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Kristina HalvorsonKristina Halvorson is to many the face and the voice of the content strategy profession.
She came to prominence a dozen years ago with the publication of her book Content Strategy for the Web, and she had been practicing content strategy for a dozen years before that.
Since 2011 she has organized Confab, the leading content strategy conference, and founded in 2020 the Button conference, which focuses on digital product content.
She hosts the Content Strategy podcast. And she leads Brain Traffic, a top content strategy consultancy.
She is working now on her second book, about content leadership in organizations that excel at customer experience.
We talked about:
- her forthcoming book on the role of content leadership in customer experience
- her focus on people and culture and leadership
- whether “content strategy” is the right label for our industry
- how she’s not mad at the content marketing industry for its use of the term
- how well her original definition of “content strategy” has held up
- the evolution of the Confab conference
- the new Button conference for content design practitioners
- the difference in her leadership approach between Confab and Button
- the arrival of the content design profession (and its surprisingly long history at companies like Atlassian)
- the recent alignment of many companies around the job title “content designer”
- Beth Dunn’s approach to content design as set out in her book “Cultivating Content Design”
- the difference between content designers and UX writers
- the difference between job titles and actual roles and responsibilities
- content and design practice maturity models
- the number one thing on her mind about content strategy currently: increasing diversity in the field
Kristina’s bio
Kristina Halvorson is widely recognized as one of the most important voices in content strategy. She is the owner of Brain Traffic, a content strategy agency; the author of Content Strategy for the Web; the host of The Content Strategy Podcast; and the founder of the Confab content strategy conferences. Kristina speaks worldwide about content strategy, educating and inspiring audiences across every industry. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with her two teens and very good doggo.
Follow Kristina on social media
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 101. It’s been a dozen years since Kristina Halvorson published the first edition of her book, Content Strategy for the Web. She would be the first person to point out that many had practiced and talked and written about the field before then. But it’s also true that her book paved the way for a deeper appreciation of the practice of content strategy. She continues to advance the profession with the Confab and Button conferences and her always-sassy Twitter feed.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone, welcome to episode number 101 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am super delighted, beyond thrilled, just ecstatic in every way to have on the show today, Kristina Halvorson.
Larry:
Yay, happy, welcome, Kristina. Now, Kristina, maybe for the one or two of you who don’t know she’s the founder of Brain Traffic, big content strategy agency. She runs Confab and the new Button conferences, and she’s just the public face of content strategy. So welcome, Kristina. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.
Kristina:
You just did a really great job. Right now in this very moment, we have just wrapped our second virtual Confab and we’re getting ready to go on sale for our second Button conference. At the very same time, I am working on finalizing contracts for in-person Confab and Button next year so the whole thing is … What is time anymore for anybody. So that’s what’s happening with me right now. And we are doing some consulting projects at Brain Traffic and I am starting to think about a new book which I am really happy to talk about in public now. I know.
Larry:
Is this brand new? Do you have a contract or a . . . ?
Kristina:
No. God, no. No, no, no, no, no. This is early. This was research that I was going to start a year ago so I can talk about it just a little bit. But a lot going on. All kinds of stuff happening.
Larry:
Well, let’s start with that. What’s your … What’s the scope of the new book?
Kristina:
I am super, super interested right now in how companies that are delivering really outstanding customer experience, not just content, but all the customer experience. So it’s the companies that always make the most admired companies lists, how they do content behind the scenes. So I … And the reason I’m interested in that is I think that there is a mystery that has yet to be solved in the larger content strategy community about how to really create consistency and a thorough line between every single touchpoint, not just from awareness to sale but beyond. And a lot of that has to do with I have a very, very special place in my heart for technical writers and people who work on the support content because I feel they don’t get nearly the love that they deserve in the customer experience realm. So that’s what I’m interested in.
Larry:
That aligns 1,000 plus percent with all the stuff I’ve learned in especially the last year or two of the podcast the … Customers and users don’t care where they’re at in their journey, they just need the content that gets them.
Kristina:
And I think there’s a quiet but growing interest in the idea of content ops. And I know that there’s a book coming out I think it’ll be A Book Apart at some point in the next I don’t know several months. But I think that’s only a part of the puzzle. I think that there’s a whole much larger cultural issue as well so I’m just getting down to job requirements, and rules, and how people collaborate. And it’s just a big, messy, sticky topic. And I’m interested in diving in, and seeing behind the scenes, and then maybe coming back with some sort of actionable ideas about how companies can start moving in that direction.
Larry:
Great. And you just hit on culture and people. That’s, what, 93% of our work . . .
Kristina:
Yes, sir. It sure is. And leadership, right, I mean, because that’s … Every time anybody’s like, “How do I sell this idea into my company?” I’m just like, “Look, if you don’t have leadership that understands and values content as a true business asset, it’s a long, long ways to go. You can convince your manager, they can convince the director, they can convince a VP, but ultimately if you’re hitting that CIO level or CMO and they don’t understand the complexities of content or how important its role is in terms of just making it or breaking the customer experience, you’re going to just keep hitting your head against a brick wall.” So that is really … That’s what I’m hoping with this book actually is to start to change the minds of leadership leadership.
Larry:
I’m excited to see that because you’ve had as much success at that as anyone just from my anecdotal experiences over the years. When people talk about that, a lot of people speak about it with frustration but you speak about it with authority and experience. You’re like oh, and here’s how I convinced that C-suite to do this.
Kristina:
I-
Larry:
A little bit?
Kristina:
It depends. I mean, if the C-suite is going to let me through the door then they already have an idea that this is something important. I have … So at Brain Traffic, we do two main things. We produce Confab and Button, but then we also have a pretty robust consulting practice where we work with organizations on content strategy for websites and then content strategy across the enterprise, which we really deal way more on the people parts and not on the technical content part, which I just attended the Seattle meetup where Theresa Putkey and Gary Carlson were speaking specifically about enterprise content strategy. I’m such a super fangirl of Theresa and that whole firm. But anyway, point being, we largely deal with the people in the culture part of it and that is … So those are two areas of focus for our consulting practice.
Kristina:
And when we started to talk about the people in the culture part, I will tell you what, I have even in the sales process we will get … I’ll get called in by an executive vice-president whose super excited to bring us in and we’ll pitch this giant project, and we’ll go along and we’ll go along with … Sometimes we even meet with procurement but then we hit the CMO, specifically. And the CMO is just like, “Well, are you going to do that 12 part video series that I’m excited about? Or, tell me about your agency. Have you worked with Apple?” I mean, it is just the value set of some of the executive leadership and I can’t have a conversation with that person. They won’t listen to me. They don’t hear me.
Larry:
Oh, and you’ve been fighting … You’ve been battling that for a while and I’ve heard you talk … And you’ve talked … I mean, you’ve spoken at Content Marketing World though and you’re friendly with people in that community but there’s still this-
Kristina:
Oh, yeah.
Larry:
Appropriate … Not appropriation but I don’t know. Is it safe to say … The term content strategy … Well, first of all, what does it even mean anymore? Because it has been sort of … It’s to me, it’s “community” or “wellness.” One of those terms. It’s almost lost meaning because each person who adopts it ascribes their own meaning to it. Is that still the right label for it? Let me ask you that.
Kristina:
I truly, I have become much more specific when I talk about content strategy. So I will refer to what you heard me refer to website content strategy earlier which I think is a whole different beast than product content design or the practice of UX writing, for example. I mean, they … UX writing gets applied to a website but it’s just a different approach, it’s a different set of considerations, right. Separate but related I would say.
Kristina:
So I talk about product content strategy. I will talk about enterprise content strategy. I will talk about unified content strategy statement which is just sort of a … It’s what we used to call a core content strategy statement. I talk about marketing content strategy or content marketing programs. And so I think that it’s great in that we as a larger field and interconnected fields are claiming more areas of specialty.
Kristina:
But I do feel like for many, many years when marketing was talking about content strategy they were largely talking about what … Where are we going to publish content and what kind of content we’re going to publish? So your video content strategy, your social content strategy, your blog content strategy, which used to put me through the roof. I mean, I don’t know how long you followed me on Twitter but oh, I would go on some rants which a lot of people found entertaining but oh, some people found really annoying. I entertained myself and that’s what important to us, right.
Larry:
I was in the entertained camp.
Kristina:
You were in the entertained camp. But it just made me nuts because we would say over and over your contents, your con … Your editorial calendar is not a content strategy, right. Your 12-part video series is not a content strategy. And talking about the idea of strategic intent, and setting up necessary constraints, and ensuring that we have meaningful metrics by which we are measuring and evolving our efforts and not vanity metrics. I could go on and on and on about this.
Kristina:
Am I … I ain’t mad at you anymore I’m really not. I get it, marketing. I get … I get it. And I get why you have directors of content strategy, I get why you talk about marketing content strategy, I just think it’s important to differentiate it because that is a different conversation when you are talking about your marketing content program and website content strategy or enterprise et cetera.
Larry:
I wonder, will adjectives be enough like content marketing, content strategist, or marketing con … Or technical content strategists or product content. Or do you think that’ll do it? Because-
Larry:
I think your … The reason I ask is I think your original definition of content strategy holds up really well and can apply across all those. Is that-
Kristina:
I would agree. That was a pretty big … That was one of my central intents when I wrote the book in the first place was, let’s get some stuff out there that people don’t feel overwhelmed by. That doesn’t overcomplicate the situation because the thing we want to focus on is that content is important and that we have to stop waiting to talk about language, and words, and meaning, and intent, and messaging until the 11th hour. We have to stop doing that. So I wrote what I thought was a very accessible book. The first three chapters of which are written for leadership. Because leaders are like read three chapters and just be like, “My God, we have to go agile. Let’s change the whole organization,” right. So it’s written for that.
Kristina:
And that definition was intentionally broad and it has worked beautifully for a couple of reasons. One, to your point, it still holds up. I mean, it’s hard to argue that content strategy guides your planning for the creation delivery, and governance of useful usable content. That’s really, really difficult to … And there have been people that are like, “It doesn’t include this or this or this,” and I’m just like, “But it could. It’s not exclusive of those ideas or concepts.” So it helps provide that broad umbrella.
Kristina:
Another thing I feel like it served very well is that was the definition we used and that we still use today when we do a call for speakers for Confab because we really look at Confab as the big tent of content strategy, that is where we want marketing to come. We want technical writers to come. We want HR communicators to come, and website folks, and product design folks because ultimately, coming back to what I want to write this book about, all of those people touch our audience or user or customer somewhere along the continuum of their experience. And so shouldn’t we all be speaking the same language.
Larry:
And now you’ve got me … How successful do you think you’ve been in … Because when I was at Confab I loved it. I mean, I love … It’s the most huggy, cake-ey conference ever.
Kristina:
I know.
Larry:
What’s not to like.
Kristina:
That’s why sometimes I’m like can we scale back on the Confab feelings? Can we just pull that in and focus a little bit more on rigorous education? But that’s okay.
Larry:
But I wasn’t pigeonholing people when I was there but it seemed like a pretty diverse crowd to me. A diverse in the sense … Across the professions. Do you feel like you’re getting the folks you want from technical content strategy … From the technical world, from the marketing world. And I guess also, not to get into your conference strategy, but are worried about divvying up the product people by hosting Button and Confab?
Kristina:
No, that’s a great question. And what’s interesting is that for a couple of years we had Confab Central and then we had Confab Intensive, and then we had Confab Higher Ed, and we sold tickets to all of them. It was fine. We did but we also felt they were really cannibalizing one another. Confab Central was supposed to be the place that you came first and then when you felt you outgrew Confab Central then you would go to Confab Intensive which was three days of workshops. And if you were in Higher Ed that was a unique piece.
Kristina:
And so for a while we were actually trying to host events by industry, right. We tried a Confab nonprofit, and we tried a Confab government, and we were going to do a Confab healthcare. And really what I found is that content yes, it helps to talk about content by industry. And Higher Ed folks want to find each other, and healthcare folks want to find each other, and they all have unique sets of challenges but ultimately there are a whole lot of common challenges that bind us together as people who care about content. And it literally, that is our call.
Kristina:
If you care about making content better for everyone come to Confab. It doesn’t matter if you do websites or marketing or technical writing or, communications internally within your organizations digitally on the internet. It doesn’t matter. There’s something for you at Confab because at its core we are focusing on helping people create useful usable content. So we’re not talking about marketing campaigns. We’re not talking about SEO for visibility outside of findability and usability.
Kristina:
So your question is, are we getting the people that we want there? Are we getting the job titles that we want there? We’re getting the people there who have the mindset of being curious and committed, and passionate about inclusive, accessible content for everyone and that’s what we want. That’s what binds people together no matter what their job title or role or industry, or even level of expertise.
Larry:
I don’t spend a huge amount of time in that world, but in the marketing world and I think just in the product and business world, in general, there’s this growing appreciation of not old fashioned industry niches or professional niches but this sort of mindset niche. It’s like-
Kristina:
Sure.
Larry:
You’re a Confab person and that’s who we’re reaching out to. And then maybe you get a representative sampling of those, maybe you don’t. And it doesn’t … It’s more about the mindset.
Kristina:
I think so. And even … For Button, for example. So this is our content design conference and we really … The folks that we expect and that we’re seeing interest in and who came to our very first Button last fall, these are people who work at prominent digital product and services organizations, who with mature content design practices who are really looking to level up. And the people who are just behind them who want to know what it is that they’re doing. Or, the people who are one or two product people who’ve been tasked with standing up a content design team within their organization. These are folks who are very interested in craft. They’re very interested in tooling. They’re very interested in the how content design sits within the product team and within a larger product organization. So they’re interested. They’re very, very specialized.
Kristina:
They’re all … We also find that these are folks who are very, very committed to … Not that the people at Confab are not, but these are folks who are really like we are committed to making our products and services inclusive of all experiences and accessible no matter who people are, and where they are, and what their capabilities are or are not. And they’re rabid about those topics, which is awesome. So we are … So I am learning to sit back and listen and learn from this community big time.
Kristina:
And that is actually been an interesting thing too is that my role at Confab, to this day, is sort of cheerleader and leader. I wrote the book or whatever and I’m super excited. I mean, I am. I’m like the whatever. I’m the Confab cheerleader. For Button, I feel a lot more like my job is to facilitate and to lift up. I mean, we work … That’s a core value for us is lifting up new voices, lifting up voices that we feel are doing good things and embody values that we share as Brain Traffic, and want to spotlight within the larger community. For Button, I feel like my job is really more … It’s just much less about like Kristina, the content strategy celebrity. It’s much more about Kristina, the facilitator, and the host, and make sure everybody has what they need to go and make this discipline run.
Larry:
Well, and that discipline-
Kristina:
Does that make sense?
Larry:
It makes perfect sense. And you’re making me think about how that discipline just came out of nowhere. Content strategy emerged from I think the mid-late ’90s up to about that fervid, around 2009, 2010. Everybody all of a sudden was like, “Hey, we’re doing a thing.”
Kristina:
Sure.
Larry:
Whereas content design has emerged it seems like in the blink of an eye.
Kristina:
Right. It really does feel that way.
Larry:
What do you think-
Kristina:
Although like content strategy, product organizations have been practicing it for 15 years. I mean, that’s … I just did a Clubhouse room. I know. I was just … I’m like one of the kids – with a manager of design opposite at Atlassian. And they have been building out their content design practice for 10 years. I mean, and she had no idea that they were at the forefront of the movement. She thought everybody had content design and I was just like, “Oh no. No, no, no.” And that is … So we want to bring those people together so that we can help it to continue to explode.
Larry:
And the way you described the demographics currently at Button, it’s mostly people from these big established places.
Kristina:
It is.
Larry:
Or a lot of people from these … And so I love that that’s an opportunity to democratize the practice that, hey, here’s how we’ve actually been doing it 10 years at Atlassian, we just didn’t call it that or whatever. How many other secret hidden prac … I mean, Facebook goes back 10 years or whatever.
Kristina:
12 years.
Larry:
Who else … Where else has it been a thing that is just now-
Kristina:
Shopify, I can point to very, very quickly because they’ve been super transparent about writing about their content design and UX writing practice for years. And so they were really one of the first people that I was like, “Oh, what are you doing over there?” I also want to say quickly that Sarah Richards has been doing a flavor of content design, obviously, in the UK for many, many years starting with the work that she and her team did at gov.uk. But and she’ll tell you the same thing, the methodologies that she pulled together and called “content design” have been around in UX forever. It’s just that she was able to say, “This is important. This is important. This is important. We can put these all together and make sure that content is useful and usable for people within the website experience, specifically.”
Kristina:
And the work that we’re doing around research and making sure that choices are informed by data and writing in plain language, that’s content design. Those principles, many of them are embraced, of course, in the product community. But the way that Atlassian and Shopify, and we’re now just announced there that they’re changing their people to content designers. And Facebook, and Google, and Twitter, and Adobe. All these companies that are suddenly are content strategists are now content designers, they’re really talking about it. Yes, from that research standpoint, but it is much more closely aligned with product than it is with websites.
Larry:
Right. And in that world, there’s this pretty clear … There’s UX researchers and then there’s all the UX practitioners adjacent to them of which content designers are now part of that. And that’s something I think some people are, not struggling, but I think we’re still getting the lingo around that.
Kristina:
Oh, yeah.
Larry:
The relationship between content designer, UX writer, and product content strategist, how would you sort those out for folks who are struggling with that?
Kristina:
I am 3/4 of the way through this blog post that Sarah Richards has been bothering me to write for three years. So I have … Actually the person that probably helped shape my thinking on this the most is Beth Dunn at HubSpot, which she writes about this topic beautifully in her new book called Cultivating Content Design. And because from her standpoint, it is a huge culture thing. It’s not just a let’s create some jobs and move forward and call them content design. And she talks about it in three levels which the book is not here and I can’t remember exactly what they are because I’m a terrible human being. But she basically took Jesse James Garrett’s Elements of User Experience model and streamlined it for content, in particular. And she uses three S words. One of them is surface. Sorry, Beth, I’m sorry. But she … This is basically how she talks about it.
Kristina:
So product content strategy is what she would describe as not just strategic intent of a product but, in fact, within the product ecosystem, right. So where does this product that is used, that is being used for this larger task set, where does that sit within the ecosystem of the organization? And what are the unifying standards, and guidelines, and principles around content that apply no matter where people are working with and coming into contact with this product? And what that means is not just within the product itself but also any content that using the product triggers. So an email or a text alert, or, something that gets sent to somebody else, or if it gets published on a platform that also exists as a website. All of that content, that whatever the core three lines are, that’s what product content strategy is, is its content within the product ecosystem.
Kristina:
Content design then is the sort of creating the user experience of the product itself, where we are content designers are participating in the early UX research, they’re working directly with visual designers and engineers, with UX designers and engineers to actually craft the experience within the product. And this oftentimes will … There’ll be an entire team that is focused on a feature, a certain product feature, right. For example, Twitter’s Moment. No, not Twitter. Twitter Moments could be a product feature and there’s a whole design, there’s a whole team around that, and a content designer might sit in that team. So that is where … That’s where the content designer’s role is.
Kristina:
The UX writer then is where the rubber hits the road. This is the person that is actually penning metaphorically the words. They’re making choices around language, around voice, around tone, around the application of voice and tone. Content designer is probably working with voice and tone hopefully with brand to sort of form those guidelines, right. Or even the product content strategist, it can vary. But the UX writer or the UX writing, I should say, is … That actually is crafting the experience of the language and the words within the product.
Kristina:
So I will say – and Scott Kubie keeps me honest about this – job title and role are separate, right. You can have a job title and have six different roles. So when I talk about content design, UX writing, et cetera, I really am more talking about the role then the job title. And to that end, I think there are a million people with the title content design that do UX writing and a million new UX writers that do content design. Where I get real worried specifically, this is my last thing, is when a UX writer is operating in a vacuum and has no content design and has no product content strategy thinking or documentation or decisions or resources available. That I don’t like.
Larry:
Because that’s when they’re stranded at that oh, you can just sprinkle the words on at the end, right.
Kristina:
Those are the people that are stuck in being … They’re stuck in executing other people. Executing. And executing other people’s ideas and orders. And oftentimes what we see in organizations then is we see a UX writer that is beholden to two or three or four different product teams.
Larry:
Yes. There’s an interesting, I don’t know, dichotomy here between we really know what we’re doing and we’ve … And we can articulate all the things and identify that one, your title doesn’t match with what you’re actually doing day-to-day. So it feels like we’re pretty mature as an industry, but there’s some … Is that just other people perceiving what we do and HR people having trouble writing the right job title and description? Or, do we have some … Do we still have some more maturing to do as an industry I guess? Or as a profession?
Kristina:
Well, I … I mean, listen. I mean, that’s a really great question. This is another thing that Dominique from Atlassian and I were talking about quite a bit is that I think that there are … And Rahel Bailie created a beautiful diagram 13 years ago that I have yet to see anyone improve upon when it comes to … You’re nodding so you know what I’m talking about.
Larry:
Exactly.
Kristina:
Levels of maturity within organizations when it comes to content. And there is a similar model that exists from the design ops perspective around levels of design maturity within an organization. They are not that different from one another except there’s a whole technology element with content that isn’t really the same with design. But point being, when we talk about maturity, yes, we can talk about maturity as a field. We can talk about the maturity of the design field. We can talk about the maturity of the content design field, of the content strategy world, of content marketing, right. That’s one topic that is … You can go out and how do we define maturity there? It’s the depth of conversation, it’s the breadth of conversation, it’s the level of seniority of people and experience that people who are weighing in and who are celebrated within the field, right.
Kristina:
I am more interested in the maturity level that sort of is presenting itself within, at the organizational level, because those are largely the resources that we can pull on to help level up the field itself. And so what I’m seeing is that there is a small but mighty contingency of organizations who have super mature content design practices and who are moving at the speed of light in terms of maturity and evolution. I want to make sure that those people are in the spotlight to continue to help the maturity of our field. Those are two separate but related topic.
Kristina:
The third related topic is the maturity of recruitment and HR practices and understanding what they need. Not even necessarily what to call these things. I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen the same thing. There are job descriptions that come out with six different titles all in the title of the job description because the HR is just buckshot. I don’t know what they call themselves. I just know what I think we need.
Larry:
No, and I didn’t do a thorough look but I took … A few months ago I looked at a bunch of descriptions and it’s clear that they’re all copying and pasting from each other too-
Kristina:
Oh, big time.
Larry:
Without any serious-
Kristina:
You know who is doing interesting work there is James Deer who is one of the co-founders of GatherContent. He came out at GatherContent and is working on a project now called WorkingInContent.com where he’s working on building out basically a job board for people who are recruiting for content professionals. And so he sees everything that’s coming out and he’s really aggregated some very interesting long-form posts about what people are calling a content strategist, what people are calling a content designer. And it is all over the map I’ll tell you what.
Larry:
I just discovered that WorkingInContent a couple of weeks ago and I’m like oh, good maybe he’s the guy who can sort out the … Because I’m an information architect at heart, okay. Can’t we agree on labels and how we organize things?
Kristina:
I know, I know. I know. Well, that’s … This post that I’m working on is not meant to be a now I’m going to define all these disciplines. It’s more like look I’m … We have a unique perspective at Brain Traffic in that we work with a lot of different clients who call things a lot of different things. I have a podcast that I’m rebooting later this year and so I get to talk to a lot of different people. And then, of course, we have our events where we’re seeing hundreds of different people, if not thousands of people talking about where their organization is, what their organization calls things. So we are really … I don’t know anybody else who is within the field who has that breadth or purview is the word that I’ll say, and so I’m trying to use that responsibly to say, “Here’s some language if it’s useful to you, to talk about content design, and UX writing, and product content strategy,” so we’ll see how it goes over.
Larry:
I’m picturing the Rosetta Stone. You can be the link between all that.
Kristina:
Exactly.
Larry:
Hey, Kristina, I can’t believe it we’re coming up on time and I could literally talk to you for days, but I like to keep this … I’m a human-centered designer and human attention spans fizzle at about 30 minutes so I want to wrap up pretty quick here. But I do want to give you one last chance. Is there anything that’s come up in the conversation or that’s just on your mind about content strategy lately that you’d like to share with the folks before we wrap?
Kristina:
Yeah. I’ll tell you the number one thing that is on my mind with content strategy lately is creating more diversity in the field. And I recognize that diversity, and inclusion, and accessibility are big, hot topics, but I’ll tell you what. We have seen at our virtual events, in particular, two things. A couple of things have happened. We’ve been able to award … We have an Equity Scholarship that we started several years ago to not only increase diversity at our events but also just try to help remove some of the barriers for people who for whatever … Whether it’s a marginalized population, whether it’s socioeconomic, whether it’s whatever, that we’re trying to help remove those barriers to help folks come and join us at Confab. We are … It costs us thousands of dollars to bring one person to Confab in person. We were able to give away almost 100 virtual tickets at both Confab and Button to people that qualified for an Equity Scholarship.
Kristina:
And I will tell you what. What we saw at our events, we have a extraordinarily … The community happens within Slack and it’s just this extraordinarily active, robust, deep, brave conversations happening throughout dozens of different channels that are … That people self-organize. We let anybody create a channel around demographics or industry or interests or job role. And what we found is that with such an increase in diverse voices and perspectives, the level of conversation that was occurring and the courage that was happening within these virtual channels, which are safer spaces for people around what’s going on in our field when it comes to systemic oppression, when it comes to dismantling white supremacy, when it comes to the language of oppression, that those conversations shifted things coming in and out of the conference. It shifted minds of other people who were there who had not thought about these things or who hadn’t seen things through these different lenses.
Kristina:
And so what I am struggling with slash the opportunity that I see that I’m hoping that we can rise to at Brain Traffic within our events, is how can we recreate that level of diversity that … Present that degree of opportunity and help recreate those safe spaces for difficult, scary conversations around race, and creed, and socioeconomic disparities. How can we recreate those spaces and conversations in person? And it’s going to take money. And so if anybody out there is looking to support or sponsor these efforts you can reach me. But that’s what’s on my mind because I just … And I just feel like the … Especially when it comes to getting to this useful, useful, usable content for everyone, it is absolutely critical that we continue those conversations, those uncomfortable conversations. Those scary, and difficult, and richly rewarding conversations. And so that’s what’s on my mind right now.
Larry:
Cool. Well, thanks. Oh, one last thing, Kristina. What’s the best place for people to follow you in social media? Or how do you like to connect with folks online?
Kristina:
LinkedIn is a place that I’m working on being more. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I am … My social media home is probably Twitter and so it’s just @Halvorson is where you can find me there. I can get a little sassy on Twitter I’m just going to warn you right now. But join me. Join me in the quest.
Larry:
Join sassy Twitter with Kristina Halvorson.
Kristina:
Exactly.
Larry:
No, I appreciate it. Well, thanks so much, Kristina. I’m glad we finally got to talk and-
Kristina:
I am so honored to be here. I really am. Thank you so much for having me on.
Larry:
Well, the pleasure was all mine.
Kristina:
You do amazing work.
Larry:
Thanks so much, Kristina.
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