This interview was originally recorded on [date], as part of Leoni Consulting Group’s All Things Marketing and Education Podcast.
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[Start of recorded material 00:00:01
[Start of recorded material 00:00:01]
Elana:
Hello, and welcome to All Things Marketing and Education. My name is Elana Leoni, and I've devoted my career to helping education brands build their brand awareness and engagement. Each week, I sit down with educators, EdTech entrepreneurs and experts in educational marketing and community building. All of them will share their successes and failures using social media, inbound marketing or content marketing, and community building. I'm excited to guide you on your journey to transform your marketing efforts into something that provides consistent value and ultimately improves the lives of your audience.
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of All Things Marketing and Education. This week, I am sitting down with Emily McDonnell. She is the VP of Trust and Safety at one of the biggest EdTech companies in the US, potentially even the world, who knows? She'll tell you how big they are, but at Remind. Today we'll be talking about all things safety in EdTech, and we'll get into all the nooks and crannies. Whether you're an EdTech startup navigating safety yourself, which is true for a lot of you who are one person, maybe, or you have a small team, this'll be a really good episode for you. Or if you're an educator or district leader trying to figure out is this product safe? Is this product secure for my students? This episode will also be helpful for you.
Back to Emily a little bit, I'm going to introduce her, and then we're going to get into all the things around cybersecurity and safety. Emily McDonnell is the Vice President of Trust and Safety at Remind, and she can tell you a bit more about Remind. But Remind is a communication platform that reaches students and families, and supports learning wherever it happens. They have lots of new exciting things that they'll be talking about. It is one of the largest free services in education. It's a school communication business that supports millions of students every year. Then they also have an online tutoring solution, as well.
Emily personally has been at Remind for over eight years, and I absolutely love her story because she was originally a preschool teacher before joining Remind's support team, and now she's heading up trust and safety and she's on Remind's executive team. I just love her story. We're going to talk a little bit about her journey as well for all of you educators just curious about careers outside of the classroom. Welcome Emily, I'm so excited to have you on.
Emily:
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Elana:
I mentioned your journey, which was inspiring to me, and I actually remembered connecting with a colleague Meredith, and for those of you that want to follow that, Meredith was from Soundtrap, and she heads customer service, but she also started as an educator. So I said, "Oh, I just met Emily, and she has a really cool story where she came as an educator as well, like you." For those of you listening that are curious about paths starting as an educator, I'll go ahead and put it in the show notes, Meredith's episode. But I'd just love to hear from you about your career journey because so many educators don't know where to go outside of the classroom or how to really follow their gut and their passion and what are those opportunities? When I heard your story, I got inspired, so why don't we start there?
Emily:
Yeah, well actually, I didn't know what the journey was going to be myself, either, when I started out. As you mentioned, I started my career in early childhood education. I was a preschool teacher in Madison, Wisconsin, and I had moved back home to the San Francisco Bay area, and I was looking for what was next. I knew I wanted to have an impact, hopefully a broad impact. I wanted to change the world, I wanted to help people, so I actually was looking for jobs in the non-profit sector. I thought joining a non-profit dedicated to a cause that resonated with me was going to be how I was going to have my next big opportunity.
While I was job searching, I went on a walk with a friend just chatting about what I was looking for. A couple weeks later, she reached back out to me. A friend of hers had posted a job on Remind's support team on Facebook asking if they knew anybody who would be interested. She reached out to me recommending this role that I initially dismissed, actually. I had not been considering tech, I didn't think I wanted to go anywhere near anything for-profit. This friend really encouraged me to take another look.
I go onto Remind.com, and the stats that I saw really blew me away. Back in 2014, we were a 30-person company. We already had 25% of the teachers in the US using Remind. You mentioned our size, our updated stats are we are currently used by 60% of all teachers in the US, so we have an active teacher in roughly 80% of all US schools, 90% of Title I schools. We deliver 11 billion messages annually. That was just to answer that, one of the largest services in education question.
It's been really exciting. I took this role, right? I took a chance on a seasonal contractor role. I had a three-month agreement to help answer teacher questions about how they create their classes, how they get their students and parents to join. Thankfully, I got to keep my job after that busy back-to-school season. I joined full time, joined the support team. I became a lead on the team, I became the head of support, and it was as the head of support that my trust and safety journey really began.
Now, with a more formal trust and safety program, we have dedicated teams that are set up to help in specific areas. Right now, we have an email alias for legal@Remind, privacy@Remind, security@Remind. Back then, we were hardly even using the words "trust and safety," and the only way you could get in touch with the company was to shoot an email off to contact@Remind, and you hit the support team queue and you come in as a ticket that needs to be answered. It doesn't matter if you're a parent asking about our privacy policy before your kid uses Remind, or if you're a district superintendent trying to vet our security before you're going to roll Remind out to your school; it came in through the support team.
Those were the questions that I really gravitated towards, probably partly because we didn't have the answers yet, and so they were really interesting. Those were the interesting tickets to get to start asking questions like, "Well, why did we draft our privacy policy this way, and how are we going to talk about that with our users?" After about a year and a half of really gravitating towards that, what kind of ended up being trust and safety work, I had "and customer privacy" smushed onto my head of support title, so I spent some time as the head of support and customer privacy, and then Remind, like we've talked about, was growing, and we were able to invest full time in a dedicated trust and safety role, so I became the head of trust and safety.
Then most recently, as you mentioned, about a year and a half ago, I joined the executive team as the vice president of trust and safety, which is just awesome in my very biased opinion, awesome for our business outcomes, having trust, safety, security, legal at the executive table. But I also think it sends a really important message and signal internally and externally that trust and safety is its entire own team that sits at that table that can help partner all the way across the organization. That's been my journey so far.
Elana:
I love how you say you just didn't know where you ended up and so much of us don't, but you followed your gut, you followed your passion and just led into it and said, "I like this. Let's see where it goes," and you had a company to support that.
Emily:
Absolutely.
Elana:
I would just clarify when you said in the beginning, "We didn't know. We didn't have a lot of privacy policies even created." Nobody did. When we were talking before the call, we were both kind of reminiscing about how EdTech has evolved so much when it becomes to data policy, privacy, and trust. It was the Wild Wild West. No one knew in the beginning. I remember going to EdSurge meetups, and I was attending panels, and Clever and the big EdTech companies were just trying to learn from each other at that point and all wanting to do what's right. But I would say everyone had different various takes on it.
It's been a contentious and also ambiguous thing for so long, and you've been at the head of it, so I'm excited to get into your findings and how it's evolved. More importantly, too, what should we be looking for from the educator perspective, too, because it gets a little tricky. But why don't we just start high level to start and talk about trust and safety? It's in your title, but a lot of people talk about it in a different way or two, so how do you begin to define it for yourself and for Remind?
Emily:
Yeah, I think about trust and safety as having three pillars that I always anchor on. First is safety, second is legal, and third is security.
For safety, that is to the extent that it's applicable, actually keeping your users physically safe. That could be how are you responding to content related to self-harm that makes its way onto your platform? For us, it can be how are we empowering our administrators who are using Remind at their school and district to help keep their communities as safe as possible in urgent situations? The role that we play there is making sure that they can get in touch with every single person that they need to reach real time in a way that the messages actually get through. It's about what content, what interactions, even what users you allow on your platform. We exist to support education. We're not just an open network, so that's how I think about safety.
Legal is generally compliance with applicable privacy laws and regulations. That one kind of speaks for itself.
Security is keeping users' data safe, safeguarding that data that you have, which should be a very top priority for every company. It's especially important when you're handling student data.
Then, trust for me is how folks feel and think about your company and your brand. This can result from the interactions that they have actually using your product; it could be their interactions with other users on the platform; it can be their interactions with any of your customer-facing teams. What are they seeing about you in the news? What are they seeing about you on social media? In a marketing sense, that trust can kind of boil down to brand loyalty a bit, I think.
Elana:
Yeah, and I'm glad I asked the question, because it is like a four part question, because there's so many aspects to trust and safety. For those of you that are like, oh those laws, I actually do want to dig into, we did talk to Susan Bearden from Project Unicorn, and we'll put that episode in our show notes. She has a lot of free resources that point around the legalities of the laws as well. I'm sure we'll touch a little bit about those in this podcast, too. We know that there's lots that is within trust and safety and you have a big job, and you are now responsible for the trust and safety for millions of people around the US, not to give you more pressure than you already have.
Emily:
Yeah, thank you.
Elana:
But I mean, for me, I'm just so biased. I love that we have a former educator that's doing that, because you can empathize and you have been in that position, and you know how critically important it is for students and for educators. Why don't we dig into tactical ways? So let's talk about building trust. What do you think the best ways are to build trust with users specifically in online communities?
Emily:
A motto that I hold is, "Say what you do and do what you say." I'm actually going to connect this back to education. Even as a preschool teacher, as any educator, what you're doing with your kiddos, with your students, is here's what's going to happen, and then that has to happen to build that trust and those expectations to get that buy-in, and so translating that to online communities, that can mean your policies that you're drafting. You need to have clear policies that say what data you're going to collect, how you're going to use it, making those policies accessible both so they can be found and they can be understood.
Then, you need to follow through. From the data perspective, so then don't use data in any other way than the way that you've said that you're going to use it. But also, I think an extension is delivering the experience for your users that they are expecting. They log into their Remind account to do something that is related generally to a student's educational outcomes. The interactions that they're expecting on our platform are those that would be appropriate in a school setting. That is a really important tone for us to set and uphold to make sure that when we have users using Remind, that the experience that they're getting is matching those expectations in terms of the content that they're seeing, the interactions they're having.
But then also, there's a reliability element there, so it's about site uptime, like not having outages. If you come to use a communication tool, we'd better be sending your messages and even interactions again, with our customer support team, so if you do have a question, are you getting reliably, timely, accurate, empathetic responses? Again, it's about, I think, "Say what you do and do what you say."
Elana:
Yeah, it almost reminds me of that THINK acronym that teachers put up in their classroom, and it's really just about that. It's like being kind. Is it true? It gives you a series of questions throughout it to really make sure that what you're posting is really aligned with what you say and believe. It sounds simple in EdTech, and in trust and safety, but we have seen data breaches, and things go wrong because of simply that. We see EdTech, and all companies really, it's not just education tech, like with the Illuminate Education breach, they said they were doing something, and maybe it's they just didn't double check, but do what you say, right?
Emily:
Exactly. Yes, exactly.
Elana:
Okay, we have some tactical ways of making sure that your users trust the product that they use. What you also said that was helpful is not only be transparent and have it accessible of here's what we do, all the things, but make it so people can understand. How many policies have you read that you're like, "I have no idea what this means. This feels like --"
Emily:
I think that people end up just not reading a lot of the policies because of the time that it would take to actually comb through and meaningfully understand it and ask the right questions or understand the nuances. I think a lot of people skip reading the policies honestly, to your point.
Elana:
Yeah, are there parts in the policy that you're like, please prioritize these sections if nothing else? Because it is long, it is arduous, and educators don't have time generally.
Emily:
Yes. Well, one thing that we've done, which I'm sure is not unique, but it would be super difficult for me to ever try to approach a privacy policy of a tool I'm considering without this is, I mean, they have to be pretty lengthy and robust for a legal, to serve its legal purpose, but for every single section we have, what is this saying in very accessible, like an eager high school student could totally read and understand the privacy policy. So, having those bubbling it up like, "What is this saying?" sections are something that I think is really important.
Elana:
Yes, agreed. Sometimes I have to reread and reread again and go, "What does this mean?" And I scratch my head and I just give up and I hate that. I love that that is a priority for your policy. You're now leading a big trust and safety initiative and program, and you're at the executive table making sure that it's embedded into conversations every day and product development. But if we're kind of taking a step back to younger companies that might be building out a trust and safety program, how do you even get started? It feels slightly overwhelming, right?
Emily:
Yeah, there is a very common principle called Safety by Design, where everything you're doing, you are keeping user safety first and foremost. I'll give you an example of how that came to be for us. Our founders had seen firsthand the impact of school-to-home communication on student wellbeing and outcomes, and so that's when they really set out to help teachers and students build those relationships. But they were embarking on this mission just when teachers were barely starting to become accessible via their personal cell phones outside of the classroom. While this was great for education outcomes and allowed for greater collaboration with parents and between teachers and students, it also presented a lot of safety and privacy issues, even labor issues, union conflict, like they were using their personal devices for work, and the whole just teachers giving their phone number and texting students practice was considered taboo.
Our whole company was founded to enable those relationships between the families and teachers and the schools to be built in a way that seeks to protect safety and privacy. For us, trust and safety, being a part of that school-to-home communication was our premise, and that was how we were able to keep that line of communication open. So, the Safety by Design principle that we've maintained that can be implemented across any young company getting started is, with every new feature that you're looking at, keep that same lens on what are the right controls, the right safeguards, the right oversight features and specifics. What are all those things that you need to have in place to launch any product experience feature?
Then, for our more formal program in terms of figuring out what to prioritize, because there's going to be so many problems, probably, or challenges or questions, you can't tackle everything at once, listen to your users and pay attention to what's happening out there that's scary for those stakeholders. For us, it's focusing on what parents and administrators are concerned about. Some of our security features, like requiring two-factor confirmation codes for login, even some of the internal employee trainings we routinely have that are raising awareness about phishing, social engineering, those focuses have come out of seeing incidents like credential stuffing or ransomware attacks happening to school districts and EdTech companies in our own backyard, and just wanting to make sure that we can do better than that.
One other piece of advice for any young companies getting started, you don't have to bring some of the most expensive resources in house like legal counsel or a security team. You don't have to build that out internally. There are some amazing individuals and organizations out there that will take you on as one of their portfolio of clients, and you can have, therefore, really solid expertise but not at full-time costs. Those are some tips.
Elana:
I know that was a really hard question, because that could be an hour in itself of here are all the things we need to do. But what I loved you said is some of your answer insinuated that it's not just your role to do trust and safety. For any feature that's being developed, let's come up with a series of questions or principles guided by the resources you talked about, and let's make sure it meets those criteria and that we're doing our best to anticipate different scenarios, and you're not going to be able to anticipate them all, because I'm sure that every day, like, "Oh that's new, that's new." It feels like you're just maybe one step ahead at times. But I love the idea of an entire organization thinking about the safety and trust of its users, so it's not just one person.
For those of you that know me and know all the other things I talk about on these podcasts, it's the same for social media. Social media shouldn't be delegated to one person, because you have to listen to your users, and your users are generally talking about you, with you, for you on social media, and then communities as well. If you're building a robust online community, it's not just your community manager's job to keep it engaged and provide value around that. I loved that and I went down a little bit of memory lane, because our users know that I spent eight years at the George Lucas Educational Foundation at Edutopia, and I remember we did a "Schools That Work" where we covered a school that we thought could provide evidence-based data to show what they're doing truly works, and it could be replicated in any school environment.
We went to a school called Yes Prep in Houston. It was a charter-based school, and it was one of their policies that their teachers would give out their cell phone numbers to their kids. It was like 2004 or 2005, and that was back in the day where it was a Wild, Wild West. We had cell phones, but we weren't sure of that balance, and there was all sorts of legal things, but I remember talking about that in that coverage and wow, we've never gotten so many comments about you shouldn't do that, and then it was so polarized because we just didn't have guidance. Then, some ed tool like Remind came along and now we have a couple of other tools, too, but it's just been a different world. It's completely transformed education, so I was just kind of in memory lane while you were talking.
Emily:
Yeah, it's actually really funny. We get a lot of one star reviews in the app store from students saying, "Now my parents actually know what my homework is," which is just really funny to see even from students taking the time to leave an app store review, because we are connecting to home in the classroom, which is not something I had growing up. It was a note in the backpack, and a note in the backpack is problematic in the first place, it's probably going to get lost or crumpled and never delivered. Even if it does make it home, maybe it makes it to one parent's house but not the other if there's two households. Yeah, we've come a long way.
Elana:
You can also connect the broader caring community, which I love. I love those stories when I hear about Remind and other messaging tools, it's sometimes not just the parent, maybe it's an aunt or an uncle or a grandparent. They're all being connected if they want to, and I think that's powerful, and it just made me chuckle because I was the one that always lost all of the flyers and the things. I didn't even put them in my backpack as a kid. It was just messy and I don't know, so they physically clipped them to me with a bobby pin. That was like, "All right, I get it."
Emily:
Yeah.
Elana:
All right, so have some tips and tricks around how to build a trust and safety program. That is probably just the tip of the iceberg, but I do believe it has to start foundationally with everyone saying this is a commitment. How do we get started? And then I loved your tip about don't feel like you need to bring it all in house when you're starting. There's experts around there so you can not jump all in, but at least have experts at the helm that you can trust and get advice from.
Maybe let's put our educator hat on and our education leader hat on, and they are forced every year and throughout the year to evaluate tools that come their way. We have to trust that the decisions that they make are the safest for the kids, and that they've done their due diligence, and they've looked at the policies, and they are convinced that they have proper data, cyber security, all of the policies in place that help everyone feel safe. How do they begin to navigate this process? What are specific attributes that they should look for? I know this is a bigger question too, but maybe a couple of them that you're like, if it says this, run away, if it says this --
Emily:
Yeah, I don't know. If they don't have a privacy policy, run away, but no, I'll give you some things that you should look for. This is my personal opinion, but what I think what's most commonly looked for, I actually think is pretty seriously insufficient, because what a lot of folks anchor on are really, to me, just table stakes compliance. What you're seeing are folks asking questions about "Are you compliant with these state and federal privacy laws?" And yeah, you do have to be compliant, but a lot of those laws are actually pretty out of date and not robust enough to truly assess if that company is legitimately protecting user data in the safest possible way.
I would say if you are an administrator or a teacher considering a tool for your school or district or classroom, instead of focusing on the really common privacy acronyms, COPPA, FERPA, GDPR, or CCPA, they go on. If you can spare a minute, take a look at the company's actual security practices. I know that not everybody's going to have the knowledge or the resources to ask much beyond checking those legal requirements boxes. I would say that I think the EdTech community should be stepping up and taking ownership of being transparent about security practices, because it can be so hard for somebody considering a tool to know what to ask.
One thing you can look for is, I think there should be an expectation of a security certification by an external third party. That could be ISO, which is the International Standards Organization, as an example of one. What happens with these is you have an auditor come in and take a look at your data governance practices and certify every single year that your policies provide adequate protection and that you're actually implementing those policies. There are shockingly few EdTech companies that are ISO certified. Remind is one. But that should be a pretty easy thing to look at if you are Googling the name of the company and ISO, that's one you can look for.
Then there's some other visible indicators of how seriously the organization takes privacy and security. They should have a trust and safety page or a security center, something like that where they should be highlighting things like have they signed the student data privacy pledge? What other commitments have they made? Are they on the early side of announcing compliance with new state legislation, like the age appropriate design code here in California? And then even if you just don't have time to get past some of those legal acronyms, are they just self-claiming compliance or can they actually cite a third party that has vetted those?
For example, iKeepSafe is one of several organizations that will actually certify that yes, you are COPPA compliant. They came in, they looked under the hood, and everything checks out, and you really won't put the district out of FERPA compliance. Any of those kind of respected third-party certifications, external commitments, signed pledges, they should all be on one webpage, so any parent should be able to pull that up and then reach out. The company should be responsive and should answer your questions. If you have a question, it's valid, so ask if you need to.
Elana:
I knew in my gut that people could say they're certified this and that, and it kind of reminds me of any marketing, yes, we do this, but it just really hit home to me that if they're not getting certified from another party that has gone under the hood, like you said, that's a big takeaway. That also makes me a little scared that not a lot of people do that, too. That is a really good takeaway because you can trust things like iKeepSafe, and what was the other one? ISO?
Emily:
Yeah, ISO, the International Standards Organization.
Elana:
That's a big takeaway, and that's helpful for even me when I navigate all these EdTech websites that if they say it and they don't have third party kind of oversight and stamp of approval, just pause for a second.
Emily:
Yeah.
Elana:
Interesting. Gosh, so interesting. I feel like I'm a student in this, because every day it changes, too, and you're probably following all the laws and trying to say, "Okay, how can we protect against this thing we didn't foresee," which makes it interesting. It kind of feels like I'm in social media where the algorithms change every day. You're in trust and safety where you have new bots and new things every day, new spam.
Emily:
That's right.
Elana:
Given that, we talked a little bit and reminisced about where it was in the beginning, where it was not a lot of policies, not a lot of regulation, not a lot of guidance from educators who were giving out cell phones and all the things. But where do you see it going in the future with EdTech? I know you don't have a crystal ball, you're not a fortuneteller, but you've been at this for a very long time and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on maybe some key trends that you might see continuing.
Emily:
Yeah, well, I will give you an optimistic answer and tell you where I would like to see it going more. In trust and safety, unfortunately, you talk a lot about the bad stuff, the scary stuff, the risks. I think I would like to see us moving more in the direction of supporting and encouraging positive interactions. This is actually starting to happen a bit, for example, in the gaming community. There has been some research and studies run where they don't necessarily prohibit profanity. You can curse during your zombie game if that's how you were interacting with the game, but before you say something that has AI-detected negative sentiment, they've started delivering these nudges that check the user on their tone and they're like, "Hey, this could be perceived that way. Do you still want to send it?" You can still send it. But there's been studies that show that those users, that percent of users that were trending toward disruptive behavior that get those nudges, then end up becoming some of the most super users in terms of answering questions in the forum or congratulating teammates.
Tying that back to education, we worry a lot about keeping the experience in par with what would be appropriate in a school setting. That's mitigating a lot of the stuff that shouldn't be happening in that realm, but how are we encouraging students to answer questions from other students? How are we teaching digital citizenship? A lot of students are beginning to use online tools when they're in the classroom, and so how can we be using that space to really help them understand what's appropriate and encouraging those positive behaviors? Trust and safety can be really reactive, and so thinking more proactively around how we can promote those really positive behaviors and interactions, I hope we can get there.
Elana:
Yeah, it reminded me, I love that because we know that that works in education, and I love that it kind of parallels that if you want to be punitive and say "Don't, don't, don't," one, you're being reactive but you're not really rewarding the positive stuff and uplifting that. But then I love the example of, "Hey, just pause for a second. This tone might be considered X." I think it just reminds people that they're... Pause with emotions first of all, but they're not alone, and not in a weird... In social media, I find the people that act out the most is that they just want to be heard, and they don't feel like anyone's listening. Once I kind of reach out to them in a caring way, and it's not in an AI way or in a systemized way, but just saying, "Hey, how are you? What's going on here? We're here, by the way, and our guidelines don't allow this, but tell us what's going on here." As soon as they realize that someone's listening, they'll change their tone.
Emily:
Exactly.
Elana:
And especially in education, we don't deal with the student side, but on the educator side, they just want to be heard. In this challenging moment in education, I don't blame them. I loved your example around that.
Your role is incredibly challenging, it's changing all the time. I'm wondering how do you get the support you need in your role with all the challenges thrown at you? Where do you go for professional development, or are you able to have a support community of like-minded individuals like yourself that you can go, "Hey man, this just happened. How do we deal with this?" And do you feel like the challenges in EdTech are unique to data and privacy? Would it be considered helpful to have a PLN just in EdTech folk like you?
Emily:
Right, really good question. My network, my professional network grew out of heads of support at various companies coming together. For me, that was in person in San Francisco, we would have lunch monthly in person just rotating between the different offices, because generally at the startups where we were, you're the only head of support at your company, and there's nobody else in your company that has the same role as you, and so maybe you can get some internal support, but we were really very collaboratively working on, how have you set up your Zendesk queues? Have you implemented phone support? Things like that. And so when trust and safety really started being talked about and a more common discussion point, a lot of those trust and safety folks did come from support, and so we've been able to maintain those types of networks where we come together every so often and just chat about what we're seeing.
In terms of similarities between EdTech and other sectors, I think there's two different similarities I'll draw. One is with other networks that have some degree of professional expectation. A really helpful other kind of adjacent sphere is, for example LinkedIn, right? You're going there for a professional experience, and that's super different than Twitter, gaming, dating, which is pretty purely social. Any collaboration between any company's EdTech or professional associations that have some higher bar of community standards and what is acceptable conduct, it's just less casual. You can really collaborate on community guidelines if you're anywhere in that type of sphere. Then in terms of data, I would say anybody that has really highly regulated data, so that's health data, data of children, financial data, anything like that, those can also have really similar conversations.
Elana:
Interesting. While you were talking, I was thinking about just, I love educators. I'm on social media all the time, and sometimes they're on Twitter or TikTok or some of the more social platforms, but in general I can count on my hand how many educators have gone out of line on those platforms, because we all use it in such a professional, selfless, authentic way. That's what brought me to education and specifically into social media. But it just reminded me, I was like, "Gosh, we're lucky to work in this." Not that there're not problems when you get into students and teachers and things like that, but I love that we all hold ourselves to a professional standard and that we go in with the expectation of learning, and learning from each other and being that lifelong learner, so a little bit of a side note, but when you were talking about... I just can't even imagine what the head of Tinder trust and safety would be like, what their job would be like. Ouch.
Emily:
Yeah, and actually one other distinction between different types of trust and safety teams, there's online interactions and so that's everybody that we've been talking about, and then there's in-person interactions. Think of all the social media, gaming, education, online platforms, and then Airbnb where an individual is showing up at someone's house. That has a whole possibility for in-person interactions, so in terms of where EdTech can collaborate, it's a lot of those online communities. Although it is a little different because we are created to support an existing real-life ecosystem, so we can't have disruptive behavior on Remind and be, like, kick the student off the platform, like them not getting their math homework isn't going to help anybody. EdTech is a little special in that regard.
Elana:
Very good point, very good point. Given that you came from education and we are as always in a very challenging moment in education. We're out of a pandemic, but not really. There's a lot of unfinished learning reports coming out. There's a lot of pressure on educators, there's a lot of educator turnover, there's a lot of superintendent turnover. I don't mean to be the negative Nelly, but I also like to call it like I see it in K-12 education, and educators are burned out. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts or parting something for them as they listen and go along with their day?
Emily:
Yeah, I mean, for me personally, and I can speak for Remind, we understand and we're here for them. What I mean is we're reaching out to districts, we want to talk about how our tutoring solution or how our communication platform can have an impact for them, and we're not able to get ahold of the administrators because they are literally teaching in the classroom because of teaching staffing shortages. We get it, we're here to help.
Then what I will say for anybody listening who, whether or not you are an educator, if you know an educator, reach out and check on them and thank them. I don't know that it's understood well enough how hard it is right now on schools and districts and everybody working to support them, so just if you are in any position to help in any way, please do so.
Elana:
Yeah, I just wrote a newsletter, and that was kind of the same thing. It's just like, let's try to figure out even the small ways in a consistent way to support educators. Don't blame, don't ever attack, let's come together, and even if it's a small action, small consistent things add up, and we need to support our educators as much as possible, including our leaders as well. They're under a lot of pressure.
We like to ask all of our guests this one last closing question, and it's fun. I get to learn a whole lot of things of reading and habits and whatnot, but especially in EdTech and especially in your job, you must have challenging days where you're like, "I just want to go home. Don't talk to me. I am completely drained." How do you go back the next day to work and feel recharged? What refuels you?
Emily:
Yeah, that's a good question. This is not a piece of advice I can go out and give somebody to just implement in their life, but I have a three-year-old daughter, and so when I log off, I'm truly off, and I step into her world of pretend and make-believe where she doesn't know that there's a pandemic going on and that things are different and that things are scary. Spending time with the little person whose world I'm trying to make better for the future is something that's really important to me, and I'm really lucky to be able to do. I guess I would kind of extend that more broadly to family time or just connecting with anyone that you care about. That's what gives me the energy to keep doing this work.
Elana:
Yes, last weekend, my niece turned four years old, and she had a tiger-themed party, and for the entire day our entire family just pretended we were tigers. I can't tell you how much Zen that gave us, just to be in this world of make-believe and do tigers eat cake? It was just fun. Thank you for reminding me about the power of it. I always come back replenished, but if somebody would've asked me that question, I don't know if I would've said that in that way.
Emily:
Yeah.
Elana:
Thank you. Well, thank you so much for coming on this podcast, Emily, and sharing your expertise in everything you do every day to keep educators and students safe. I don't envy your job because you are doing so much, but I appreciate you being transparent on just what are the challenges, where do you hope it goes? I hope educators that are listening can say, "Gosh, I never thought about looking about that," or "Here's ways I can navigate that privacy policy," and feel a little bit more comfortable and confident around it all and know that we're all still figuring it out, but you should attract to companies that are leading the discussions and helping navigate it for you, being thought leaders, going to panels, talking about it. I appreciate that so much from you, Emily, and your leadership here. How can people get in touch with you? Are there any specific resources you'd like to share? We will put them all in the show notes, as well.
Emily:
Yeah, so my email is just emily@remind.com, so that would probably be the easiest. Emily McDonnell on LinkedIn. But you can shoot me an email and we can figure out a way to connect, and then I can get you some resources around how Remind thinks about trust and safety, just as examples for other companies out there looking to build something similar or for anybody considering taking a look at everything that we can offer. Yeah, thanks for having me.
Elana:
That would be really helpful. Okay, well thank you all for joining us, and next week we'll be on as well with other experts in community building, social media, and then also just educators in the field as well. But for this episode, you can access their show notes at leoniconsultinggroup.com/36. We will be talking about the most salient points that Emily brought up, too, so a little bit of Cliffs Notes, but then all the resources as well, which will be really helpful for an episode like this. We will see you all next time on All Things Marketing and Education, and thank you so much. Take care, everyone.
Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode. If you liked what you heard and want to dive deeper, you can visit leoniconsultinggroup.com/podcasts for all show notes, links, and freebies mentioned in each episode. And we always love friends, so please connect with us on Twitter at @leonigroup. If you enjoyed today's show, go ahead and click the subscribe button to be the first one notified when our next episode is released. We'll see you next week on All Things Marketing and Education.
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Elana Leoni, Host
Elana Leoni has dedicated the majority of her career to improving K-12 education. Prior to founding LCG, she spent eight years leading the marketing and community strategy for the George Lucas Educational Foundation, where she grew Edutopia’s social media presence exponentially to reach over 20 million education change-makers every month.
Emily McDonnell, Guest
Emily McDonnell serves as Vice President of Trust & Safety at Remind, a content and collaboration software company that they joined in 2014. Emily is part of the Safety team within the Operations Department. They graduated from Pomona College in 2009 with a BA in Spanish. Their career path includes editorial work at Eindhoven News, teaching Spanish at the Creative Learning Preschool in Madison, Wisconsin, and several organizations in the non-profit sector.
About All Things Marketing and Education
What if marketing was judged solely by the level of value it brings to its audience? Welcome to All Things Marketing and Education, a podcast that lives at the intersection of marketing and you guessed it, education. Each week, Elana Leoni, CEO of Leoni Consulting Group, highlights innovative social media marketing, community-building, and content marketing strategies that can significantly increase brand awareness, engagement, and revenue.
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