Selena Strandberg on Helping Organizations Manage Hot-Button Issues

Mixing Board Studio Session

Selena Strandberg is the Founder & CEO of the Know, enterprise software that helps internal communications teams track, manage and respond to global news events and emerging sensitive issues. The Know is an early stage start-up that works with large, multinational corporations and is backed by Impellent Ventures, K Street Capital, and US News & World Report.

Prior to The Know, Selena founded KnowYourVote, a consumer voting tool which was endorsed by celebrities, journalists, and major consumer brands, like Barry’s and Glossier. Before moving into tech, she was a Strategy & Operations consultant at Deloitte and an analyst at the State Department.

In this Studio Session, Selena and Mixing Board Founder Sean Garrett talk about why more and more companies are cautious to speak externally on big issues, the importance of data and remaining objective when evaluating those issues, separating signal from noise and aligning internal stakeholders, the evolution of mission driven companies and how to address issues before they pop.

SG: Tell me about The Know and why you built it.

SS: The Know helps comms and risk organizations determine if, when, and how to respond to sensitive events. That can be anything from the Los Angeles wildfires, it can be super acute, like a crisis event, or it can be more broad-based. It could be changes to DEI policies. It could be return-to-office, AI, immigration – it's broad in that sense, but “hot button issues” is the right way to put it.

I started my career in DC as a management consultant. I moved to San Francisco and was in HR technology products for most of my time out there. I moved back to DC just before 2020 and was initially starting an election tech company that was entirely around aggregating primary source information and getting it to voters. In the process of doing that, we had interest from big brands and tech companies in white labeling that website and putting it out to their employees or their customers.

We were on a shoestring budget, so I was like, "This is fantastic. This is our go-to-market channel that is free." What it actually was, was an eye-opening kind of look into how companies are now involved in crisis, politics, civics, social issues, thorny topics that are very complex because of the fractured media environment. Two or three years back now, I did really deep dive product research interviews with CCOs, CHROs and CEOs of massive Fortune 500s, and really came to laser in on this as the problem – when a news story breaks, it's a problem for executives no matter what. Figuring out and teasing out what their core pain points were was the bulk of the product interviews and then we built a product around that.

SG: What does your product do?

SS: The three pain points that we heard most frequently were, one- how do you separate signal from noise? Meaning, how do you know if something is just 10 employees emailing the CEO that are always going to do that, versus a sizable portion of the workforce? Two- how do you align stakeholders internally? That was a really interesting one to tease out because everyone across an executive team has their personal opinions involved and they're just duking it out on the phone at night before trying to decide something. The last piece was more about prioritization. In a world where there's constantly something happening, how do you know what to prioritize? You can't boil the ocean, you can't touch everything.

In seeing those as the pain points, we built a product that helps executives understand how their employees feel on very sensitive issues without having to poll them. In addition, help them understand in real time how peers or competitors are responding to those issues, seeing the market landscape there. The third piece is tying all of them together and using a calculated, data-driven software approach to making a decision specific to your organization, your values and your precedent.

SG: I understand giving context on things happening now, but how do you actually do the work to align folks?

SS: What comes at the end of the product is a series of scores. There's an overall severity score that we give, and then it breaks down into subsections. You can see, based on different inputs, what are the pieces that are impacting that score. We'll look at how viral the event is, how intense the sentiment is, have you responded to these issues before, and what are peers and competitors saying? We're giving a common language to executives. Usually companies have done some thinking on this already. In an onboarding, we'll take their standard inputs or precedent and use that to make the system smarter and say, based on prior actions you've taken, here are possible suggestions for this level of crisis.

SG: For example, you're onboarding a company and they say, "Immigration is important on some level, but it's not core to what we do as a business. However, women's health is integral to our values, runs hand in hand with what we do and what we stand for." Your tool would then flag an emerging reproductive rights issue, and then they would jump on it?

SS: Yes, it's really customizable, there are several pieces in the product where that would be taken into account. There would be notifications for one and not the other. That's in the product’s user interface that you would see if you're looking at the data. There are also several places in the backend of the product that would weigh these issues differently, in this scenario.

It depends a little bit on what the company's values are, but there are different components of the scorecard piece that would address this difference. There are several pieces that would alter both the outcome as well as the awareness of it to begin with.

SG: What is the after photo for an organization using your product?

SS: Time savings is the biggest piece that we've seen evolve. A direct quote from one of our current customers is, "A process that used to take hours now takes 10 minutes." The core values that we are providing, in addition to time saving, are really around objectivity and consistency. We are seeing organizations really quickly assess issues before they pop.

They’re seeing around corners. They're knowing beforehand whether or not something is going to really rock their workforce or not. So when the CEO gets an email that says, "Hey, why didn't we speak out about immigration?" They have the data and they have the precedent to already know where that was in the workforce, how sensitive it was, how it impacted different stakeholder groups, and can objectively apply the same thinking to any issue and defend their decision-making.

SG: Is every company different? Or do you see a trend with your customers in terms of how much they respond and/or how little they respond based on knowing this data?

SS: There's definitely a trend happening more macro right now, which is that companies are very cautious of speaking externally. We have seen, across the board, across varying customer profiles in terms of how thought out their process is,a push to keep things internal and to keep things targeted. Companies that previously weren't very outspoken are already like, "We would run an evaluation and think about this and be pretty targeted and specific if we were going to say something." And then companies that were previously outspoken have just adopted this behavior.

There are several instances that come to mind of companies not saying things because of data they saw on the software. There's just a bigger macro trend happening right now, and it's fairly consistent across a lot of different types of companies. Not to say that companies aren't their own unique environment, some of them really certainly are. But even those that are really particular and specific about how they do these things, it's still the same trend. Everyone's caught in this wave.

SG: Obviously there's a process there of saying, "This is what matters to us and it's connected to our business and it's connected to our values and it's connected to what your expectations are as an employee in some way, shape or form." Does going through this process, having a dashboard, and having this data in front of folks, does it help them refine what they stand for? And if so, what's the outcome? Or are you really working with people who have already done that work and are refining it?

SS: We've seen it go both ways. One customer comes to mind that has done a ton of the work up front, they have a whole team already dedicated to this. But it has still forced refinement in their process too. Not necessarily deliberately, but it is a common language for executives. It makes it very clear to stakeholders what has been commented on before, what hasn't. What tacks have been taken, what hasn't. It becomes more of a repeatable playbook that they can deliberately refine.

SG: Holistically across your client base, what are the topics that are always being looked at? And what are they evolving into now?

SS: Last year we had a ton of interest around the election. We still saw a ton of interest around Israel-Gaza. Probably until the fall of last year when the election really started to dominate discussion, Israel-Gaza was still a really widely discussed topic amongst college-educated employees. We saw it all the time. In addition, reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights were hot button issues.

It's shifted now quite a bit more towards things that you could expect people are talking about as a result of the new administration. In terms of monitoring, as well as net new customers who come and say, "Here are the things we're concerned about," we see tariffs as a big one. Return-to-office is a really big one right now. Everyone is asking, "What are other companies doing about DEI? How are employees feeling? If we make this decision, what will the backlash potentially be?" And to a lesser extent, but I'll name them because we are keeping a close eye on them, is immigration as well as LGBTQ issues.

The LA wildfires were also highly engaged. More than five times as engaged as any crisis event we have seen in the past 12 months, that includes the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. It was very widely engaged with professional employees. We saw a lot of angry sentiment, but we also saw a lot of hopefulness and admiration in terms of sentiment, which is not typical for a crisis event. Usually the thing that spikes is anger. But we saw an interesting amount of admiration and positive, hopeful thinking around support for victims or rebuilding. We could also see really closely trends around where people were starting to cast blame – they were blaming the state government, federal government, and climate change.

SG: Why do you think that was the case?

SS: Some of this pertains to the virality of a news story. That news story was super viral. Jimmy Carter dying was also viral, and we saw very little discussion of that, with the exception of some executives putting out statements. The LA wildfires were a combination of virality, social media sharing, nexus to Los Angeles.

SG: Are there trends or things that pop up within organizations that run counter to the current moment media narrative?

SS: It's an interesting time to say this, but we have consistently seen employee support for DEI policies in some industries. Last summer was when we started really seeing a big media narrative around DEI, and we were surprised to see in our data that the narrative ran contrary to employee sentiment in some industries. We'll look at specific policies too.

There are definitely several topics that pop up that we think this is actually a little bit more of a media talking point than reality. On the flip, there are some interesting things we've noticed recently that run contrary to assumptions or what you would think – but there's a media component there too. We are recently seeing Gen Z and millennial perspectives on politics shift to the political right. That's one that we've been watching. The common assumption has always been that younger people are left. Same with voting, turnout and registration, but we are seeing that shift.

SG: How are you seeing that shift manifest, especially in the workplace?

SS: We're seeing more positivity expressed around conservative viewpoints, more support for Trump-related policies than historically, with that younger base. Not to say overall, but historically. What coincides with that is some right-leaning policies, immigration is one that comes to mind, that companies have previously expected a certain response from younger employees on, might actually be somewhat challenged. We see a split between anti-immigration and pro-immigration sentiment.

I'm speaking overall, but usually for a customer, we're giving them an industry or local audience. This is just broadly speaking and it varies by different audience. But we’re seeing more anti-immigration sentiment than I personally would have assumed, especially coming out of the tech industry. Similarly, we're seeing higher volumes of support for mass deportation than I would've expected.

SG: What is your overall assessment of how companies should be thinking about their role in society?

SS: It's really nuanced, and it really depends on the company and their values. Where we see the biggest conflict and problem is when a company says or does something that doesn't align with their values, and that goes both ways. I don’t have a one size fits all, it actually very much should not be one size fits all. It really does depend on the employer and who their stakeholders are, what their values are, and their priorities of the business. Things that are common across businesses that I've seen successfully opine on those issues and businesses successfully stay out of them, is objectivity and authenticity.

Companies that are authentic and true to their voice and values and can maneuver these situations in either direction according to those values. The objectivity piece is really important. There's a need for data and acting from understanding that data instead of gut and personal opinions. And there's a need for consistency. The objectivity kind of helps with the consistency piece.

The other area that companies tend to botch is inconsistency. It will be interesting to see in the coming months because plenty of companies and brands have previously spoken out on things that they may now walk back or they may reevaluate, and that will be a super difficult line to walk for a lot of companies. The objectivity piece, in knowing more about their stakeholders and thinking through the company values, is one of the most important parts.

SG: I really don't care if a company doesn't go out and talk about big important issues if the employee base knows that that's what the company's all about. We've had many decades of companies like banks that never do that stuff. You'll work at a bank, you don't expect the CEO to talk about these things and it doesn't come up at the office, it's not a thing. But in the wonderful world we've created in Silicon Valley, we very much have a dawn of a new kind of company that built its reputation and its brand around, quote-unquote, "changing the world" or changing certain segments of the world. Like, "Hey, we're bigger than just selling this product. We're bigger than just being this software thing. We actually are doing this virtuous thing that's going to be this amazing thing." Then employees go work there thinking, "Amazing, I want to be part of this big thing." Then it's like, "Actually, nevermind. Now we just sell the thing."

SS: That's a very good point – the trend towards mission-oriented businesses has been really popular. It's been a huge recruiting tool and a big retention tool too. You can think of startups in Silicon Valley where people could leave and make a lot more money, they stick around because of the mission.

SG: Do you think it's the end of mission-driven companies or a pause on mission-driven companies? Or you'll find fewer of them, but they're going to be bolder and get more attention and interest because they're actually swimming against a stream?

SS: I don't think it's the end of mission-driven companies, but I do think we will see certain types of mission-driven be favored over others. There will be a shift in what type of mission-driven companies there are. This is really taking a Silicon Valley lens, but if you think about the types of companies that get funding and you think about two years ago, venture was putting money into DEI tech companies, it's just a totally different world now.

SG: If you were giving advice to someone who is starting a software business that targeted communications people, what advice would you give them?

SS: My advice would be to spend as much time with your prospective or existing customers as possible. I would be laser focused on the product and the need that your prospective buyers have. Understanding their actual pain point, over anything else.

SG: What have you learned about communications people in this process?

SS: I quite like them. It's a very affable, enjoyable bunch of people that are nice to do business with. Most of my conversations run longer than the allotted time because they're talkers. It's really interesting to see that the role of comms has become more and more of a strategic function. At the same time, they’ll tell me that they’re hamstrung by budget that doesn't get allocated to the department anymore. It's a pretty gritty bunch of people – in terms of doing a lot with a little, which is also what you have to do as a founder.

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