[Podcast] 'Grow For Good™' S02 E8: Making Images Accessible with Scribely's Caroline Desrosiers

On this episode of the Grow For Good™ podcast, Jed sits down with Scribely's Founder & CEO, Caroline Desrosiers.

Show Notes:

• Scribely
• Scribely's Vitiligo Series
• Scribely on Instagram
• Caroline on LinkedIn
• Web Developer Chrome Extension

If you have any questions or suggestions for future guests, send an email to growforgood@moreycreative.com.

Caroline Desrosiers [Snippet]: So, if we look at the statistics for the number of people that have disabilities, it's actually one out of five individuals in the world that identifies as having a disability. So, this is a very large population size that we're talking about.

Intro [Voiceover]: It's an age-old question. Can you do well by doing good? Welcome to the Grow For Good™ podcast, where we speak with leaders who strive to make a positive impact on the world. Here's the host of the Grow For Good™ podcast, Jed Morey.

Jed Morey: We first met Caroline Desrosiers through our sister initiative InclusionHub, an online resource designed to help organizations in their digital inclusion and accessibility journeys. In the article she writes about the importance of descriptive alt text on website images not just for users but the website owners as well.

Caroline is an experienced digital marketer with a deep understanding of web accessibility, something near and dear to our hearts. She is soft spoken and deliberate. An outdoor enthusiast with an artist’s appreciation of the visual world and a desire to bring these visions to life for blind and low vision internet users.

And like most purpose driven entrepreneurs she has the ability to stay focused on growing her business and the greater good that growth affords. In the complex world of digital inclusion, hers seems like a simple solution on the surface but it’s harder to execute than it seems and is often overlooked. And as you’ll hear, Caroline’s approach to alt text is not just powerful, it can sometimes be beautiful.

Here’s my conversation with CEO and founder of Scribely, Caroline Desrosiers.

JM: All right. Welcome back to Grow For Good™. I'm your host, Jed Morey, CEO of Morey Creative Studios and executive producer of social justice podcast, News Beat. Now in my day job at Morey Creative, one of the most important initiatives for us is web accessibility and digital inclusion. So, my guest today is massively important in our world, and I'm so happy to introduce you to Caroline Desrosiers, founder of Scribely. Thank you so much for coming to the show.

CD: Thank you for having me. Yeah. I love this topic, “grow for good.” That's what we're all about here at Scribely. So, looking forward to this conversation.

JM: I dig it. All right. So, I'm going to frame this in a way that might seem a little reductive at first, but it kind of speaks to the importance of what you're doing. We introduced the concept of alt text in the introduction, and on the surface, it seems like a really kind of straightforward thing. Yet, there's a mastery of it that we're going to unpack along the way, along with a really layered rationale behind the importance of it. But I want to start with the basics. Can you tell us exactly what is alt text and why it's important?

CD: Sure, yeah. That's a really good way to think about it. There's a simple definition and then actually when you kind of start to pull things apart, there's a lot more that goes into it. So, the simple definition of alt text is a description within HTML code that helps individuals using text to speech or screen reader technology extract information from images, and actually hear the description of images read out loud to them.

JM: Okay, perfect. For the uninitiated, why is it important?

CD: So, the reason why alt text is important is because if alt text is not included for the digital images on a website, a person's screen reader will actually just skip over that image. So, if alt text is not included, there's this massive amount of visual information that's just out of reach for people with visual disabilities.

So, we really need to make sure that it's included in. Actually just to throw a statistic out there, according to WebAIM, 66% of website homepages are missing alt text. So, this is a huge problem on the web that we still need to solve and businesses can make a huge difference just by including this alt text.

JM: So, forget about missing alt text for a second. If there’s let's say an image that somebody uses mistakenly or inappropriately or it’s just lazy development, and they leave the existing description in there, but it might be a file number, something like impossible for a screen reader to read—does the screen reader always read out what's there? Because I imagine that can create like almost a chaotic experience.

CD: Right? Yeah, exactly. Basically, anything that's populated within that tag, the screen reader will read out loud to the user. So, we actually see that happen all the time where the alt text is actually a file name as you said, or just the word “image.” Something we see a lot is just the title of a blog for instance, or the title of a section that's being put in as the alt text, which of course that doesn't provide a good visual description for people with disabilities.

JM: And we're going to do an experiment later on to really show people exactly what an amazing visual description sounds like. So, let's talk about how you got into this because your personal journey is interesting and then you founded this company at the beginning of the year, and we'll talk about the timing of that, but just give us a little bit of an idea of your background and how you happened upon this?

CD: Yeah. So, before Scribely, I worked for an academic publisher that published textbooks for K-12 higher education students and also professional resources for educators. And in that role, I was focusing specifically on distributing the actual eBook files out into the online retail marketplace to vendors like Amazon, Apple, Google Play—any place where people buy eBooks. I was looking after that distribution network and as the years went by, I started to get more involved with how those eBooks were actually created at the pre-production stage. And as I looked more and more into it, I discovered there are so many accessibility challenges when it comes to creating eBooks.

And one of the ones that was particularly frustrating was just not having alt text for images within these textbooks. And the solution was to actually go out and try to find a vendor that can do this work because it's a very specialized task, and we were really having trouble finding a vendor that could deliver that high quality image description, which was so critical for students that were trying to learn a new subject to have these images described properly. So that was a real accessibility barrier to education that just personally frustrated me. And I've always been this future thinker type that is focused on actually taking action and making change.

And so, I decided this is kind of my opportunity. Here's a window here where, you know, I have the experience in the background in publishing and this knowledge of an accessibility barrier and why not me? Why don't I just try to take on this problem and try to solve it.

JM: So, it's such a common theme and the entrepreneurs that we interview on the show, it's the, “So I was doing this thing and then this other thing was bugging me and I saw the opportunity and then said, why not me?” But what separates you is that “why not me?” It was asking that question and then doing it. So, first of all, I applaud you for that, but let's follow that up then and talk about what it is that Scribely does. So, when somebody hires you, they're hiring you to do what, and what does a typical engagement look like?

CD: Right, exactly. So, if we break it down to the simplest way to explain it. Basically, we have a team of writers that describes images to people who cannot see them. So, they are experts in putting themselves in another person's shoes who cannot see an image and trying to describe it in a way that really gets the critical message across. So, they're trained to think about, you know, “How do we break down an image into its parts. Which parts are the most important to describe and what's the essential message that I'm trying to get across here?”

JM: So, is it that you do this—is the unique value proposition or that you do it in this way? Do you have a lot of competitors in this space? Or is it your process that's kind of unique?

CD: We're unique in the sense that we focus exclusively on writing alt text. A lot of our competitors are companies that are in publishing services where they're providing a variety of publishing services, alt text being one of them, but they're not necessarily focused on the writing aspect of it and actually getting it right. So, it felt like for me that there needed to be a dedicated vendor out there that was focusing exclusively on writing alt text, because it's essentially creating content and working with content providers to add to their content that which is missing. So, it felt like we were just missing this in accessibility services and publishing services in general.

JM: Now, when you come into an engagement, are you agnostic in terms of CMS, or do you care what the platform is built in? Is there a learning curve ever that somebody has a proprietary CMS that you need to go learn it or is it you can fly in on pretty much any backend and make it happen?

CD: I'd say that we intentionally remove ourselves from the technical aspects of the content, in the sense that that's really up to the content creator. They have designed a way to deliver their content in a way that works for them. We're simply filling in the gaps of their content where there's information missing.

JM: But you can do this on a WordPress, you could do this on a Joomla, Drupal. It doesn't make a difference, you can fly in and make it happen.

CD: Absolutely. Yeah. So, it can be as simple as, you know, just adding image descriptions to a manuscript in word, or it can be more complex, actually working with the tech team to add these image descriptions into the backend of their products.

JM: Oh, so you can even do this offline, you could do this in the original documents that they're providing the text in—if it's a manuscript, or you could actually go to a live site environment and do it there–whatever it is you're coming in and you're making the changes.

CD: Absolutely. Yeah. Especially in the publishing world. Everything sort of begins at the manuscript stage and we're at the point where publishers are selecting images. We can come in and work with their editorial team to add in those image descriptions. And then sometimes, you know, in other cases, it comes later when a business is designing their website for instance, and they have these images that they're loading in and they need to add in alt text into their HTML code. And so that's a little bit of a different process where we're working with them at that stage.

JM: So, Caroline, you recently wrote an article for Morey Creative’s sister initiative InclusionHub, where you also write about the business use case for alt text generally. And many of our listeners are either in business or they're aspiring entrepreneurs listening for tips on how to do better as a business. And a lot of people are, as you know, growing familiar with accessibility, they're learning about it, they're desirous of making certain changes but don't necessarily understand the business benefits for doing that. Can you give a few examples of the business case for alt text just beyond even the moral imperative for it?

CD: Sure. So, if we look at the statistics for the number of people that have disabilities, it's actually one out of five individuals in the world that identifies as having a disability. So, this is a very large population size that we're talking about. And also if you take into account the network of family and friends that kind of witnesses firsthand the daily challenges of people with disabilities, just trying to go through their daily lives. This represents a massive population that is estimated to be about 13 trillion in annual disposable income. And that's a pretty big number and a pretty big market. This population really wants to see businesses making their products and services more accessible to people with disabilities. So aside from just the ethical benefits of just doing this work and doing change for good, there's also a business benefit in just showing how your business is helping people with disabilities.

JM: Plus it’s market share. It seems like it's also market share, right? I mean, if you're—you could unwittingly exclude, you know, based on the numbers that you're putting out there and enormous share of the market, if you make it frustrating for people to look at your site.

CD: Right. Absolutely. It's impossible to ignore this large group of people that wants to see accessible experiences. And also, it's just, I think that a lot of businesses find that when they start to focus on the accessibility of their products, the quality improves for everyone overall, the quality of that experience. And it just becomes, you know, easier to use products in general. There are so many benefits that are not just for people with disabilities they're for everyone.

JM: That is such an excellent point. Our president, Jon Sasala talks about how it isn't just for that audience like you said—if you can think about great design, great architecture, it generally has a benefit well beyond the original intent, it benefits everybody, even though you're doing it for just that one audience.

And oftentimes I'll watch him do an analysis of a site. And, you know, he's trained to—he puts a screen reader on he's sighted, and he has no auditory issues, but he navigates sites with a screen reader and to see what the experience is like. And if any listeners out there haven't done that, it's hard. If a site isn't built correctly, or, it can be a really thoughtful experience and that's alt text. I mean, that is, you know, that's a huge piece of the puzzle. There's a lot more to it, but I feel like you're representing this piece that so many people take for granted. I'll just put the name of an image in there and I'll kind of move on. So, I think it's pretty big what you're doing.

CD: Yeah. Actually, and I'll add to that because I love to simulate this experience, I think it just helps people understand. A tool that I use quite often is a Chrome extension called Web Developer. And if you download that extension and you turn on display alt attributes, instead of images, you can actually move through any page on the web and look at what that experience is like trying to navigate without images and just using the alt text alone. So that's something that I really encourage people to do if they want to understand how people with a visual disability would actually navigate their website.

JM: I love it. I want to move a little bit into kind of the art of what you do and how you do it. I read another feature article on you and there was a great section that said, “describe don't interpret.” I thought that was such a good way to put it. So, in the context of today's very fraught online world, I thought this was kind of a small, but powerful thing to say. Can you explain what you mean by that?

CD: Yeah. It's definitely an important consideration that we take when we write alt text, because we want to leave our personal interpretation of images out of the equation as much as possible and really just describe the visual details that we can see in front of us. Just to simulate the same experience that someone who is sighted can actually experience when they're looking at that image. So, we try to do our best, not to interpret and rather to describe the visual details.

JM: So, for listeners, try and imagine you have this job and you have an image of protestors in front of the Capitol about to storm the Capitol. There are a few different ways you can go with that. Imagine forcing yourself to strip your own bias out of describing what exactly is going on in that photo, and then extrapolate that over millions and millions of websites doing it that way. That's why I kind of consider what you do a little bit of an art as well, to take yourself out of that equation. That has to be, I mean, you mentioned training before, but that's got to be a big part of the training. Yeah.

CD: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just to, you know, you constantly have to ask yourself when you're writing alt text, “Have I communicated all of the visual details that are relevant to this image and how am I doing that?” If I were to just try to use my image description alone, would I be able to visualize the same image that I'm trying to describe? So that's kind of the last step that we take is, “Is my alt text complete? Can I visualize the same image?”

JM: So just staying on the art theme for a second and I'm sorry that part of the extension of doing this host role is that you have to dig and do some research and it's evident that in researching you that the outdoors is really important to you it plays a big role in your life. So, I was wondering if you think there's some connection between your passion for nature and the desire to bring that visual stimulation to life for blind and low vision people?

CD: That's such an interesting question. Yes. I live up in Northern California, so there are so many different things to do outdoors—everything from, you know, going out to the coast or going to the mountains and California has so much to offer. And I also love to backpack. So, I’m a big hiker.

And I think that that does play a role because for me, the reason why I like to go backpacking and get out into nature is to kind of reset and experience something just apart from, you know, technology and all of the busyness of daily life and just take in my surroundings and, you know, have kind of a quiet moment. That's just observing. So, I think that it's very astute of you to pick that out because I think that's actually why I do love to describe images for other people.

JM: Okay. So, speaking of that, and speaking of imagery, I love how personal and captivating Scribely’s social presence is. If this was a different conversation about digital marketing and what we recommend to our clients, we always tell them social media is social first. It's not just media, it's social. You can't just put things out there just to grow your business. You have to be personal and social. And I think Scribely’s Instagram is exactly that.

And I think it's important to note that you take just as much time to describe your social images as you would for, let's say a client, in going through their materials. And I want it to read one aloud to our listeners to get a deeper understanding of what we're talking about, but I'd rather put you on the spot if that's okay. I just dropped a description in our chat here. So, if you can open that up and I'll just sort of—again, sorry to put you on the spot—just so the listeners can really understand the art of what you do. I thought this was a really beautiful selection from your company's Instagram feed. Do you mind reading it?

CD: Sure, absolutely. And just to provide some context this is from a series that we did on just talking about what it's like to live with visible differences. And so, we featured some work from photographers that have taken photos of people living with vitiligo, which is a skin condition that creates white patches on the skin that are of course, visible to everyone. So, this is a photo from one of the photographers and here's the alt text that we wrote:

“A Van Dyke Brown portrait with vertically brushed borders captures a woman’s lower face and neck. Her hand lightly touches the side of her face, rings adorning the middle and ring fingers. White inkblot patches of vitiligo cover the area around her mouth and most of her hands with accents of darker skin tone. Pale oblong shapes follow the lower neckline. Her thin, tight braids fall down the length of the photo’s left border.”

JM: So, listeners think about the alt text that you put in your images, and then think about that right there because that's some alt text right there. While you're thinking about that, we're going to go for a short break. And when we come back, we're going to continue our conversation with Caroline and go further into her business model and the imperatives behind alt text solutions for your business.

Break [Voiceover]: Is your company looking to scale? Morey Creative Studios is a Diamond HubSpot Partner Agency that helps organizations leverage HubSpot's platform to achieve sustainable and predictable growth, from video production and inbound content marketing to sales and customer retention strategies. Morey Creative Studios provides comprehensive digital solutions for your company, so you can Grow For Good™. Visit moreycreative.com to learn more.

JM: We're back with Scribely founder, Caroline Desrosiers. Did I do that right again? I did, right?

CD: You did actually. And it was a very nice pronunciation this time. [Laughing]

JM: I'm putting a lot into it. I'm trying to sell it. So, Caroline Desrosiers, continuing our conversation on alt text and her company Scribely. Caroline, we talked through the business use case for having a proper alt text solution, which is great, and I think it would be great to spend some time also on the moral and ethical case.

There's many of us out there that are trying to create a better internet, which is more important than ever. So just in those basic terms, sort of like an elevator pitch for the better internet, can you place alt text in the context of that conversation and describe the importance of your service in those terms?

CD: Absolutely. I think that accessibility is part of this diversity and inclusion movement that we're seeing happening right now. It's essentially including everyone in web experiences and the web itself is such a visual space and we're using images all the time to communicate our message. So, we need to make sure that we're not moving so fast that we forget to describe these images for people who cannot see them.

JM: So, I think we've established that it's important for people to think about this and it's important for businesses or publishers and anybody that wants to expand their market share to kind of do the right thing, lean into accessibility. And as a business owner, I'm sure you'd love to work with anybody and everybody that would want to do it, but you have to have some sort of, I guess, niches. What type of businesses do you find yourself supporting the most at this point in your career?

CD: Sure. So, we can really work with businesses of all sizes, any business that's using digital images on the web, but our focus is primarily on three industries, education, e-commerce and entertainment/arts. And the reason why we're focusing on those industries is because they really represent some important aspects of our culture and we want to make sure that everyone is included in these specific areas.

Also, we feel that the approach we take with alt text is slightly different with each one of these industries. There's a different way that we describe an image in a textbook versus an image like the one that I was reading out loud earlier, that has more artistry behind it. There are more visual details there that are relevant to describe for artistic purposes. So, we like to kind of break it down to those three industries because we take a different approach with each one.

JM: E-Commerce, I mean, the potential there, I imagine could be massive, right? But also—I wasn't thinking about that coming into the episode, how massively important that must be in e-commerce if you don't get that description right for somebody that's blind or low vision trying to shop for a product, that description is everything.

CD: Absolutely. And with e-commerce, especially, it's very important to provide a quick navigation experience for people that are trying to shop for products online. So, we try to be as succinct as possible and really break it down to the most important visual details. And also, often with the case with the product pages, there's a sequence of product images that are provided and each one is showing maybe a different angle or a different feature that that business is trying to highlight. So rather than describing the whole image every single time, we try to see the alt text in this scenario as a sequence. And by the end of that sequence, you really have a complete view of what that business is trying to show you or tell you about that product.

JM: Got it. So Scribely this about it, a little over a year old, is that about right?

CD: Yes.

JM: Did I read that, right. Okay. So, let's try and revisit the moment when you decided to launch a business, because it was essentially just before the world imploded. So, for online companies that actually presented both a huge challenge, but also a huge opportunity, but I'm assuming the timing was maybe ironically great for your particular service with the growth of the need and everybody really understanding how we're in a digitally interconnected world and if you're not playing there, you're not staying in business. But it must've also kind of been surreal to try and get something off the ground in the middle of a pandemic. So just as a business owner, how was year one?

CD: Yeah. What an interesting year, 2020, for so many reasons. Yeah. At the beginning of the year, I feel like all of us were like, “2020 new decade, we're going to do so much,” and you know, grand plans were made in January, and I was definitely in that group. And then March was humbling because it was like we all needed to go back to the drawing board and just completely, you know, rethink our approach.

And in Scribely's case, I had this plan to travel the states and have so many in-person meetings and attend all these conferences and all of that was just kind of wiped out. And that was a bummer for me because I really love just being with people face to face and having those conversations. There's just an energy, that's very difficult to replicate in a virtual world.

But when March rolled around, I had to kind of rethink how to get the word out about Scribely and how to make those connections with people, even though we all weren't able to leave our homes. So, it was interesting and I was a bit worried about how it would go, but I actually was able to make a lot of connections virtually with people. And it was a time where it became so glaringly obvious that we had an accessibility issue just across the board with everybody having to use technology in order to do you know, just about anything. And it was a motivation to kind of come together and figure out these problems. And with Scribely being this niche vendor in accessibility services that kind of aided in moving those conversations forward.

JM: Do you feel like you've found your footing?

CD: Absolutely. I also did a lot of reflection where, you know, I wanted to find the industries where there was a very high demand for alt text and a lot of missing alt text in general. And so just throughout 2020, I think I honed in on those areas of focus for Scribely. That's put us in a very strong position moving into 2021.

JM: Like so much on the internet things are constantly evolving and last year I feel like it was as much revolution as evolution. Just things jumped and, you know, we're a HubSpot Partner Agency, for example, and HubSpot's growth last year was just absolutely tremendous. And their product suite grew almost exponentially as well. It seemed like R&D was the flavor of the day.

People were doubling down on their digital services and one of the things that seems to be advancing maybe faster is artificial intelligence. So, I'm wondering what you can tell us about AI image recognition technology and how that kind of factors into, you know, Scribely, your future and how you can kind of either work with it or work against it. You know, I don't know where it kind of sits in your mind.

CD: Sure. This is one of my favorite topics because there's a lot of investment in AI these days and a lot of companies are pursuing advancing this technology because of the possibilities of solving these problems in a very quick and efficient way. But if you actually look at where AI is, and object recognition is right now, it's really not meeting the mark on where we need it to be in terms of accuracy and providing those visual details.

Also, it also can be quite problematic in terms of just adding in some biases that are kind of inherent in the processing and it's really producing what is not an accessible image description. Things are improving in terms of identifying objects within photos, but it's really how you kind of stitch those together to convey the visual message of that image and that's where AI is kind of falling short.

JM: Yeah. I'm trying to imagine AI producing and interpreting a description like your vitiligo description.

CD: Right.

JM: Yeah, I mean, it just doesn't, at least today.

CD: It's a great example because AI might be able to pick out maybe that it's a woman in the photo. It might be able to identify vitiligo, but to describe the patterns and shapes of that vitiligo using kind of like an artistic angle and sort of like a canvas on skin, it won't be able to do that, to describe those shapes because that takes, you know, a trained eye and also that empathy that we were talking about that we're bringing to the image description.

JM: Do you see a future where you can almost work collaboratively with AI where you could actually leverage it for part of what you do when Scribely achieves some scale? Do you think it will be a benefit to you?

CD: Yeah, absolutely. I think that I'm not completely against AI in terms of tagging images, because I think it's actually, it can be quite good at picking out objects within images. And what I'd like to do is work with companies that are using AI to have a quality check on the AI that they're using. And, you know, making sure that the way these images are tagged are actually correct.

Because if we take our eyes off of that, then what we're getting to is potentially dangerous territory of, you know, even offending some people out there using language that is not inclusive. One of the examples that I give is, we're testing out AI descriptions on different images and we put in an image of a person using a wheelchair and the AI came back with a person riding a bicycle. Now that's incredibly offensive and incorrect. So, I'd like to be able to have the opportunity to just review AI tagging whenever it's used.

JM: You strike me as somebody that doesn't really sit still. You might reflect a lot, but it's, while you're hiking, you launched businesses during a pandemic and grow them and you're on the cutting edge of technology and accessibility. So, what's on the horizon? What are you thinking about for 2021, 2022?

CD: Yeah. I mean, it is interesting. I am definitely that person that you're describing there that has a little trouble staying still and I think that's why 2020 was important for me personally that— I feel we all need to kind of take a step back and we need to do more listening and, you know, understanding our role in the world.

So, I've been thinking about, you know, of course what's next for Scribely and this might be really ambitious, but I have big plans for this year in actually expanding our services to include audio description for video. And the reason why I'm taking this on is because it feels like a natural step for Scribely's writing team to actually describe visual stories playing out; writing descriptions about those important visual moments that you can insert into the quiet moments of an audio track to help people with visual disabilities, engage with video.

JM: I'm trying to wrap my head around that, so it's beyond the dialogue. So, what's happening on the screen to keep the audience there, if they can't see it, it's kind of remarkable.

CD: Exactly. Yeah. So, there are visual moments in stories that happen that kind of go along with the dialogue and if you miss out on those visual moments, then you're completely lost at times. So, it can be quite challenging in the sense that you need to be very, very succinct and very selective with the visual details that you're describing. But I think that with all of the video content that's being produced out there, someone needs to be watching out for these quality descriptions and I want Scribely to kind of take that on and help out in that way.

JM: It's like beyond captioning. It's like the next level of, yeah, that is ambitious. Man, you might need another pandemic here to sit still. That's kind of big. And so, before we go, just tell me a little bit about the best steps that a company or an organization in your mind can take if they haven't yet started on their accessibility journey. What are some of the things that a company can do to start the process?

CD: Sure, I would say a good place to start would be to reach out to the accessibility community and just get feedback or an audit on how you're doing with your accessibility across your products. There are so many companies out there that are ready to support in that way. And they'll identify issues like missing alt text so that you can have kind of a checklist for resolving some of the accessibility errors. Now Scribely lives more on the side of actually doing the work once those issues are identified. So, I would say, if you're looking to start, just get a report or an audit of where you're at, and then you should then start to decide which directions you can take from there and where the priorities are for fixing those issues.

JM: And just to wrap up on a business note again, I'm curious about—so we've talked to a lot of businesses about navigating through 2020, you know, ripping out into a strictly digital landscape, what that has meant for their employees, their systems, the things that they took for granted not being able, like you said, to go to a trade show, what am I going to do instead. But you, you birthed this company, it right in the heart of one of the strangest business years.

So, it's like, you didn't even have the chance to make the mistakes that other people make, you know, when they're starting a business, but you started it at a time when digital matters the most. What kind of systems do you have in place to communicate with your team and to run a company? How did you know how to do this? Like, how are you running your business now?

CD: I was fortunate to have made the decision that all of the writers that work for Scribely should do their work remotely, and I of course, made that decision before the pandemic. And I'm really glad that I did. It was a decision I made because I want to be able to provide that work-life balance of being able to do your work from home. And from my perspective, what we're essentially doing is we're writing and we're describing images. So, there should be a way to do that.

So, in starting my new company it was important that we were able to work within a network that can operate remotely. Basically, how Scribely runs is we have a team of writers that are called on to different projects based on their subject expertise in that area. So, they're assigned to a project and then essentially, we're just using very basic project management tools to communicate with one another and to really make sure that we're integrating in the right ways, we're providing open lines of communication and also taking care of the quality assurance at the end of the process,

JM: I love it. Our listeners are, like I said, either business owners, themselves, or aspiring entrepreneurs, or they work at companies that are doing some good in the world, or curious about doing good in the world. And every one of you, if you're in that position, you need to hire Scribely. So Caroline, how do they get in touch with you and how do they do that?

CD: Yes, I'd love to talk with you and I am an open book and I love to have conversations. So, there are many ways to get in touch. You can head to the Scribely website and go to the contact us page, and you can also feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love when I get direct messages from people and I would be happy to connect and start a conversation there.

JM: I love it. Well, thank you so much for the time today. Appreciate you, appreciate what your team is doing for the industry. It's a super important part that not many people think about at first blush, but once you hear it, you can't unhear it. So, I hope that everybody acts on it and best of luck to you, and hopefully we'll touch base and see how things are going with that video journey. Very cool stuff. Thank you.

CD: Thanks so much for having me.

Outro [Voiceover]: The Grow For Good™ podcast is produced and distributed by Morey Creative Studios, a diamond HubSpot Partner Agency that helps organizations leverage HubSpot to achieve sustainable growth. Grow For Good™ is a registered trademark of Morey Creative Studios.