This was the year Confab went virtual! Check out the smart talks, candid conversations, and funny nonsense we enjoyed.
Registered 2020 attendee? Go to the event site
Relationships with internal stakeholders are often the key to planning, creating, and maintaining strategic content that gets results. Being able to have productive conversations, even when the topic is tricky, is a skill every content professional can and should develop.
From having to tell a stakeholder their idea isn’t on-strategy, to critiquing a non-writer’s writing, to approaching a frank conversation about content that is offensive or insensitive, we’ll walk through an approach to planning for and facilitating tough talks with stakeholders.
Using real-world examples from 20 years in the fields of marketing, communications, content strategy, and user experience spanning a wide variety of industries and organizations, this session will give you a framework to:
Who should attend: This session is for anybody who would like to hone their skills for difficult conversations. We’ll even practice! Don’t worry. It won’t be scary … well maybe a little for us introverts, but we’ll get through it.
In the current political climate, it seems like we've nearly given up on productive discourse. However, there are design and content strategy choices we can make that encourage collaboration over conflict, even when dealing with hot-button issues.
In this session, we'll look at real-world examples of how the way we phrase a question or design an interaction can have a huge impact on the quality of conversation, and three rules you can use to change course from a fight to a constructive exchange.
You get the conversation you design for. This session will help you design for a better one. You’ll walk away with:
Who should attend: This will most directly apply to anyone who has to deal with comments sections, social media, or any other community-related aspects of content, but it will also be useful to anyone who has to get internal teams, clients, or management to align or collaborate on a project.
As content strategists, we’re often tasked with creating order from disorder. We categorize, compartmentalize and structure content so that each element fits within a specified set of rules. But what if we are “optimizing ourselves to death”? What if content needs a few degrees of uncertainty, and maybe even of idleness?
Drawing heavily from studies on the Default Mode Network and musings on the idle mind, this talk explores how we can allow for a more natural and nonlinear approach to defining, developing and enforcing a content strategy.
In this session, you'll learn:
Who should attend: Content strategists working with varied, diverse audiences, and content strategists who feel burned out or uncertain of how to measure the value of their work.
Writing for product means you never work alone. Ever. Your work is intertwined with the work of a UI designer, a researcher, a product manager, an engineer and a handful of people you haven’t met yet, but who are going to email you screenshots of your designs covered in their rewrites anyway, because hey, they had eight minutes spare and thought it’d be nice to help out.
Collaboration is deeply uncomfortable—it hurts. Especially if your happy place is headphones on, eye contact avoided. But if you can’t collaborate, you will miss out on how much better it makes your products—and how much fun it can be, too. Come and hear how one UX writer pushed past the pain and learned to collaborate, with solid, practical techniques.
In this session, you’ll learn:
Who should attend: This session will be most useful to content people who tend to be introverted souls, thrust into the loud, extroverted, bullish environment of software development.
A community of practice (CoP) doesn’t just happen. It takes planning, effort, and a lot of listening to build a supportive community. When LinkedIn’s team suddenly grew from one UX writer to seven, they had to come together quickly as a strong, connected team.
Luckily, their research team had completed an extensive study on professional communities. Using those findings—along with what they’ve learned from established CoP leaders—this group soon discovered what works, what doesn’t, and where to go from here.
This talk is a playbook for intentionally creating your community, rather than hoping it just comes together.
This session will teach you:
Who should attend: This will be helpful for managers, independent contributors, and anyone responsible for bringing teams together around a single discipline.
Musical theater creates unforgettable moments that drive stories home for audiences, because songwriters distill epic tales and staggering sagas into concise, memorable, and engaging forms. How might the story mechanics from Broadway and pop music be applied to shift narratives in our careers?
This talk will explore three tried-and-true story hacks found in musical theater that have been shifting narratives for generations. You’ll learn how to tell stories that establish your identity, unify disparate audiences, and protect the momentum of your journey (not to mention, your precious morale!) when facing set-backs.
In this talk, you’ll learn:
Who should attend: This will be useful to folks who are shifting career paths, or who may need help reframing the pivots in their journey. Also, anyone for whom persuasion, storytelling, and problem-framing are essential can add new techniques to their soft-skill toolbox.
People who write for a living are used to adapting their work to their audience. When you’re writing for user experience, incorporating user research and insights into your work takes this to the next level.
But how do you know when to A/B test and when to use qualitative methods? How can you translate research findings into content that helps users and your business? This talk will help you ask the right questions to start research, make use of existing findings, and communicate your decision rationale with data and confidence.
In this session, you’ll learn how to:
Who should attend: Content strategists, UX designers, and marketing writers will learn practical ways to gain content direction from research—even when you’re not running the research yourself.
Personalization is everywhere. You see it in those all-too-accurate Instagram ads all the way to banking and credit card recommendations. Services are getting smarter about what customers might actually want, but what does it mean to offer a recommendation in a highly sensitive moment? Or around personal information? And as content strategists stationed right between data and humans, what should our role become?
This session is grounded in the speaker’s experience of developing and executing content strategy around personalization in a healthcare startup.
In this session, you’ll learn:
Who should attend: This will be especially useful if you are working with personalization in highly regulated spaces, or at a company where you’re managing many stakeholders. This is for anyone looking for a framework to measure the risk/reward for personalization and a content strategy approach to help develop content that resonates.
As technologists, one of the hardest things to remember is that we’re not our users, and our assumptions can easily extend into our work. If we aren’t careful, we can easily end up designing products based on our assumptions and biases rather than insights from the actual audience. If we want to build better products, we need to include our target audience in the creation process and listen to their feedback every step of the way.
In this talk, we’ll hear what a team at The Ad Council learned from a project where they worked directly with teens experiencing various forms of bullying that directly informed the product’s goals, UX, and content.
In this session, you’ll learn:
Who should attend: This session will be helpful for attendees who either work in UX design or are interested in learning how UX principles can be applied to create better, more inclusive content.
When you write UI copy in English, knowing it will be translated into multiple languages, do you recognize your own cultural biases? How would you avoid getting lost in translation? What are the best practices in developing localization-friendly content?
Writing UI copy is not easy, and writing for users from all over the world is even more challenging. You want to be equipped with strong writing skills, user empathy, product thinking, and more importantly, a global mindset.
Drawing on her work experience in the U.S. and China, Awen will share her observations, best practices, learnings, and maybe some unique ideas.
In this talk, you’ll learn:
Who should attend: This session is for anyone who works on UX content and localization for global users, or who is interested in learning more about cultural bias and user empathy.
In a place far from home, how do asylum seekers find information about and understand how to navigate a complex government process of applying for asylum?
In this presentation, you’ll learn how one team conducted human-centered design research at asylum offices, how those insights illuminated areas of improvement for content strategy and service design, and how they redesigned content and services while balancing needs for ease of use and data security. Finally, you’ll see how content strategy work illuminated the need for overhauling the organization’s overall strategy.
This session will offer:
Who should attend: This session is for people who want to hear specific examples of design ethics in practice, and how thoughtful, intentional content strategy decisions make public services more accessible and inclusive to vulnerable communities.
This session will offer two perspectives on how the BBC has built a new UX Writing discipline—and how it fits into the existing design team and process. You’ll hear about creative leadership and strategic planning, as well as the importance of developing, protecting, and promoting craft.
Learn how these two presenters work in partnership with editorial teams to make sure the surrounding context of a design supports and complements the content. Sometimes they concentrate on designing the surrounding context. At other times they help teams optimize content for audiences and technologies.
In this session, you’ll learn how to:
Who should attend: This talk will offer some insight to leaders with responsibility for content teams, but most of the talk will focus on practical steps individual practitioners can take to create the right context to do meaningful and valuable work.
Is your content successful? What needs to be changed and why? This can feel like a shot in the dark, particularly when you’re not sure if you’re relying on the right metrics—or if those metrics are even reliable in the first place!
In this talk, you’ll learn how to build a measurement strategy for content including which metrics you can rely on, and which you can ignore.
You’ll walk away with:
Who should attend: This is for anyone who doesn’t feel confident that they are reporting on the right things or making decisions based on the right data.
Google changed user expectations about how search should work, and voice platforms like Alexa are changing mental models again. It’s time to modernize our search experiences to meet the user needs of today and tomorrow.
This session will discuss 8 key principles of modern search experiences. Then, building on the NPR’s own experience in re-platforming its cross-platform search service, this session will explore how to apply those principles to the web, mobile, voice platforms, and beyond.
You’ll learn:
Who should attend: This talk is ideal for designers, content strategists, and technologists of all stripes—anyone whose product could benefit from integrated search that actually works (which is perhaps most products!). This conversation will be most applicable to mid-career and senior folks who have the power to champion the importance of search within their organization.
In our jobs, we (rightfully) focus on meeting the needs of our constituents. But things fall apart when we are faced with logistical nightmares, bureaucracy, micromanagement, and miscommunication. So what do you do when you don't have an official project manager?
This session will focus on the basics: scheduling meetings, taking meeting notes, handling document versions, creating documentation, and writing effective emails. Anyone can do these things—but not everyone is doing them right. You'll learn:
Who should attend: This session will be ideal for people who need to do their own project management. Actual project managers might find the info a bit introductory.
Everyone knows that creating accessible content and digital experiences is the right thing to do—right for users, right for businesses, right for society. And yet. Accessibility is still mostly an afterthought, is generally limited to the bare-minimum effort, and is the first thing to get compressed or rushed or entirely cut when there’s budget or schedule pressure.
Why do we have such a hard time upholding our values? Creating truly accessible websites requires that we do more than just using semantic formatting and adding alt tags to images. If we want to build accessibility into our digital experiences from the ground up, we have to start by addressing the ableism embedded in our organizations and work culture.
In this talk, we’ll explore:
Who should attend: This will be most beneficial for those people who believe that this problem exists and want things to change, but have no idea how to make that happen. We also hope folks who are targets of ableism will feel more included and validated.
Once the pieces of your content strategy statement are in place, the day-to-day work really begins. Making your content strategy sustainable means making it part of people’s everyday work, keeping the principles and practices of content strategy on everyone’s mind.
Importantly, this isn’t top-down work, but work best done from the inside out. And it requires skills that most content strategists already have: listening, sharing, and fostering connections.
This session will include examples from organizations of various sizes and types, and participants will come away with ideas they can put to use immediately. You’ll learn how to:
Who should attend: This session will be especially useful for people who create or manage content for a large, content-rich organization. They will benefit by understanding how to use upfront content strategy work on an ongoing basis.
The Norwegian Environment Agency had embarked upon an ambitious project. In the redesign of their new website, a handful of communication staff set out to rewrite all of the content, with the reluctant help of over-worked subject matter experts (SMEs).
It didn’t go well. By the time they hired outside help, they had lost key staff due to burnout and resignation.
When the team from Netlife Design joined the project, their first task was to find a way for a small team with only a minimum of domain knowledge to jump straight into any topic and be productive from day one, creating content of high value before moving on to the next piece. Come and learn how they created a hybrid method based on their own Core Model and a Google Design Sprint, resulting in a platform that allowed SMEs and communication staff to collaborate and develop the best, most user-centric content prototype.
In this session, you’ll learn how to:
Who should attend: This session is for anyone from the communication side who has to work with subject matter experts in a project with multiple topics. It’s a good fit for web editors, content producers, and content designers—both in-house and from the agency side.
Chatbots can help your users quickly and easily get answers to their questions about your products or services. But how do you develop a chatbot that meets your audience’s expectations?
Using the USAGov chatbot as a case study, this session will cover how you can use the basics of user research and content design to launch your first chatbot or make iterations to an existing one. We’ll also explore ways to use quantitative and qualitative data to make iterative improvements to your bot over time.
Attendees will learn:
Who should attend: You’d most benefit from this session if you’ve been thinking about launching a chatbot at your organization, but aren’t sure where to start. You could also benefit from this session if you’ve very recently launched a chatbot and are trying to figure out how to make improvements to make it more user friendly and helpful.
In this presentation, national organizer Leslie Mac discusses why toolkits don’t work—and an alternative method for helping workgroups, clients, and communities make collective, impactful decisions together.
In this melding of a field organizer’s best practices and proven digital strategy methods, attendees will leave prepared to create containers that help move work along a ladder of engagement in a logical way.
In this session, you’ll learn:
Who should attend: Anyone who does work that employs toolkits to disseminate information will benefit from this session. They will learn a new way to engage people by creating containers that help their target audience decide what they want to do.
Working in large organizations where content isn't always recognized or understood as a critical business asset can feel like living in a war zone. Our content armies are often invisible, under-resourced, under-valued, and under-utilized. Turning the ship around can be a daunting and very slow process.
As the Australian Government’s former Head of Content (Digital Transformation Agency) and now principal content designer at Atlassian, Libby brings you tales and takeaways from the front line. She’ll share her experience of improving the visibility and value of content through community empowerment, executive buy-in, and using a “bottom up, top down” approach.
In this session, you’ll learn:
Who should attend: This session will be a good fit for those working in, or aiming to work in, content leadership roles in big companies, government, or large organizations.
How did a financial technology company get four business units and 10,000 employees to consolidate many content style guides into one powerful resource? This case study offers the answers and demonstrates the kind of thoughtful collaboration your content team can do to find allies, extend your influence, and improve content across your entire enterprise.
At the beginning of this story, the content designers working on TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mint were miles apart literally as well as figuratively. Using content strategy and a healthy dose of people skills, the teams came together to publish a style guide all Intuit content creators can call their own: contentdesign.intuit.com.
This session will explore:
Who should attend: Content strategists and content designers who are in companies with a variety of content creators (product, marketing, social, PR, etc.) can benefit from this collaborative, open approach to content standards and systems.
Understanding content strategy can be tricky—everyone seems to have a different definition of “strategist” when it comes to advertising job roles, and strategy descriptions can often feel abstract. Even when we have a good handle on it ourselves, explaining it to stakeholders can be difficult, especially when businesses expect a “content strategy” to be magical document that fixes everything overnight. If only!
Sure, we know that good content needs strategy behind it, from an organizational level right down to product level. But how do you create, explain, and implement a strategy in a way that brings others along for the journey?
In this session, you’ll learn:
Who should attend: This session is for anyone who sometimes feels overwhelmed having to explain what content strategy is but really wants to achieve a strong, impactful strategy for their business.
As component-based design becomes more commonplace, it brings with it the opportunity to adapt content to a modular framework. But incorporating information into a design system can be a process. Challenges like streamlining copy, template dependency, and image sourcing make content strategy critical: a successful, sustainable design system means a common understanding that content should be intentional and flexible.
In this session, we’ll demonstrate how working with a predefined set of pieces doesn’t have to limit expression—how breaking free from the idea of content as a fixed spot on a webpage helps express ideas in a fresh and lasting way.
In this session, you’ll learn:
Who should attend: This session will be a good fit for people who need an introduction to component-based design or are looking for new solutions to challenges they might not have considered, or for UX practitioners looking to better understand how content strategy, IA, and visual design interact through the lens of component-based design.
Tracy Playle (Pickle Jar Communications), Malaika Carpenter (SayCred Media Group), and Clay Delk (Shopify) talk through considerations for content strategy at every stage of a project.
Rebekah Baggs (ONWARD), Chris Corak (ONWARD), Aaron Baker (Harvard University), and Dana DiTomaso (Kick Point) have a conversation about the different ways they approach content measurement and success.
Scott Kubie (author, Writing for Designers), Beth Dunn (Hubspot), and Amanda Mohlenhoff (GetYourGuide), and Ariba Jahan (The Ad Council) have a conversation about how they each approach UX writing and content design in their work.
A frank conversation with Anna Pickard (Slack) about work and life during a pandemic.
A frank conversation with Eileen Webb (webmeadow) about work and life during a pandemic.
A frank conversation with Erika Hall (Mule Design) about work and life during a pandemic.
Enjoy live Q&A with Sarah Richards, author of Content Design.
Enjoy live Q&A with Michael Metts and Andy Welfle, authors of Writing Is Designing: Words and the User Experience.
Enjoy live Q&A with Gerry McGovern, author of World Wide Waste: How Digital Is Killing Our Planet—and What We Can Do About It.
Three brave contestants try their hand at a Nailed It-style competition, hosted by Leslie Mac.
Dogs! Cats! Chickens! Host Margot Bloomstein takes our judges on a virtual tour of the animals who live with Confabbers.
Have you always wanted to see Ann Handley tap dance in a tiny house? You’re in luck! Hosts Lisa Maria and Mat Marquis show us the many hidden talents in the Confab community.
Our host Ravi Jain invites Confabbers around the world to share their favorite morning and evening beverages in this unconventional happy hour.
If we know one thing about our beloved Confab crowd, it’s that y’all are a bunch of nerds. (We mean that in the best possible way.) Our host Ben Kjos put together this special trivia competition, with questions designed just for content strategists.
Our host Keri Maijala invites Confabbers from around the world to sing their hearts out. Special thanks to LinkedIn for sponsoring this beloved Confab tradition!
“When a professional conference leaves you feeling like maybe there is some hope for humanity… just wow. Beyond grateful to be part of this community.”
“All I can say is wow and well done. For this first-timer, you made the Confab online experience memorable, phenomenal, and perspective-enhancing.”
“Shout out to the Confab team for making a virtual conference feel as warm and inviting as it ever could. The last two days have been amazing and I’ve learned so much and met so many amazing people!”
“If there is anyone who knows how to put on a fabulous online conference it’s Confab.”
“Confab has been professionally and beautifully designed and obviously obsessively and carefully thought over. Thank you Team Confab!”
“I’m feeling so rejuvenated after going to virtual Confab! I met so many like-minded content people. Thanks to Brain Traffic for pulling this global group of experts together!”
“I was really impressed with how well Confab online was organized and executed. A ton of great speakers and valuable large/small group discussions. A+, two thumbs up, and five stars.”
“I’ve never been to a virtual conference, but Confab online was 100x better than any other conference I’ve been to before—polished and professional, yet completely human.”
“Confab has been incredible. It doesn’t feel adapted from an in-person conference, it feels like it was designed to be virtual.”
“The Confab team has done an incredible job. They’ve considered everything. This needs to serve as a model for other conferences.”
Sign up and be the first to know about all things Confab. We promise to email you only if it’s important.