Episode 56: Kara DeFrias, Intuit QuickBooks - Content strategy and the power of storytelling

Kristina Halvorson:
This is the content strategy podcast and I’m your host, Kristina Halvorson. On each and every episode I interview someone I admire who’s doing meaningful work in content strategy and all its adjacent disciplines. If you care about making content more useful, usable and inclusive for all, welcome in, you have found your people.

Welcome back content enthusiasts everywhere around the globe. It's me, Kristina. And wait until you make this week's guest. You're going to freak out. I freaked out when she agreed to be on my podcast. It's a delight. All right. I would like to introduce to you Kara DeFrias. Kara is the Chief of Staff at the Intuit QuickBooks Platform. Her passion for creating impact at scale has brought her to many exciting places, including the Super Bowl, the Oscars, Women's World Cup and two White Houses. Kara champions small businesses as chief of staff at Intuit QuickBooks prior. Her public sector leadership includes the inaugural class of Presidential Innovation Fellows, Director of Experience Design on the Cancer Moonshot team in the Obama White House and senior advisor in the Biden-Harris White House. She does pro bono product strategy for nonprofits, taught design to microentrepreneur, women in rural India and guest lecturers at Harvard and Stanford. Kara loves cheese and Broadway equally. Welcome to the Content Strategy Podcast.

Kara DeFrias:‍

Why? Thank you. That sounds like a really incredible person. And I just need your audience to know right off the bat, Kristina, that I am just a kid from Jersey who is supposed to be a high school English teacher and coach soccer, all those things that you just said it's like, oh wow. Yeah, that was never on my wishlist.

Kristina Halvorson:

Isn't it? It's kind of amazing sometimes to hear your own bio and just be like, woo, wow, it didn't feel that fancy when it was happening, and now look at me. I'm a collection of all these experiences. It also sounds like you're about 110 years old.

Kara DeFrias:

I'll tell you. Some days it does too.

Kristina Halvorson:

Well, I'm anxious for my guests to hear a little bit about your career journey because I know everybody now is hanging on for dear life, waiting to hear. And I'm also excited to talk to you about how and why we know and love each other, connected not only by our love for Broadway, but also our passion for content strategy. So let's start off, why don't you tell me a little bit about your background and what has happened over the last 110 years?

Kara DeFrias:

So when I was negative 2, I started out in content and-

Kristina Halvorson:

Math.

Kara DeFrias:

It's funny, I never thought of myself as a writer. And in fact, in high school, we all in honors English, had to write a graduation speech and they would pick somebody, whoever wrote the, quote unquote, "best one," which when you're 17, what does that even mean, to then deliver the speech of graduation? And so I wrote what I thought was a really awesome speech. It was right on the mark at five minutes because the computer program I ran it through said it was a five-minute speech, but then you had to get up and give it in front of the class. And I gave it in exactly 38 seconds. And so that wasn't the best situation, but good news is they didn't pick me, so I didn't have to give it. But then fast-forward to college and I was supposed to play D2, division two soccer, and I didn't make the team and didn't know what I was going to do all fall.

I was walking through the student center and I saw a flyer up on the wall for a Brendan Behan, an Irish playwright's play called The Hostage. And I thought, well, what else am I going to do this semester now that I'm not playing soccer? And that's truly what changed my life. I found my voice, I found my presence. I learned how to present and talk and tell engaging stories. So when I tell people in our shared love of Broadway, Kristina, there's that great line in Avenue Q, what do you do with BA in English? And I am kind of the answer to, well, a lot. You can actually do a lot with a BA in English. So I ended up double majoring in English and theater. And then coming out of college, I had to finish up six credits and I didn't want to do student teaching cause I didn't find it was a fit for me.

I went to the head of the department and I said, listen, I'd love to do an internship for six credits for six months at my hometown paper, which wasn't small by any means. It was about a hundred thousand people circulation, which back then in the early 1900s was a really big number. And so I did that, and that's where writing really started resonating with me. I'd written a little for the college paper, but mostly had done sports photography. So I did six months as a reporter, as a photojournalist. I mean, I had a byline pretty much two to three times a week going out on assignment. That's when I realized the power of words.

I really learned, because it was very hands-on. It wasn't like it was an internship where someone's over your shoulder the whole time. It was really like, Nope, go write this story, bring it back and we'll throw an editor at you. So I learned how to tell a good story, how to get a good hook. Then when I graduated from Elizabethtown College, a great little small, liberal arts college, that is such a hard word to say, liberal arts college in Central PA.

Kristina Halvorson:

That's okay. I can never say operationalize. Oh, I said it.

Kara DeFrias:

Thank you.

Kristina Halvorson:

... yes.

Kara DeFrias:

Oh, hey, take the W friend. I ended up doing, because I didn't do the student teaching, I ended up doing instructional design, which is just corporate learning and development for the better part of 10 years. And that's where it really became... I started calling myself an information designer. This is before content designer was like the ‘it’ term, because it really to me was how do you present information in a way that people can grok onto it, that they can remember it, that they can chunk it. When I went into grad school at Penn State, my master's is in instructional design and it's a lot of adult learning psychology and how the brain perceives things. So when in UX, the cognitive burden conversation started coming up in the early 2000s, I'm like, oh, I get what that is. And so just more and more as I went through my career, I had more things where if there was writing that needed to be done, people would turn to me.

Over time I became a PR executive. So writing press releases and trying to convince people to be interested in my clients and what they're doing. Now as chief of staff over the past five or so years, it's a lot more ghost-writing for my principal. So for my boss or writing for somebody else, I had the great privilege at the White House to write for the Vice President, for Vice President Harris. I had the opportunity to write for Vice President Biden under Obama. And when I look back at that kind of through line, it really did start in my reporter days and my instructional design days of how do you hook somebody early? How do you craft the content away that's meaningful and memorable? And it's funny, when I was in the White House the last time I just left this last July while I was senior advisor for technology in that team, the running joke became, you know how there's SaaS, software as a service? It became KaaS for Kara as a service because anytime anybody would write anything, no, run it by Kara, she'll make it better.

It wasn't my day job, but I do love that people want to come to me and to run something by me or ask me how to structure it. I also had the great opportunity in the last gig out in DC to create a content strategy from scratch because there wasn't one there. So I love that even though writing might not be the day job, the full-time job anymore, boy, there's been a lot of cool opportunities to draw on to help make the written word better and more understandable and more actionable.

Kristina Halvorson:

So I'm going to ask you, I have so many questions, but I'm going to ask you that last thing you said about a content strategy at the White House. Can you talk to me a little bit about what problems that work was trying to solve and the kind of opportunities that it was hoping to go after?

Kara DeFrias:

Yeah. So I'm sure you have an international audience. So I'll kind of go back one step to a little bit of 101 because I don't want to presume that anybody-

Kristina Halvorson:

What is the White House? Start.

Kara DeFrias:

Well, so it's this big building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC that's burned down once. But for folks who might not be aware, every four years in America, we have an election, potentially a new person comes into the White House. So most people are familiar with the high amount of turnover every four to eight years in the White House. But what they might not know about is there is a career staff that stays through presidents often. And a lot of them are writing a lot of the documentation for even things like how to create a PDF or how to connect to your printer. So it's more of the technical side of writing. But when I got there, I noticed there was an opportunity for more consistency and voice in tone and how the information was organized. And so I just kind of went back to my old instructional design days and my information design days and I was like, all right. We used Confluence there. I just built a Confluence page out. As I started kind of whiteboarding, because I'm like, they could bury me with a whiteboard and sticky notes and I'd be so happy like, here's how to get to her funeral site from the wake because clearly being half Irish, we're going to have a major party when I pass. At least that's what I hope. But yeah, man, whiteboards and sticky notes for my love language. In fact, I'll just send you a picture afterwards. The biggest whiteboard of my life was behind my desk at my office in the White House. And I was like, God, if they're... I mean, when I talk big, I'm talking, I'm like eight by five mounted with a wood frame. It was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life.

But anyway, go back to your question. There was an opportunity for consistency, and so I took a very narrow approach of, I know a lot of the building could have used a content strategy, and there's clearly the comms team has theirs for their stuff that's external facing. But again, if we're looking internally, how do we get our literal own house in order. I started with a group that does the technical writing and I put together a Confluence page. And then one of my collaborators, I'm a very big, let's build as we go, but test as we go. And again, that goes back to the ADDIE model from instructional design, analyze, design, develop, implement, execute, and evaluate. And so as I'm going, I'm building and I realized that I was writing at a level that wasn't going to meet the people who needed to read it and use it. And that was a really good reminder of your audience and meet them where they are.

I was talking to a friend, I'm like, I'm struggling on how to get some of these points across. And he was like, why don't you just do a good, better, best? Because I feel like in a lot of content strategies you'll see the red and the green like, this is the wrong way to do it. This is the right way to do it and there's no gray. So I wanted to introduce a spectrum. So I would write a sentence, I would take a sentence, here's what it looks like now. If you were going to take this sentence to good, this is what it would look like. Emoji queen over here. I had all these emojis to mentally embed and anchor into their brain so they would remember what each one looked like.

And so we're like, okay, this is what it looks like if it's good, this is what it would look like if it's better, but this is what it would look like if it was best. And that to me, and the feedback I got when I started training and the teams on it is like, oh, they self-select where they are and then they can see what the aspiration is to get to the next level. And that, it sounds small Kristina, but it was such a big part of getting the adoption rate up for this content strategy guide.

Kristina Halvorson:

This is incredible. I mean just to remember that yes, even at the White House, these things need to happen. So it sounds like the part of the work that you're talking about is almost sort of in the voice and tone, readability, how to structure the content and that lived online in a wiki format. Is that right?

Kara DeFrias:

Yeah, yeah. There was an introduction section on like here's what a content style or content strategy is, and there were style guide stuff like here's what the spell out acronyms and stuff. But it really was also, how do you think about it? What is usability and why should you do it on your content? Also bringing accessibility and inclusivity from a language perspective in. Oftentimes you'll hear people saying, government citizens, and that just gets under my skin because there's so many people that interact with our government who are not yet citizens or may never be citizens. And so little things like rather than say citizen in the content strategy say the people, or the public. So yeah, it had all those things and some more as well.

Kristina Halvorson:

Sometimes I like to wrangle terminology on this website, which I know I recognize makes me the person that nobody wants to sit next to at parties. But I think that this whole conversation about content within the user experience is so critically important because as the term content strategy sort of spiraled out of control over the last several years, people coming back and anchoring themselves in this phrase, content design, I think that part of what's powerful about that is from a content perspective, it helps ground those practitioners in particular within experience design. And that's really the lens through which you're kind of coming at this conversation is how are people who are creating this content, creating it in a way that it's going to be meaningful, useful, usable, relevant, accessible, and inclusive for all the different audiences that need to work with that content?

Kara DeFrias:

Totally. And it's not lost on me at all that I'm talking about a content strategy that I did with literally the queen of content strategies. I'm like, oh God, she's going to call me out for using the wrong word.

Kristina Halvorson:

No. My God, no. Listen, actually, literally for a client just wrote out content strategy is flexible terminology that requires a differentiator in front of it to help people align on what it's for in the first place. So there's marketing content strategy, there's experience content design, there's enterprise content strategy. I mean, there's lots of different kinds. It just depends on where and how you're putting it in play. 

Kara DeFrias:

That's the thing, right? Because I've been in UX more or less for probably 15, 20 years now, and the way when we talk career earlier, quick sidebar, the way I got into UX was because I was an instructional designer at the largest insurance company in New Jersey, I literally stumbled over this team two doors over called new media, and this was 2004. And I was like, what do you do? Because I had just left Hollywood, I had just finished up my year in LA working in entertainment, and I was like, oh, I got to go back to grad school, finish my masters, settle down, get married, all that stupid stuff you're supposed to do in your late 20s according to society.

Well, and I'm sitting there and I'm like, well, what is new media? And they said, oh, well we do this thing called usability. And I was like, what's usability? They said, well, we put the things we're building for the company in front of customers before we launch it to make sure they can use it. I was like, I'm sorry, what is this geniusness? And so I just walked into my boss's office, I'm like, this stuff sounds really cool. I want to rewrite now my job description to be 25% new media and usability, 75% instructional design. He was like, I'm fully supportive. If it's what you have passion around, just make sure you're nailing your day job. And I did. And so for the next five years, every subsequent job I had, I worked usability UX into it to the point where I finally in 2009 landed my first official UX job and that was at Intuit working on Quicken at the time.

I'm a big believer in charting your own course, making your own opportunities. And one of the things I've seen in this whole time to get back to your original point is we get so tripped up in the design community, capital D, capital C or design Twitter, design LinkedIn of wanting to call this thing our thing and make it precious. Let me tell you, when you're trying to get career military folks at the White House to buy into a content strategy, you have got to speak their language. And so you have to let go of, yeah, to your point, is it content strategy for marketing? Is it content strategy for sales or is it something that they can relate to and then they can feel like they're fluent in the language as well. And that's where I've seen the most success. And so I agree with you. I think the terminology is something that we as designers writ large tend to get a little precious around. And I think we'd be a lot better off if we were a little less precious.

Kristina Halvorson:

I think that what I see and what I hear so often and what I try have tried to help with in as the years have gone by is folks in the content community who really struggle to communicate value. I just did an interview with Peter Merholz, and he does org design for design orgs. And so he is working to create team structures and career paths and so on within these organizations. And he just said straight up the role of the content fill in the blank person is pretty amorphous to me and is difficult to pin down.

I just feel like, and it's ironic because we're content people, but that difficulty in communicating value does, I think it gets in our way in that we're trying to find exactly the right words versus to your point, okay, person that I'm speaking to that I need to communicate the value of my work to what do you care about? What do you value the most? What hurts the most? And I'm going to connect the dots for you to show you how content is either helping or hurting that. And the work that I'm doing can either solve your pain points or lift you up and make you look like a rock star.

Kara DeFrias:

Yeah. Because who's the star here? Who matters in the end, the team that put together the content strategy? Absolutely. I'm team content strategy. Love you all. You are my bread and butter, listeners. Love you very much. At the same time. And it's one of the learnings we had under the Obama White House, and this was in the early days, the first class of Presidential Innovation Fellows. We were the first guinea pigs in the door on this grand experiment of can you bring in outsiders from tech and other sectors for a short tour of duty at the White House to help make a meaningful difference? And what we learned, because we tripped and got bruised a lot those first six months, and now there's Presidential Innovation Fellows, 18F, US Digital Service. But what we learned in those days is you've got to find the champions inside the org who trust me, have been trying to do what you want to do for decades, partner with them, give away the glory, let them shine because you're going to leave and you want this to live on.

That's why I made sure with the content strategy, I built it in a durable way that's accessible, that's approachable, that feels like, oh, I can do this. And I'll tell you what, the folks on the receiving end were like, oh my gosh, we've been craving this because there's not a lot of time to do professional development in four years at the White House. So yeah, I think if we can get past ourselves as the star and make our whoever's consuming what we're creating the star, I think you get to success a lot quicker, and it's more fun for people along the way because God forbid we have fun doing this.

Kristina Halvorson:

I'm going to say that has kind of been my core career value over the years is lift other people up and make sure that I'm having fun along the way. That'll be good. I mean, don't get me wrong. I like it when people are like, Kristina, you're great. I'm like, oh yeah, okay. But still, I really have been, through our events recently, especially, I get so much more pleasure out of ensuring that I'm fueling other folks' success. And I think that that is part of what a content strategist has to... That has to be a core value for them because I do think that it sort of clears the path and makes it easier to do their jobs.

Kara DeFrias:
And I do think words matter because I would put down a dollar, I can see a clear delineation between a copywriter and a UX writer. Maybe a little more blur between UX writer and content strategist but to me, copywriter is like you're coming in to do a specific thing. So I do think titles matter, and I do think it helps explain, but I think it's when we get tripped up and stuff where it's like, you know what? Maybe just chill a little.

Kristina Halvorson:

Yeah, agreed. Well, and I just think too, the lexicon matters depending on which organization you work for and how they are trying to delineate between copywriters and content strategies and content specialists and content marketing and so on and so forth. Hey, I want to switch gears just a little bit to talk about when you and I connected during a very fraught time in the world's history. I wonder if you can chat about that just a little bit, because the first time I had a phone I was like, how is this person [inaudible 00:22:06]? So can you tell me a little bit about that? Because I think it ties directly into this part of our conversation.

Kara DeFrias:

No, totally. And I'm laughing because I'm just thinking about how in the span of three short years, I went from this person to content and event bestie with you, which just brings me so much joy, Kristina.

Kristina Halvorson:

Samesies.

Kara DeFrias:

So folks who are listening, because of my experience with the White House, I was called up on day two of the pandemic. I got a phone call from a former coworker saying, we're getting the gang back together, not for another heist. It wasn't an Oceans 11 situation, but it turned out to not be terribly different actually. But we're getting the gang back together to go up to the governor's office in California. We've been asked to come scrub in on the pandemic. I got the call on Saturday, March 21st of 2020, and the immediate question was, are you healthy and are you available? And at that point, I was terrified. I was living in San Francisco, we had a cruise ship in the bay full of 40 people with this new virus called COVID. And I said, yeah, I'm healthy and a little scared. So he told me what they needed me to do.

I said, how long do I have to decide? And he said, we need to know in 24 hours because we're getting everybody together on Monday. And I said, okay. I called my kind of inner circle board of directors, personal board of directors, which if you don't have a personal board of directors, you absolutely need one, everybody listening. And I decided to head up. Originally it was going to be 10 days. We were going to be put on the data and technology team specifically. At 5:00 AM on Monday, March 23rd, 2020, I got in the car. And what usually would be a three hour from here to Sacramento was about 90 minutes if I recall, with COVID traffic. And that started day one of a hundred days straight of going up to Sacramento and trying to figure out how might we use data and technology to one, figure out what all of this is. And two help, at least at the time, we thought we could stop it three years later. It wasn't the way it went, but we went up there. And so I originally had been put on this team to be the liaison between the governor's office, and we have this thing called the Big City Mayor Coalition in California, the 13 largest cities in California, and the mayor or the mayor's office, so their chief of staff or senior advisor. And I was going to be the liaison. I was going to kind of be the conduit. Three days in that just went sideways. And so what I did instead was I spun up an insights team to look at both qualitative and quantitative data with a storytelling lens. One of the things I built on was the president of the United States, because it's presidential daily briefing, a PDB book.

I said, well, what might it look like if we created that for the governor around the COVID data that we're seeing? And so I was focused on what's called NPIs, non-pharmaceutical interventions. So I wasn't reporting number of people in the hospitals or deaths or cases. I was looking at everything else because what people who are listening may not know if you have Facebook on your phone, for example, that's tracking everywhere you go. If you haven't turned tracking off it, that's how you get targeted ads. And so all that information's publicly available. And so we started looking at other publicly available information like ticket sales at beaches or state park reservations or Caltrans traffic data, who's driving around the roads. And we looked at that data every day. A lot of the data was broken down by all of the counties in California.

We started putting together this book and it went up to the governor's office every night in his senior staff. And we started telling the story of what it looks like out there. And what was interesting was we spun all of this up of the 58 counties in California, we spun up this story every day for a hundred days, but we weren't getting the voice of the people. And they didn't quite know how to do that. We also were still on the fly figuring out what does it look like to have a website? So it was covid.ca.gov or ca.covid.gov, and how are we presenting the information because people were desperate? And so as I'm sitting there spitting up the survey, so we could have qual data coming in, and I knew that, we all know how surveys work, they pop up for every 50th or 100th person.

And I was like, oh, well, I want to get a 100 responses a day. Let's throw it to every 50th person. We might be able to get a 100 responses a day. Well, people were so hungry to give feedback, we hit a thousand in the first three hours. So I was like, okay, we're going to fire it to every 200th person. But while I'm doing the governor's daily briefing book, and while I'm doing the survey and bringing the stories of the humans in, I realized we don't have a content strategy. Shit. And so I said, well, the queen of content strategy is Kristina Halvorson, maybe she'll take my phone call. And I don't remember if I emailed you or called you, I don't remember how it happened, but thank God that we got on the phone with each other. And folks, what you don't know, because we've never talked about publicly, is Kristina, in the span of about 24 hours, put together a content strategy for us, for the state of California and why that is impactful other than the fact that clearly she is an amazing A+ human being is everybody...

So I was also on a daily call with the digital data and technology teams for all 50 states, and we were sharing best practices right and left. And I was like, Hey, here's a content strategy we got from literally the person who wrote the book and is the industry leader in all of this. And she said, you can read it and use it. It is not hyperbole when I say, what a tremendous difference Kristina's unheralded, unknown work made in those first hundred days of the pandemic. And that is how we met.

Kristina Halvorson:

First of all, thank you. I've never heard you talk about it like that, and I'm pretty overwhelmed. I have no memory of doing that. I have zero memory of putting that together because at the same time, we were trying to convert an in-person conference to a virtual conference when we had never even done so much as a webinar before and parent to kids who are freaking out at home. And those days are such a, maybe I've just blocked them, but I'm so sort of overwhelmed and humbled and grateful to hear you say that. I think that when I asked you to talk about it, that was not what I was going with it. I was really interested to sort of understand where the gap was and how you identified this is what was needed and what the outcomes were. But I appreciate, and I now feel like I set you up and you knocked it out of the park, and now I look like a rockstar. Well, thank you for joining us for this week's podcast. You can now go home.

Kara DeFrias:

Goodbye.

Kristina Halvorson:

Yes, Exactly.

Kara DeFrias:

That's the thing. It was scary in the beginning and we were all just trying to do the right thing. And what I really appreciate truly was that you didn't know me from Adam, and we have mutuals, but we literally didn't know each other. I was just hoping that you were going to say yes to even throwing a bone our way and you really did go above and beyond. It was so instrumental and I think it shows California became the gold star that everybody else emulated for how to get information out in a timely, effective manner, and you never know where the help can come from. So I think the lesson is don't be afraid to ask, especially your heroes, because they might have time and they might be able to. And it really was instrumental in shaping how we thought. So thank you for that.

Kristina Halvorson:

Again, I did not intend to have you on the podcast and say all of those really nice things but you're welcome and thank you and it was an absolute honor to be able to serve. And I am sorry other people were listening to the podcast. I definitely do not have time to do that for you anymore. I can't. Yeah. But you look back and you think about content and data during the pandemic and during the 12 to 18 months where it was such just a constant horrific threat. And the organizations that had it together... I mean, I don't think it's any, what was the data project that the Atlantic helmed that Erin Kissane was on? It was one of the most celebrated looked to data projects in terms of what was happening, where it was going. And one of the leads on it wrote a book called The Elements of Content Strategy, Erin Kissane. I don't think that's a coincidence there at all.

Kara DeFrias:

Yeah. Well, and it's interesting, right? Because I happened to be the person they brought in and the assignment was never spin up an insights team. That was never, and we had a strong narrative in the book every night. Again, the way I laid it out. I'll tell you, one of the lessons learned quickly is that I... Because I literally had the pen, it's a saying we had at the White House, who has the pen? Meaning who's the one who could ultimately make the change to something? And for the insights team, it was me. The buck stopped with me for the book every night. And I just remember after one night of sending up the book, which again, we turned around from idea to execution to delivery in 36 hours the first week of the pandemic.

I just remember when I got the first batch of results from the call survey, because some questions I left in to like, I want to see how they change over time. So there was a Likert scale, but there was a lot of open-ended questions. And we read every single comment. I just remember I put the quotes at the back of the book, second to last page, and it just didn't feel right. I moved into page three or slide three so that the first thing the governor and the single leadership team read every night was the voice of the people. That grounded them in the rest of the day they were going to read. And that made a difference. I think oftentimes in my experience, and maybe in my earlier days in content design and information design, I was looking for somebody else to tell me what to do or looking for permission to do the crazy thing. And now I have enough coins in my bucket and I'm like, yeah, I'm moving that up front. Why? Because I want to. So-

Kristina Halvorson:

You know what we're all hoping for some point, get the coins in my bucket. I do want to point out what you were talking about is storytelling and the power of storytelling. And we have so many people come to talk about that at both Confab previously and then at Button as well, or content design conference. And I think so often people hear storytelling and they're like, oh, marketing, oh, advertising. And in fact, storytelling is such a critical component, sometimes even more so for our stakeholders and the people that we're trying to help understand our audiences or our business objectives, or going back to what we were talking about our value in the workplace and the work that's done. And I just think that being able to develop those superpowers. You can have tremendous impact like what you're describing, although hopefully it won't be in another pandemic because we don't need any more of those things.

Kara DeFrias:

Well, and that's an excellent point. I always say it's the narrative, right? Because I think storytelling people can sometimes write off as woo-woo, but when you talk about a narrative, people get it. And that comes from working on the Oscars, working on the Emmys. I did an NBC Dreamworks pilot that I got to see from start to finish and how they developed the story and how they broke the story and how they refined it. And to me, and I say this, I just gave a talk at my undergrad last week. I put so many stories in that talk because I said, no one's going to remember a lick about what I say, but they're going to remember the stories. And that's the truth. And so how as content strategists are we weaving narratives and stories into the work we're doing?

Kristina Halvorson:

We are just about out of time, which I received feedback from my last podcast guest that I need to let these go longer. So I'll look into that for season seven or whatever season which is next. I don't know. I've lost count. Before we go, I wonder if you couldn't tell us what is getting you up in the morning these days? What are you super excited about?

Kara DeFrias:

The first thing that comes to mind when you ask that Kristina, is Ted Lasso. If you want to talk about good storytelling, good narrative, something that just makes you feel good about life and good about yourself, I love that show. It brings me so much joy. And then living in San Diego, I get to do my walks along the cliff every day. I'll be 48 in June. I'm one of those people. I don't care if you know how old I am and I've had a life well lived, and I'm grateful where I am right now and what I'm able to do in my life. That's a nice feeling.

Kristina Halvorson:

Thank you so much for gracing me and our listeners with your amazing, wonderful presence and stories. I appreciate you joining us today.

Kara DeFrias:

Thank you for having me. It was an absolute pleasure.

Kristina Halvorson:
Thanks so much for joining me for this week’s episode of the Content Strategy Podcast. Our podcast is brought to you by Brain Traffic, a content strategy services and events company. It’s produced by Robert Mills with editing from Bare Value. Our transcripts are from REV.com. You can find all kinds of episodes at contentstrategy.com and you can learn more about Brain Traffic at braintraffic.com. See you soon.