Creating Meaningful Content

Episode Transcript:

Haley Hnatuk  00:00

I know what it's like to submit to grants and get rejected and get that negative feedback. So I fully understand that it can be heart wrenching, especially when it's something that you really are putting faith into, or it's a voice that you really, really trust and look up to. But I think sometimes it's important to take a step back to take a step away, to not immediately jump into implementing that feedback. And to really, really think about what parts of that feedback are important to be implemented. What are the things that you have heard from other people that are maybe sticking out to them as things that you could change that you could iterate on, and what are things that are more of that person's personal bias or that person's specific taste that maybe you can take with a grain of salt and keep moving on.

 Isotta Page  00:54

This is artists, podcast for artists, where we brainstorm the future of the art world and the creative industries.

 Haley Hnatuk  01:07

I'm Haley Hnatuk, I work at fastener as a content marketing coordinator. And I really find it so important in my work, whether that's my film work, or my work in the tech space to really focus on using technology as a way of connecting people and telling stories. So fast mail is the privacy friendly alternative to Gmail. So we are a full featured email calendar contact service that gives us everything you would expect from an email company, whether that is labels or folders or scheduled send type features alongside our values and commitments to our customers. My work at fast mail when it comes to community building is multifaceted. I'm the producer of our podcast digital citizen, which focuses on connecting people with resources that teach them about how they can live their best digital life, also empowering them to feel more in control of their life in this increasingly digitized world. For me, as a content marketing coordinator at FastMail, it's really meaningful for me to be able to provide FastMail customers and the community around our products with content that really serves their needs, and helps connect them with resources that can help them live their best lives. I also do outreach work with FastMail, and have spoken at nonprofits like hope works as a representative of our company. And I've helped plan in person events in the office that helped connect people who are interested in values aligned Tech with fast Mills mission, I'm interested

 Isotta Page  02:44

to learn a little bit more about your approach to creating that kind of impactful content. Because even from a creative perspective, it's really hard sometimes to be able to share meaningful content around your work that maybe isn't an exact image of what you're doing. Or maybe it's just tangentially related. But as a content expert that you are, I'd love to hear your thoughts on creating that impactful content that brings in maybe new eyes to the work that you're doing creatively or as a creative business.

 Haley Hnatuk  03:19

I think collaboration is the most important thing ever, when it comes to creating impactful content, working with the incredible marketing team that I have been so blessed to be put on at FastMail really gives me the abilities to gather multiple perspectives, before I start creating content, whether that's for our blog, or newsletter, or podcast, social media, whatever. And I have found that when I do that information gathering before I start writing, or before I start scripting, I end up with content that has much less feedback and revision rounds, I ended up with content that people largely feel more connected to and relate to more, because there's just less blind spots when you have more opinions at the outset. And we also saw that podcasting is an incredible tool for community building at FastMail. And we really listen to our listeners of our show. At the end of season one of digital citizen, we put out a survey to all of our listeners, and we realized that a large portion of the people who are listening to and downloading our show were Fastenal customers who care a lot about these topics of digital citizenship and data privacy. And we also saw that a large portion of them were sharing these episodes with their family members and friends. A bunch of people noted on the survey that they were not initially a Fastenal customer but their friend told them to listen to an episode. We really think that moving forward our goal is to continue to grow and expand that community just like with what we were talking about last episode with my film so that we can continue to spread these messages out and have a larger positive impact on people who are living digital lives, which we think really resonates with a large portion of the people in the world globally,

 Isotta Page  05:16

it's so interesting to see that feedback has been such an important thing at fast mail, whether that's in person within the fast mail team, or from your listeners and from your customers. And it makes me think so much about how little artists and the art world in general actually engages with this feedback loop. And the scope of this season is really to D stigmatize these business practices and get more comfortable around sharing business stories with each other. And so I wonder if you had any tips for maybe a creative person who's asking for feedback on their business from clients, or just community members for the first time, and how to keep an open mind and not take maybe negative feedback personally, and to be able to process that kind of learning curve.

 Haley Hnatuk  06:15

Personally, I know that it can be incredibly hard to grapple with negative feedback or grapple with feedback that doesn't meet your expectations as somebody who has submitted to a lot of grants with the film I'm working on now. And also, as somebody who made a few short independent documentaries, like my film, dos hermanos, which screened at festivals internationally before I started working on in love and memory, I know what it's like to submit to film festivals and get rejected.

Isotta Page  06:48

Yeah, that's, that's really great advice on you know, really breaking it down into like, what's useful, what's serving me and what's not, and just accepting it. And then moving forward is always so important. I was wondering if you could share any thoughts you had on why you're so passionate about technology as a tool for community expansion and building either in your professional work, or your creative practice,

 Haley Hnatuk  07:14

I think it's just because technology has this incredible capacity to be a problem solving tool to be a tool of connection we see all have these big social networks that have emerged in the last 20 years that are really focused on being tools for community and connection. And I think if you don't have people in the space, who are thinking about and centering community, and thinking about in centering connection, and thinking about how to build that in a way that is positive and centered around good digital citizenship, then people are not going to build things that serve those needs. Because a lot of technologists build things to solve the problems and to solve for things that they see as immediate impediments in their life. I feel like you need people who are advocates for community building in this space, or tools are not going to be built that serve that purpose. Exactly.

 Isotta Page  08:10

And it makes me also think about the importance of having that really interdisciplinary perspective, getting feedback and ideas from all sorts of people with all different areas of expertise so that these products continue to serve individuals across the board. I was wondering if you could share some thoughts around any misconceptions that you see to be holding people back from creating meaningful community, online or offline as

 Haley Hnatuk  08:39

well. I think the biggest misconception that I hear is that it's too hard. It's not worth it. It's too time consuming. I cannot invest myself into doing this. I think that there are a lot of easy things that people can be implementing on a personal level, that serve the purpose of creating community around your work, you can talk about the progress of your creative projects, keeping people in the loop with what you're doing, whether that is like, hey, we just got this grant, or we just added a new person to the filmmaking team. Or this is how our shooting day went on the streets, we were picking up these new shots of X, Y, and Z. Or this is a project that I am jumping into or a new idea that I'm going to be exploring, keeping people in the loop and also providing photos that can really make people feel more connected to your work and more engaged with the work that you're doing. I also think engaging with people who inspire you in your field and connecting with people who do work that you find to be incredibly impactful and following them in places like whether it's LinkedIn if they're more in the technology, space or I know a lot of artists that don't use LinkedIn and maybe it's Instagram or a different place, but following them and continuing to stay connected with those people can go a long way of building community with people you aspire to be like. And finally, I would just say, this is a super easy thing. But I feel like it's something that people really undervalue, making sure that all of your moving pieces are connected, if you have a Facebook page for your project, and you also have a website, and the link to your website is not on your Facebook page anywhere and nobody can find it, you're going to see a lot less people engaging with that website. Even if every day you're going in and writing a blog post about your progress. If people can't find it, then they can't engage with it, and they can't share it. And they can't do these things. So just making sure that all of your links are easy to find. Having the links to your socials on your website and having the link to your website on your socials can go a really, really long way.

 Isotta Page  11:04

I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about your thoughts on working with digital communities and in person communities? How have you felt building community online and offline differs? And are there any significant overlaps that you could share with

 Haley Hnatuk  11:21

us early on, as somebody who's growing up in a town and going to the local schools, a lot of the community that you have as a really young person is your local offline community. It's the people that you're seeing every day, it's often very geographically focused, it's landlocked. When I think about my local community, I often think about volunteer work that I do with organizations like Special Olympics and the people that I see there. And then once I got to my teen years and started getting more involved online, I was introduced to this much more expansive, last geographically focused community that really allowed me to connect more deeply with the different subject matter that I was interested in. I've always been a person that inhabited multiple worlds, like the art world, and the film world and the tech world. So finding community online really allowed me to connect with other people that also were inhabiting multiple worlds. But in recent years, since even in the last year, I've been seeing a lot more blending of these two spaces. For example, at FastMail, we held a Philly Tech Week event a couple months ago, where we had people come into our office and eat breakfast with us, we had an avocado toast bar, it was wonderful. And we got to talk about doing the work that we do and values driven technology. But we found that a lot of people who came out to that event were people who were connected with staff members in various slack groups like code for Philly. So there's this lending of people who you're connecting with and meeting online, who are entering the offline communities of your life, whether that's the people who we hired from that event, and are now becoming our team members. Or that is just the people who we see irregularly at networking events, and continue to stay connected with that's so exciting

 Isotta Page  13:21

to be able to have that hybridity, again, which is so important now, especially as we're coming out of the pandemic. And it's really exciting to be able to have so much expansion in in both worlds and getting those to overlap. Again, I was wondering if you could share a little bit about the digital citizen podcast in terms of what's coming up for that show, and any thoughts or aspirations you have for the podcast moving forward?

 Haley Hnatuk  13:51

Yeah, so if you're interested in anything I had to say about digital citizenship. Today, we do have a second season of our podcast digital citizen, which will be coming out soon, we will be releasing and announcing more information about airdates sometime in the coming weeks. So if you want more information, you can follow FastMail on Twitter at FastMail. And you'll see all of that information there. But this season, we're really going to be focusing on a more expansive look on digital citizenship. So we have guests who are going to be coming on and talking about topics ranging from data breaches to zoom fatigue to how you can engage with art and museums online in a way that is positive and has a productive impact on the art world to HopeWorks which is a job training program located in Camden, New Jersey that trains young people in technology skills, it's going to be a really fun and exciting season and I can't wait for it to come out and for people to start listening. I would

Isotta Page  14:59

love to hear Hear about your thoughts on what you're most excited about that's happening in the creative and tech world. What are you most excited about? Are there any changes you're hoping to see, in the coming months or years?

Haley Hnatuk  15:15

I think for me as screen time is increasing around the world. And as people are spending more and more time on their personal devices, I'm really, really hoping to see an increase in focus on community building and digital citizenship and how we can have a positive impact online and having people really talk to young people from early ages about what they say online matters and what they do online matters and how they can create a positive impact in the online space instead of a negative one. I'm also personally really hoping to see an increase in focus on codifying data privacy into law and increasing our rights for privacy online. I think that is something that is personally really important to me, especially as more data is getting digitized. With the advent of IoT devices like Cloud pets and smart lightbulbs, as there is more and more data out in the world. I think an increased focus on how we can keep that data protected is so so so important. And yeah, I also just think an increased focus on how people can maintain positive online habits, and have a positive relationship with the tools and services that they're using online is so so important as well. You can find me on Instagram at Haley natak it's hard to spell so I will make sure that I give you all of those links as well. And you can also find me on Twitter at my own path.

Isotta Page  17:01

Thank you for listening to art is a podcast for artists. Please leave art is a podcast for artists a rating and review on Apple podcasts. It really helps others find us. Also I would love it if you took a moment to reflect on who in your life might also benefit from listening to this podcast. When you do please share artists and podcasts for artists with them. So we can continue to grow the show organically and brainstorm the future of the art world together. You can also support the work I do by subscribing wherever you listen, and by donating to the podcast. The link to do so is in the episode description. Okay, that's it for now. Thanks so much and see you next Wednesday.