on the air that’s going on right now is that Kristina Halvorson recently announced that she was going to end Confab after 2023. And part of the reasoning she gave for that is that the field is way more diverse now in practice ways. She articulates it as content design, content marketing, content engineering, content ops. I think those are the main buckets she put it into. But I’m wondering, how does that affect those conversations? Or do people in your community tend to congregate around those kind of practice areas? Or are they finding these issues of ethics and equity and justice and things like that? Are they uniting it different levels around things?
Jess:
That’s a really interesting question. It’s a deep question actually. So this gets me thinking about the architecture of our spaces, of our space. And I don’t want to jump ahead too quickly to that, because I want to spend time in what you actually asked, which is yes, and … What we have found in Content + UX is that one, we have not been able … I have not been able to keep up with … That shift in our field has been fairly rapid. It’s sort of snowballing. And I’ve noticed it over the last two and a half years, just through our growth. When I first inherited this group management role, host role, whatever, was back in 2018 I think. And we were a couple of thousand people maybe. And I haven’t looked at the numbers in detail, but I would anecdotally say that the vast … We started to grow pretty rapidly then. But really since probably 2020 ish, the last couple years, it’s just blown up.
Jess:
We probably went from 10,000 to 15,000 in that time. And I think that’s a reflective of this change in the field, and this stuff that Kristina is talking about, that as the field has become more defined and found its space within business in particular, next to often UX, which has kind of opened the door I think for the content field within that context, within the business context, our community has certainly reflected that shift and that diversity.
Jess:
We’ve also become more global. And I think that’s also true for the industry, for the field. We have seen growth in membership and from Africa and India, and these places with developing markets that are starting to become strongholds of technology themselves. So yeah I think … And then this question of how that relates to these other conversations, to me that’s actually a really interesting sort of conundrum. I don’t know if that’s the right framing, but there is this reality that how we talk about ethics and equity and anti-racism in the United States is very different than in other countries around the world. And different regions and communities are in different places, and having different conversations, and are impacted in different ways by these issues.
Jess:
And so I am very conscious of that disparity in terms of, I think we often in Content + UX, sort of still wear a US lens to some of these conversations and framings. And I think a lot of that, when I talk about the architecture of the space and keeping up, we’ve had this longstanding need to completely overhaul our channels. It’s a Slack space, which is not necessarily ideal for this kind of community, but it works well enough. But it’s got some issues and the channels have grown organically.
Jess:
And we’ve always been very conscious about keeping things extremely content centric. But we have a lot of channels that have proliferated over the years, that get much more and more granular. And we’ve sort of put a moratorium on creating new ones at this stage, because it just, conversations become siloed, and then they start to disappear and become what’s visible to the group as a whole. And so this to me is one of the reasons I want to move towards this more collective stewardship model in the group, where I can step back and not be sort of the host, but really just sort facilitate a more community-based decision-making process. But yeah, I think what channels we provide, what channels we set up and how we name them, impacts the conversations we have.
Jess:
There was some discussion for example, when we launched the anti-racist language channel that we have, whether it should be broader. And we made a conscious decision to keep it focused on anti-racist language, because we didn’t want to conflate that particular issue. We didn’t want to … This was especially, this was I want to say probably within a year of George Floyd’s murder. And I think it was Andy Welfle who actually suggested the channel, and he’s here in the Bay Area with me. And we, like most major cities around the country, were really knee deep in street protests and social unrest. And there was a lot of, I think growing awareness in more mainstream circles, AKA, really among white people I think, that our systems and processes were in many cases very anti-black.
Jess:
And so we made this conscious decision to not make it an all-inclusive channel about inclusive language. We really wanted to focus on anti-racist language, because that so frequently gets swept aside in and invisibilized. So yeah, that’s I think always on my mind and one of the struggles with sort of having this volunteer organic community run effort. It’s tough to be really intentional and conscientious about this stuff, because that takes time. And relationships take time. And this kind of goes back to this whole practice of the workplace. This work of really making sure that our products and our processes are truly compassionate and humane, it takes time. It takes effort. It takes resources. It takes commitment. It takes work. It takes discomfort. And that’s just not … Our workplaces are not conducive to that.
Larry:
No, and as you described that situation with the anti-racist language channel, I’m like, “Holy cow, that …” When you think about a lot of the other stuff we’re dealing with like, cognitive overload and emotional labor, and just that diligent stewardship of the community, and proliferation of channels, you’re balancing all that stuff. And you’re like, “No, I know we got too many channels, but this one makes sense.” That’s a huge amount. For a volunteer thing, you did a lot of really … That’s just a ton of work and I appreciate it.
Larry:
But hey, I wanted to say one thing too, I can’t let you get away from this conversation without making sure we get to this. One of the most vibrant channels in your Slack is the jobs channel. And one of the things that makes it I think so interesting to people is the policy of salary transparency, which is coming up in other contexts as well. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because that’s another, I think equity issue, and I mean it’s an important issue in a lot of ways.
Jess:
Yeah I mean, this is I feel like, probably the most tangible advocacy thing we’ve really been able to do that has really had an impact, an actual tangible impact. I’m not very good at measuring it, but I get messages all the time about how people have changed their practices at work because of this. So we sort of introduced it softly with some disincentivizing posts that don’t disclose salary. But ultimately we made the decision that we were going to make it a hard and fast rule. So we, since I think 2020, have required all job post things to go through a form, it’s an automated form, and they must include salary details. And that includes freelance gigs need to include a budget. We don’t allow unpaid internships to be posted. So we do allow volunteer roles, like pure volunteer roles, that are very transparent in that.
Jess:
But it’s been an interesting process because for the most part, when we floated the idea, it got mostly positive response. But there were some vocal detractors. There were a lot of people who were worried that it was going to limit the opportunities. And this attitude of any opportunity is a good opportunity, that we can’t even … They’re like, “We got to take what we can get. Just because it doesn’t have a salary, I don’t want that to be held back from me. Or I’ll want to be able to share something I came across, and if it doesn’t have a salary, I can’t do that. And that seems really limiting.” And it was this very kind of scarcity mindset. And we made the decision to do it anyway, because we really had a lot of discussion on the admin team at the time. And we did a member survey, and got some really helpful feedback, and came to the sort of decision that at the end of the day, this was both tactical … It’s not going to solve the pay and equity problem.
Jess:
So statistically people of color, women, LGBTQ, folks with disabilities, are statistically paid less. Right? And there’s a lot of unconscious bias that is built into the hiring process. And this was a very tactical way to address a piece of that. But we knew that wasn’t going to create salary parity, pay parity. Right? That’s not going to fix the solution. But as one of the most visible and largest communities in the field, it sets a standard, and it sparks a conversation, and it creates a space for the conversation. People can go back to their employer, they can go back to their recruiting team, their HR team and say, “Hey, I have this captive audience of specialists who are perfect for this role, and probably the largest place, you’ll find the most number of these people in one place, but I have to disclose salary in order to share this position.”
Jess:
And that has changed minds. We have had … I continue to get messages from people saying, “Hey, this allowed me to make the case for something I’ve been pushing for. And we finally went ahead and did it.” And some of our most vocal detractors at the time have become some of our biggest advocates of this policy, and have changed their own workplace policies. So for me, it doesn’t solve the problem, it’s not a cure-all, but it creates the space for us to have the conversation, to acknowledge the systems that are at work and the dynamics that are at work, and to start thinking about what our own role is in that. And what can we do just in our little circle and sphere to make something, to do things a little bit differently? And it snowballs. It really does.
Larry:
Yeah.
Jess:
And we’re seeing that. Right? Legislation is now, we’re seeing that roll out from state to state. I mean, California just passed SB 1162 and it has some flaws, but it’s a pretty significant step forward, requiring employers to disclose salary in job postings, in addition to reporting pay scales for disaggregated data like race and ethnicity and gender or sex.
Larry:
Yeah, and you probably didn’t have that intent four or five years ago when you took over the community, but all of a sudden you’re realizing, “Wow, we can have an impact.” All get together and … but it wasn’t a tidy, painless process. You had to … I mean, community always requires work, but you did it. And here we are with Gavin Newsom signing a bill that ensconces what you’re talking about.
Jess:
Well, and it wasn’t like a straight line. You know?
Larry:
Yeah, I know. I get-
Jess:
And I’ll say, wasn’t my decision caused this, did this. I brought this idea to Content + UX, because I’m also in another community in which a woman raised the issue and said, “Hey, should we require salary on job postings because of this issue, because of the pay disparity?” And it was only by having conversations with her and going through that process in that space, that I was able to, that that even occurred to me to bring it to content UX, and that I was able to have those conversations as well with that this community. And this is the ripple effect.
Jess:
And it doesn’t happen, it’s not like one day I was like, “Hey, let’s do this,” and now we do this great thing. It’s this process and it requires people participating. I mean this is the beautiful thing now, somebody accidentally posts a job post, accidentally posts a listing without salary, and three people will jump on the post and be like, “Hey, don’t forget, this is the rule. This is why. Here’s the article. Here’s the form.” And we’ve all come to this recognition that as a community, this is what we want to support.
Larry:
Yeah, I love that response. It inspires a whole other conversation about cross-community collaboration and cross-pollination. But yeah, I can’t believe we’re coming up close to time already Jess, this always happens, literally.
Jess:
I knew this was going to happen.
Larry:
Yeah. I could literally talk to you forever. But hey, before we wrap, is there anything last, anything that’s come up in the conversation, or just anything that’s on your mind, that you want to make sure we talk about before we wrap up?
Jess:
Oh boy. I mean, I think these are all really sort of big issues that we’ve been talking about and sometimes it feels really overwhelming and I think feels really serious. And really like the stakes are really high. And I think for me, I’ve just been trying to, and this may … I mean, I’ve recently discovered meditation and have fallen into a daily practice over the last bunch of months. And it’s been really remarkable to me, just how it’s kind of resonated with me that, this is all personal practice. And this is all practice practice.
Jess:
It’s like you got to try it, see what feels good, what doesn’t feel good, adjust. Live in the discomfort. Recognize that that’s how you reach the next phase. And it’s little by little, it’s conversation by conversation. It’s encounter by encounter, it’s word by word. And that is what makes it manageable, and for me, exciting, because it means that we actually have a lot more control and power and influence than we realize. And being able to find that agency at this sort of micro level, allows us to then apply it at a macro scale as we get better at it, and as we touch other people, and they touch us and it grows.
Larry:
That’s beautiful.
Jess:
So I guess that’s where I’ll leave it.
Larry:
No, that’s beautiful and genuinely inspirational, to me anyway. That notion that we’ve all got the power. And it’s easier to find it and identify and express it with community interactions and community support. I just, yeah, thank you.
Jess:
Especially in this day and age, and in these systems that we’re working in, this is when we need community most.
Larry:
No kidding. That’s right, it’s so easy to just get lost in these technical rabbit holes, and thanks for pulling us out.
Jess:
Thank you. I really appreciate having these conversations with you, and I look forward to the next one.
Larry:
Likewise. Oh hey, one last thing before we wrap, Jess. What’s the best way for people to stay in touch, to connect with you on online or …
Jess:
Yeah, so my website is jessicasand.com and sand, S-A-N-D, one single grain of sand. I have a contact form there. People are welcome to reach out. I have a newsletter that I rarely send out, but if you want push emails on occasion, you can sign up for that. I don’t really tweet that much, because I’m trying to stay out of the cesspool of social media, but I’m @sDesignLabs and contentandUX.org if anybody is interested. We welcome all folks working with content, celebrating content, the content experience, content adjacent. And there’s a sign up form there. It’s free, it’s lovely, and we would love to see you there.
Larry:
I would second that. It’s a lovely community and yeah, I think one of the best ones I’ve ever experienced online. Well, thanks so much Jess, really enjoyed the conversation.
Jess:
Thank you, Larry. It was great talking to you.
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