This episode is sponsored by Qgiv, a comprehensive fundraising platform trusted by over 20,000 fundraisers. The Qgiv team understands that fundraising isn’t always an easy job. To help, they recently surveyed fundraising professionals and donors to create a soon to be released report, Building a Sustainable Future: A Guide to Healthy Fundraising. This report explores how the economy, staffing issues, declining donor numbers, and more have impacted nonprofit teams. To learn how you can build more sustainable fundraising revenue and advocate for data-backed change, click here to be notified when the report is released and receive your copy!
People who care about digital content that resonates on a human level are needed now more than ever. It's time to rethink how we approach digital content so that we can make the communications and interactions we all encounter every day less robotic, chaotic, and caustic—both to receive and to create.
My guest this week is on a mission to create more human-centered digital content. Bailey Lewis is a content strategist who runs the Words First Course & Community. She created Words First to transform the way that professionals and their organizations communicate with other humans online (only the least human and most prevalent medium of all!).
We discuss:
What makes so many digital experiences chaotic and unusable—for both the audiences trying to engage with them and the teams building them
How to flip the content creation process to “words first”
How to identify and shift where processes are keeping that from happening
How to apply user experience content strategy principles for digital communications that resonate on a human level.
About Julia Campbell, the host of the Nonprofit Nation podcast:
Named as a top thought leader by Forbes and BizTech Magazine, Julia Campbell (she/hers) is an author, coach, and speaker on a mission to make the digital world a better place.
This episode is sponsored by Qgiv, a comprehensive fundraising platform trusted by over 20,000 fundraisers. The Qgiv team understands that fundraising isn’t always an easy job. To help, they recently surveyed fundraising professionals and donors to create a soon to be released report, Building a Sustainable Future: A Guide to Healthy Fundraising. This report explores how the economy, staffing issues, declining donor numbers, and more have impacted nonprofit teams. To learn how you can build more sustainable fundraising revenue and advocate for data-backed change, click here to be notified when the report is released and receive your copy!
People who care about digital content that resonates on a human level are needed now more than ever. It's time to rethink how we approach digital content so that we can make the communications and interactions we all encounter every day less robotic, chaotic, and caustic—both to receive and to create.
My guest this week is on a mission to create more human-centered digital content. Bailey Lewis is a content strategist who runs the Words First Course & Community. She created Words First to transform the way that professionals and their organizations communicate with other humans online (only the least human and most prevalent medium of all!).
We discuss:
What makes so many digital experiences chaotic and unusable—for both the audiences trying to engage with them and the teams building them
How to flip the content creation process to “words first”
How to identify and shift where processes are keeping that from happening
How to apply user experience content strategy principles for digital communications that resonate on a human level.
About Julia Campbell, the host of the Nonprofit Nation podcast:
Named as a top thought leader by Forbes and BizTech Magazine, Julia Campbell (she/hers) is an author, coach, and speaker on a mission to make the digital world a better place.
This episode is sponsored by Qgiv, a comprehensive fundraising platform trusted by over 20,000 fundraisers. Through online giving and event registration forms, text fundraising, PeerToPeer campaigns, and auction events, qgiv's tools help fundraisers like you raise more. The Qgiv team understands that fundraising isn't always an easy job to help, they recently surveyed fundraising professionals donors to create a soon to be released report, building a Sustainable Future a guide to Healthy Fundraising. This report explores how the economy, staffing issues, declining donor numbers, and more have impacted nonprofit teams. To learn how you can build more sustainable fundraising revenue and advocate for data backed change, head to jcsocialmarketing.com qive that's jcsocialmarketing.com Qgiv, to be notified when the report is released and to receive your free copy. Thank you and let's get to the episode. Hello and welcome to Nonprofit Nation. I'm your host, Julia Campbell, and I'm going to sit down with nonprofit, industry experts, fundraisers, marketers, and everyone in between to get real and discuss what it takes to build that movement that you've been dreaming of. I created the Nonprofit Nation podcast to share practical wisdom and strategies to help you confidently find your voice, definitively grow your audience, and effectively build your movement. If you're a nonprofit newbie or an experienced professional who's looking to get more visibility, reach more people, and create even more impact, then you're in the right place. Let's get started. Hi, everyone. This is Julia Campbell, your host. And welcome back to Nonprofit nation. Happy to be here with you today. Wherever you're listening from, today's topic is all about creating human centered digital content. And in the current climate of generative AI and chat GPT seemingly taking over the world and spam and terrible marketing coming at us from sort of every corner, I really wanted to have an expert on to talk about how we can create communications and talk to our donors and constituents in a way that is more human centered. So today I have Bailey Lewis, and Bailey is a content strategist who runs the Words First course and community. She created Words First to transform the way that professionals and their organizations communicate with other humans online. And Bailey coaches, leaders, and teams all over the world to new levels of digital success through a human first words first mindset in key areas of digital decision making. Her goal is to help organizations make their online spaces a better place for everyone on both sides of the screen. That sounds fantastic. Bailey, welcome to the podcast. Hello. Glad to be here. Tell us about Words First and how it got started. Yes, absolutely. So I've been a digital content strategist for more than a decade now, which is strange to say, but there it is. And I was part of teams where we would do these really fantastic digital projects, complex digital projects, helping people with their content, their design, their development, and we would go away. It would be a somewhat collaborative process, but we would go away and we would create this really great thing, make all these content strategy choices, come back and present it to the client. They'd say, oh wow, this is great. But then inevitably, they didn't know how to keep the maintenance on their side. Of the screen, how to keep the momentum going. Yes. How to always the way, how to. Govern it, how to evolve it. And they weren't sure how certain content strategy decisions had been made. So it was really difficult for them to keep that content strategy going. So I saw the gap. I saw the need. I said, people need to know how to do this. Internal teams, professionals and leaders need to know how important this is. Because the practice of digital content strategy, the way I practice it, is, as you said, humans first, words first. The words really matter to how we communicate in compassionate and empathetic ways with people online and how they view our organizations and the kind of interactions that they have with us. And it all happens through this practice of content strategy, especially married, with a practice of user experience and customer experience. And so I set out to teach people how to do that for themselves. I love that you say an experience for people on both sides of the screen. You also write that so many digital experiences are chaotic and unusable for both the audiences trying to engage with them and the teams building them. So why is this? How can we combat this? Right? And a lot of it has to do with the fact that the mere yet big fact that we so often save the words, the content, but mostly the words for last in digital spaces. So those listening might be really familiar with the process. I'm about to describe where you go through maybe a short discovery period where you talk about what you want, the website or your app or whatever your digital space might be. You discuss what you want it to do, what are your goals, and then you say, okay, that's great. Now we want to get to the fun stuff. We want to get to design. Let's see what this thing looks like. But there's a critical step missing there because when we do it that way, then design has to basically just leave content a little box to put words in. And that is the major thing that's keeping first of all teams from being able to maintain content in a way that makes intuitive sense for their processes and their practices and to create more or stronger connections with audiences. It's also what prevents audiences from being able to interact with us in a really natural way in our digital spaces. I had a guest on the podcast and why am I not going to remember? I'll put it in the show notes, a web designer, and it was probably about a year ago, and she said that so many websites are like this beautiful brochure in a dark hallway just looking over there and no one uses them. And like you said, the user experience is not top of mind. It's always what do we want on the website? What do we want it to do, what do we want it to look like? Not what do people actually want to use it for? Correct. Yes. The people and the words and the content that will serve them. When you start putting those considerations and discussions first in your digital processes, the world literally changes for you in your digital space. You have so much more ability to connect with people in genuine ways if you put those things first. So how can marketing teams flip this content creation process? What are some strategies we can employ? Yes. So first of all, and I guess I will say this one first, because it might be one of the most painful, but it really is worth a little extra investment in this area, which is to get your communications and content professionals into the same software that your designers and anyone who's dealing with layout is using. That's a really interesting thought. Okay. Right. Because when they're writing in Word documents, Google documents, whatever, you use these communications, content words, people, they are necessarily siloed from how the content is going to appear in an actual context of a website or an email series or whatever your digital space is presenting it as. So when communications and content professionals get into tools, software that does layout, they can start to make visual decisions and they can start to communicate visually to a design team about content hierarchy, about what content belongs in proximity to another piece of content, about flow of information across screens. And so they're not in there doing design. And what they do is not going to be anything you would publish visually live, but it creates a kind of language that doesn't exist otherwise between content people and the interface and then also content communications people and the design team. That's really interesting to actually have the people that are doing the writing look at where the words are going to go and how they're going to fit and what is the other content that's adjacent to it. I'm thinking of all of my poor marketing and fundraising people out there that do the email newsletter every month or bimonthly or every week, and they're constantly getting thrown content to put in the email newsletter, but they're designing it in such a way to maybe have white space or to have bulleted lists. And the other people kind of giving them content are not understanding the way that they're using the email newsletter or even the experience of the person opening the email newsletter because they're just writing it in an email or writing it on a Word doc. They're not looking at it on a phone or looking at it like in Gmail. So I think that's a really valuable tip. So you talk about user experience content strategy principles. What are they and what are user experience content strategy principles? Sure. So the fancy jargon name for what I do and some listening may know exactly what I'm talking about. And if you don't, I would say you don't have to know the jargon to benefit from this, but it is called user experience content strategy. And those principles, that's a really good segue from what you were talking about in terms of white space, in terms of bulleted lists. It's all about how we present and format information through a screen to communicate human to human with other people. So we're communicating human to human through the least human medium that I'm aware of, which is the screen. And so the way that we present information is really important. You may have heard people don't read online in large part, and there will be people who tell you that's not true. If their task is to read, they will read. But most of the time they came to do something, they came to donate. Hey, we want them to be able to do that. They came to research an initiative that you have going. And so that's not pure reading. It's kind of more, oh, I get the gist. Okay, let me take my next step. And so a lot of times, they're interacting with us, our organizations, online, or to do something. So the way we guide them to do that is to make it easy for them. And that's through headings. That's through white space. That's through presenting information in a way that they can really understand and absorb that information kind of immediately at a glance. Because the big lift we want them to do is to interact with us, to take that action, whatever the final action is in our digital space, to interact with us. That's where we want their attention and their work focused. Yes. So it's principles surrounding what you might typically think are a designer's job, but a designer doesn't have the expertise in why the content was put together the way that it was usually in order to make decisions like what should the heading be, what should the bullets be, what should this action link be? Where should it even go? Many of those really belong in the realm of content, but designers have to make those decisions because they're the ones in the layout software. They're the ones looking at how it's formatted. So we're being kind to the user and thinking about the user experience more than we are thinking about really what we want to accomplish. Like, what was their goal coming here, reading this email, going to this website, looking at this particular post on social media, what did they hope to accomplish? I really teach that a lot in my social media training and coaching around, thinking always about your user or the supporter at the other end? What are they hoping for? Do they need to be educated, inspired? Are they looking to, like you said, help out with maybe a legislative advocacy push? Are they looking to donate? Are they looking to volunteer? What are they looking to do? And I do think a lot of digital communications, especially because they're so free, quote unquote, free to use and to spit out there and to do other than maybe a website redesign, that we are not as intentional as we could be with our digital communications. Especially like, you know, we spend hours and hours and hours and days on the annual report that's going to be printed out or the direct mail appeal that's going to be printed out. But digital communications tend to maybe kind of fall by the wayside. Do you see that? Yes, absolutely. Because digital can always be changed. Print is permanent. When you send it in the mail, you don't get to take it back. But yes, I always say successful content strategy, digital content strategy lies in the alignment of your organizational goals because they're still important. You still want people to do certain things or to know certain things or to understand them, but it lies in the alignment of those organizational goals with your audience's needs, motivations, and their expectations of you online. As our world has continued to transform in the digital space, people have ever increased expectations of what their interactions will be like online as well? Absolutely. They expect fast frictionless, completely clear and direct and instant, basically. So no more fiddling around with 90 forms and having to be directed to ten websites that load slowly. So let's switch to the topic of the role of empathy and compassion in digital content strategy and creation. Can you talk about that? Yes. So a lot of times our internal processes, we might all like each other, we might all get along, but in the midst of decision making, we can actually lose empathy and compassion within the strategy, planning, and creation process. It goes back to these practices between content and design, content and tech, content and planning. From an internal standpoint, having writers, for example, writing in Silos, in Word documents is actually not a very empathetic practice to their creation experience. So there is a need for more collaboration, more compassion for interdisciplinary viewpoints, but also to integrate those disciplines and those viewpoints together and to have more empathy for this person doesn't, like you said earlier, doesn't even know what the email looks like, but we're asking them to write for it. So for me, it really starts there on that side of the screen with the team kind of understanding how those principles are impacting their own work culture. And then all of that translates across the screen to our audiences on the other side as well. And so when we start paying more attention to compassion and empathy in our practices, it starts to leak into our other conversations too well. Hey, this error message kind of sounds like we're blaming someone. Could we write this in a way that doesn't put the fault on someone else? So when you start to have those conversations internally, it becomes a lot easier to think empathetically toward your audience members as well on the other side of the screen. I'm just thinking of all the times I sign up for email newsletters, and it really is just this bland, like, thank you for subscribing. Okay, well, great. Where's the excitement? Where's the interest? Get me really passionate about what you're doing. What's my next step? What can I expect next? So I agree. I think that's not very empathetic to just kind of say, all right, click this button to confirm, and you're on your way. And then, by the way, we might not email you for two months, and then if we do, we might ask you for a gift. Yeah, and you know that that lack of excitement comes from the team side. We have to write a success message. Let's have someone write a success message. It's probably written in a word document. Okay, now let's get somebody to put it let's get someone to put the screen up. And so if there were more thought behind the empathy, the compassion from the internal team, like, well, why are we doing this? What's the purpose of this message? How does it resonate with the people on the other side of the screen? How does it resonate with us? Then all of that translates back the other way, which gets people on the other side of the screen excited, which should get us on this side of the screen excited. So it goes back and forth in that way. So for digital communications, what do you see as the most effective channels for nonprofits in your work? Yeah, so the answer that no one likes, it depends on your nonprofit. Oh, I say it all the time. Yes, email, certainly, because if you can have people in your email inbox, or if you can be in their email inboxes and they've invited you in, that's a level of relationship and connection that you won't get a lot of other places. They've invited you in, they've said, yes, you can be in my personal space. Because I think we don't realize often enough that email inboxes are people's personal space, and they are subjected to everything that comes through that email inbox in a way that we are not in a social media feed. But where I see no matter what your chosen platforms are, what I see most as a breakdown is connecting the place where you are speaking to your audience members out in the wilds of the internet, whether that's on social media or even in your own email correspondence connecting that to your own digital space, like a website, an app, a landing page, a form. The cohesion of the experience from one channel to another is really where I see things start to break down. And usually it's because in part, we have one team kind of responsible for the site. We have a web partner responsible for the site. They take care of that. We have someone responsible for the email newsletter, they take care of that. Someone else maybe even does social media. And once again, it's not very collaborative and interdisciplinary in that way. Exactly. Oh, wow. The experience from site to site and platform to platform can be wild. You could send me from Facebook to your donate page on your website and it might not even look the same, or have the same photos, or have the same tone of voice or that same brand voice. I might get completely confused. I've had that happen to me quite a few times, like being sent out of the social media space or even off of an email and having the fonts and the colors and everything else look dramatically different. And it's like you said before, people are so used to that seamless experience and frictionless experience. So I think that's really interesting. Also, I talk a lot about storytelling. I teach a lot about storytelling in my work. And I wonder where does storytelling fit in? Is this very important to these kind of empathetic, compassionate, content strategy principles? Yes, it is. And maybe not in the way that we automatically think, because storytelling, well, storytelling is a strategy and can be strategic. And I have these conversations quite often with my clients about strategic storytelling, because what we all really want to do is as soon as someone gets to our homepage, dive into our story why we do what we do. We are passionate about it. These are causes that we really care about, and rightfully so. And we want our audience members to care too, and they probably do. But in the areas where someone is just trying to get something done, they're just trying to donate. Once they've come to the part of the experience where they're just trying to navigate your site so that's like maybe the beginning, when they first get to your website, for example, or mostly for a website, they're just trying to navigate around, they're not going to be paying attention so much to Story because they're trying to figure out what's here. What did I come here for? Am I in the right spot? We need a lot of handholding. It's all of us on the am. I in the right spot? Such a key question. Yes. Am I even in the right spot? And that's what we were just talking about. Hopping platform to platform die even. Come where I meant to come to. They are worried about that when they first arrive. Once you have them settled into, yes, this is the right spot. Here's our logo. Here's some words that key you in on why you're here and help them figure out where to go next. That's when they will start to if they're not familiar with your story or there's something that they came to research or to know more about, they will then engage with that. So it's a choose your own adventure from their point of view. But you're the one over here writing how you would move from one piece of the story to another for them. And so I think just one of the biggest things I see is trying to tell stories everywhere, and there's no room for interaction and just straight up interaction. There is a progression to it. Am I in the right spot? Okay, I am. Now. What is the story? What do I need to know? Okay, now I'm ready to act. So get the story out of my way, because I just want to do the thing you asked me to do and that I want to do. And once again, that's really all about what your audience members are coming to your space to do. So we talk about words first. Human centered content during the campaign, maybe in a campaign, in a marketing or promotional period. Fundraising period. What about content strategy for afterwards, after we got them to do the thing. Right, because we all celebrate as we should. It's a hard one thing to get anyone to notice. Your hard thing to do get them to your site. Wow, we have them. And then that's when everyone wants to celebrate because the marketing succeeded. But usually by the time your audience is at your website or your app or your portal or your form, your marketing has succeeded. And you're not done telling your story as we were just talking about, but the marketing part of it's over. You got them here to whatever you wanted them to do. Mostly, most people don't just search the Internet for random sites, so they came there because something worked. That's when we want to celebrate. But our audience's journey is not even halfway done at that point. Now they have to figure out, what steps do I take? What do I do next? If you have a form and something goes wrong, well, how do I fix that? And that's another way that we can be really empathetic toward our audience members knowing that they don't know how our site is set up. They don't have the same we are subject matter experts in how our sites are structured. They come having not a clue as to what's there, what kind of resources can help them, what steps to take. So after the marketing has succeeded and they are in your digital space and you're celebrating, while you're celebrating, also helping them to take that final action, whatever it is, and guiding them through, because they won't know how to do it without wow. So on your website, you write something that I actually really agree with. So you wrote, people who care about digital content that resonates on a human level are needed now more than ever. I completely agree. It's time to rethink how we approach digital content so that we can make the communications and interactions we all encounter every day less robotic, chaotic and caustic, both to receive and to create. So, the subject of the hour, where does generative AI fit in? Where do Chat Bots and Chat GPT? Where does all of that fit in to digital communications? Right? Because robots can help our lives and they are part of the equation, whether you like it or not. Every time you are assisted in finding something on Google, the robots are helping you. Even as a human centered content strategist, I find myself saying all the time, thank you, robots, that was helpful. The danger is in thinking that, and it's very easy to think this, especially in organization where resources might be limited or tight, but thinking that the AI robots are going to be able to create content on the same level as a human being and that it will resonate with your audience members. And we actually did an experiment in the words first course in community because a lot of us, well, all of us in their communications, and we care deeply about content. A lot of writers in there and just a lot of there's been a lot of fear generally, if you hang out on LinkedIn in particular, you'll kind of see all the fear based posts about AI writing. And that may be warranted because there are people saying that it's going to take over writing jobs. But we did an experiment where we had the robots write us a holiday greeting card. The results were not Hallmark worthy, I can tell you that. So that was a low risk way. If you're looking for a low risk way to kind of interact with the robots, that was a good and fun one. But then we had people writing emails themselves for their organizations and then having the AI robots write an email. And the difference is just so stark. If you look at a really highly skilled writer writing content and then have the robots do it, it's night and day. And when it comes to the interactive content, the kind of content that guides people through digital spaces, the robots really can't do that because at that point, they are the writer in the Word document. They are the writer in the Google document. They're not in the layout tool with you. They can't say, oh, that button there, because of everything else that's around it, it should say this. That's not a capability that they have. And they don't know your audience. And they don't know your audience. Now, I have found that robots can be I call them the robots. It's lovingly. The robots. They can be helpful in taking time off of research. Yes. Well, yeah, but you got to double check it. But yes, you do have to double check it, but if it's just, you know, those research tasks that take so long for your content team, like give me or, or your internal communications team, you know, give me I just need like 25 different, say, digital media outlets. And yes, we have to spend hours finding this on Google, and we don't want the same old results that Google wants to give us every time at the top. I've been using chat GPT in particular for that because it takes hours away. And then if I research one and it's no good, that's okay because it took the robots 1 second to find, instead of me, 45 minutes to dig it up from somewhere on the 10th page of Google. I was so excited to have you on the podcast talking about human centered digital content because of all of the news stories. And I think a little maybe the hysteria is kind of warranted because I haven't played with GPT four yet, and I've heard it's some people say it's like seeing God, which I think is a little hyperbolic. But immediately, the very first thing that I did when I played with the original iteration of chat GPT was have it write a fundraising email. That's like the first thing I had to do. My husband had it write, like, weird musicals about metal bands or something. I know he thought it was hilarious. I said, what if we just do something that's actually worthwhile write a blog post about this? And what I saw was it was so generic, it was so cookie cutter, that if you sent that email out to your donors, I mean, you might raise a few dollars, but it's not going to grab attention, it's not going to be interesting. And I've been listening to a lot of content creators talk about it, and they talk about it like you do. They say it's all about putting your fingerprint on your content. Like, what are the words that you use? What's the unique spin that you have on things? How can someone know that it's uniquely you? And sure, you can use it to research or do headline research is great. Like, give me 50 email subject lines right now or something. That's all very appropriate, but I think that we are actually going to swing back into more human centered content, digital content especially because there's going to be so much garbage out there now. Yes, I think there's a divide coming. You're going to be able to really. Say there's a divide. You're going to be able to really start to tell. So one way to keep a high touch connection with your audience is to continue to be that human, genuine, authentic voice for them, and to understand what words they use and to use those words with them, and then to communicate in your own tone and voice. Yes. And I will say one other thing that shocked me that I learned recently, is that any content you create. With an artificial intelligence solution is not able to be copyrighted. And there have been conversations about we'll wait and see. But actually I believe it was the Supreme Court has upheld a decision that anything that was created using AI and didn't have human input is not copyrighted because copyright requires human input. So I was shocked to learn that that had already kind of been a decision handed down on the highest level. So we'll see the spammers and the content marketers that already have spent 5 seconds writing something that will all just get worse and more generic. But the people that stand out I think will do a better job at standing out because of the way that they're communicating and I think that's really important. So what do you see as the future of digital communications? Yes, I think that's a great lead in to that conversation. The junk is going to get junkier and the really human, empathetic, compassionate, authentic communications are going to even get more. So there's also just this interesting trend starting and I know everyone has seen this, where I really think we're going to see more of individuals. We have like a creator culture that I think is only getting started in what we're going to do with it. Individuals creating content, individuals contributing to your digital content in really unique and interesting ways, but then also places popping up where individuals are creating a collaborative space together online. So right now, and don't start asking me to quote about Web 3.0 because I can't. But what I have seen is that right now most of the internet is controlled by organizations and by companies. Most websites are owned by those organizations. But I think what we will see popping up are more of the cooperative style or collaborative style of digital spaces where many people who have just decided to be affiliated and have decided how they're going to add value to this space are doing so and it's not necessarily owned by an organization. I think the closest thing we probably have to that right now is TikTok, which is still of course owned by an organization, but people there decide how they're going to add value and what causes are important to them and what things are important to them and how they're going to operate in that space. And I don't have any direct advice for anyone right now except just to be thinking about that in kind of a curious and exploratory way when you're thinking about your organization's new and innovative and interesting things that you might do in the future. I totally agree. I think the trend also these sites are not exploding as much. But like Mastodon and Post are two social media sites that I've been reading about. I just don't see them overtaking anything like Meta or TikTok. But you're right, TikTok is all about the content creators and influencers and people generating content. It's not about the necessarily big brands or even any kind of recognizable brand. It's really about people talking about things that they want to talk about. And it's shockingly democratic in that way. But we shall see if TikTok remains to exist in the United States. We don't know. As of this recording, TikTok might be banned. I don't know. That's right. Not looking good. It is an interesting perspective on the humanness of digital content, too. So it's something I'm keeping my eye on, for sure. Absolutely. So my last question is for a small nonprofit that is listening to this and they really are looking at their content strategy, they want it to be more human centered. What is maybe one tweak that a small nonprofit can employ sort of right away that's going to get them on the right trajectory. Yeah, absolutely. So my number one for that is always to talk to people from your audience, representative, real members of your audience. And it doesn't have to be any kind of official, time consuming you can do this with zero budget. It doesn't have to be a big research endeavor. You can literally grab family members count, colleagues count, as long as they're not in your project team, because your project team knows too much, just like you do. Friends count as long as they're part of your representative audience. And identify a few things that you want your site to be able to help them do if it's a website. Or identify a few things that you want to resonate with them from social media or an email campaign, a whole campaign, or just one email and talk to them about it. Have them respond. Give them space to respond. Don't give them the answers. Have them talk to you. Just by engaging with them, even in a very kind of non official, ad hoc kind of way, you're going to learn a lot of things that you just because we are all stuck inside our own worldview, you're going to learn a lot of things that they're thinking about that you probably have never thought about before. And that alone will boost your digital experiences for your audience's. Heads and shoulders. Heads and shoulders over even other bigger companies that don't do that. They've never talked to a single one of their audience members. So that's always my number one piece of advice. Wonderful. I love that. Bailey, thank you so much. Where can people find you and learn more about you and learn more about the Words First community? Yeah. So the main words first website is wordsfirstcontent.com. That is where I have a free library of advice, information, insights about content strategy there for whoever it may help. And it's also where anybody who is interested in coaching, training, workshops, that kind of thing, for organizations and leadership can go. And then the membership side of the business is@wordsfirstcommunity.com and that's all for people who are interested in joining others who are interested in content, interested in kind of the future of this human centered content. Learning together, evolving together. And then online, I am at Words. First content is me on Instagram and on LinkedIn. Fantastic. And I'll put all of that in the show notes and just thank you so much. This was such a fantastic and timely topic. As we listen to the headlines and. See where content marketing could or could. Go, I think, like you said, we're at the precipice of a divide and it's really important to figure out where we stand and which sort of path we're going to take. And I think human centered digital content is the way to go. So thanks, Bailey, for being here. Thank you. This has been really great. I really have enjoyed it. Thanks so much. Well, hey there. I wanted to say thank you for tuning into my show and for listening all the way to the end. If you really enjoyed today's conversation, make sure to subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast app and you'll get new episodes downloaded as soon as they come out. I would love if you left me a rating or a review because this tells other people that my podcast is. Worth listening to, and then me and. My guests can reach even more earbuds and create even more impact. So that's pretty much it. I'll be back soon with a brand new episode, but until then, you can find me on Instagram at Julia Campbell 77. Keep changing the world, you nonprofit unicorn.
