76. Consent Based Business Practices with Kelly Diels
Integrating Consent Into Your Marketing
Many of us have experienced a breach of consent.
Whether it’s the person who’s immediately in your DMs trying to sell you something the moment you added them as a connection on social media, or the person who gives you a hug that lasts a little too long when you reach out your hand for a handshake, we know what that breach feels like.
That uncomfortable or even downright gross feeling of violation tells us that consent is important. And the context for consent goes beyond bodily autonomy.
Consent matters in our businesses, in the way we market our services, and promote what we have to offer.
Kelly Diels joins India to discuss integrating consent into your business, how the concept of refreshing consent has evolved the way she shows up online, and common mistakes and misconceptions around creating a culture of consent in your marketing.
Content Note: This episode contains non-detailed mentions of the experience childhood sexual violence.
Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:
Why everyone has the power to shape culture in their lives and businesses
How to build consent in your marketing practices
How to use your newsletter to facilitate connection
The most common misconception about integrating consent into your marketing
Supporting Culture-Making Leaders
Kelly Diels is a business and self-development coach. She helps culture-making leaders get out of shame and into power so they can grow lives and organizations that truly make a difference.
She has worked with NY Times best-selling authors, national and international feminist organizations, and thousands of online entrepreneurs. The culture-making leaders she works with are using their lives and resources to build a future in which we ALL flourish.
How Kelly Flaunts Her Fire
On the Flaunt Your Fire® podcast, Kelly Diels (she/her) reflects on her oldest daughter’s recent graduation from high school and how she is navigating the world with confidence and competence and how that reflects on the culture Kelly shaped in her home.
“She has a real sense of self in who she is and an ability to advocate for herself and others. And…that’s her accomplishment, but I facilitated the conditions that made that possible.”
She says that Flaunting Her Fire® right now comes from sharing with people that, “we have the ability to create culture and we have the ability to create circumstances in which everyone can flourish…I’m trying to let other people know that this is possible for us, and in fact, we’ll be way more successful if we do it together…Every single one of us is a culture maker.”
India says it can be easy to think of creating cultural shifts only in relation to how you show up in your business or brand, and forget that it’s possible to shape those changes in your personal spheres as well.
Kelly says, “We are always culture making in every single relationship we are in, in every circumstance we’re in…Every tiny circumstance in our life, we have the ability to shift power dynamics and change outcomes…and plant seeds of possibility in other people.”
Shaping Culture in Relationships
Kelly says that we may have the most profound ability to shape culture in our personal relationships, because of the love and trust in those relationships.
She says that one of the reasons her daughter is as competent and confident as she is, is that she grew up witnessing Kelly become an entrepreneur and take the family from struggling to having their needs met.
“She’s witnessed my growth and evolution in my business, which is also about aligning my principles and my politics with my business practices. All of those things have influenced her ability to grow up whole.”
She continues, “Time after time, what we need to do is align our principles with how we behave in the world, including in our businesses, including in our interactions with baristas and doctors. We have to align them across the board.”
As a parent, Kelly says that there have been many instances in her family’s life where she didn’t have a handbook, because she was trying to do things differently from what she had experienced. And while she couldn’t shield her children from pain, she could “create a soft place for them to process so that it doesn’t turn into lasting trauma.”
They discovered, somewhat accidentally, that talking through difficult situations or experiences while baking was a way of processing fear and pain into creativity, in what became a family ritual.
“So that’s one of the things I look for in my life now is like, no matter what situation I’m in, I know I can make something delicious.”
Kelly shares that her daughter spoke at her graduation and thanked her mother for teaching her, among other things, how to be kind to herself.
“I’m not even a hundred percent sure that I know how to do those things myself. Somehow I’ve been able to instill something in her that I never learned how to do, that I am only now, in my forties, learning how to do for myself…These are not things I learned how to do as a child, but I am so inspired by the fact that there is a generation of children who are learning to do that.”
Building Consent Literacy
Kelly says that it is important to have conversations about consent in all aspects of our lives and businesses because “our entire culture casually overrides consent on a daily basis, in a million different ways.”
From her personal experience as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, she is intimately aware of what overriding consent feels like, and she says that prioritizing and normalizing consent in every situation is a way of reclaiming her autonomy and agency, and of shaping a culture that cherishes and protects everyone’s bodily autonomy and freedom.
India shares that is also a survivor of childhood sexual abuse in a culture where consent is neglected and not taken seriously.
Kelly says, “We’re not consent literate as a culture. And one of the ways we can become consent literate is by those of us who get it, teaching about it, prioritizing it, [and] building it into our practices and principles.”
In her business, one aspect where Kelly has shifted her approach is to her marketing and launch sequences.
“I don’t think that just because you sign up for a newsletter that you have consented forever to receiving any kind of communication from that newsletter.”
She says that when she is launching a course, she does send out a lot of emails, but her practice is to send out a preliminary email allowing people to opt out of receiving the launch emails while staying on her list for other content.
“What that does is let people consent to hearing about it or not hearing about it, and sort of take the wheel about what kind of communications they want to receive from me.”
She says she changed her approach based on a gut feeling that the traditional model of sending all of the launch emails to her whole list didn’t feel good to her. “It was just an internal reaction of aligning my principles with my practices.”
She initially feared that everyone would opt out of the launch emails, but she ended up not only making more sales, but had people who immediately bought the course based off of the opt out email, even though that email hadn’t even included a link to the sales page.
“What it did was show a bunch of people who were sitting on the sidelines wondering if they should work with me that, yes, I was the teacher for them.”
Rethinking Newsletter Strategies
She says that overall, it wasn’t a major shift in how she shows up in her emails, because she had never run a lead magnet or freebies to build her list, which she says was initially a product of laziness and not having an idea for what to create.
But building her list without a lead magnet, created “a confidence that I didn’t lure anyone to the newsletter, that the only reason they signed up was because they wanted me to write to them. And that changed everything. I didn’t feel like an intruder in someone’s inbox.”
She says that confidence in her relationship with her subscribers helped her settle into writing the Sunday Love Letter every week, “and that has definitely changed everything, showing up every single week with a comprehensive, delicious essay for people that’s no strings attached.”
Working through the topics in her newsletter and sharing her worldview, she says, helps her subscribers connect with her and her work and want to work with her when she does launch courses.
“We’re talking about principles, we’re talking about morals, we’re talking about our visions for the world, we’re talking about how to align our beliefs with our daily practices…I’m talking about politics, I’m talking about business, but I’m talking about it on a higher plan of aligning what you believe and trying to make it real in the world.”
India notes that the way Kelly has structured her newsletter runs contrary to the typical advice of using lead magnets to put people into funnels and push for sales in a way that can feel predatory.
Kelly agrees and says the alternative is to “really take a look at this and not think about how do we extract from people, but how do we facilitate circumstances for everyone to thrive…Just because we’re marketing doesn’t mean we’re preying on people.”
Cultural Norms Inform the Business Status Quo
India says that there is so much standard advice in online business that teaches the lead magnet and funnel methods that don’t prioritize consent.
Kelly agrees and says that it’s a reflection of the culture and that it’s difficult for people who are new to the space to question the status quo.
She says that when she first started out, she was trying to follow the advice and the formulas, but couldn’t sustain it because it simply felt wrong.
“There was so much internal friction. It didn’t align with my principles. I didn’t feel good about it. I knew it was a violation of consent.”
Her experience with sexual violence made her more aware of and attuned to issues of consent, but for people without that sensitivity or awareness, “when you’re in the water, you don’t even know you’re wet.”
She says that most people running their business according to the status quo aren’t intentionally overriding consent, but they aren’t aware of alternative ways of doing things. And she notes that there are aspects of our culture that everyone has to confront and unlearn.
“I’m in the water too. I have to learn how to do something different…That’s the task when you have those feelings of like, I hate this tactic, I don’t feel good about my marketing, I’m embarrassed by my business practices. That’s when you have to challenge yourself.”
India says she often witnesses people recognizing that they don’t like or feel comfortable engaging in a practice, but that they don’t pause to question why it doesn’t feel good and to dig to discover the root of the issue.
“There’s also an opportunity to even reconsider what you think is a normal practice and then begin to explore for yourself, and maybe in community with others, of what are some other practices you can replace this with.”
Kelly says certain types of marketing may not fit your personality–content marketing versus networking, for example–and that you may have to adjust your strategy so you can show up from your strengths.
She adds that when you’re first starting to make yourself more visible, you may also have to build your window of tolerance.
She says that when she first started writing online, she would have to leave the house for several hours after pressing publish so that she wouldn’t immediately take down her posts. “Sometimes not liking something might just be that it’s unfamiliar and it’s novel, and your window of tolerance hasn’t yet expanded and you need to give yourself time to settle in and acclimate. But like, five years later, if you still haven’t acclimated, maybe you just need a different pipeline and different brand awareness strategy.”
Launching and Consent
India says she has noticed a number of people recently discussing moving away from the standard launch cycle, and asks Kelly how that process can be more informed by consent.
Kelly says that for evergreen products, unless you have a really large email list, a lot of your newsletter signups will come through SEO. But whenever someone signs up for your list, the principles of consent are the same.
“You wanna let them know how often are they gonna get a newsletter? What other kinds of communications are they going to get? You just wanna set expectations so people can have full information about what they’re consenting to.”
Kelly says that one of the main reasons people don’t like launching is that it’s a lot of content to create in a very short amount of time. Her solution is to offer four products, at regular intervals, and to keep her launch materials the same.
She quotes Rachel Rodgers as saying, “work hard once,” which Kelly keeps as her philosophy for using the same materials to launch her courses, year after year, and all she has to update are the dates.
India agrees that a “tweak and repeat” approach can take a lot of the pressure off of launching.
Kelly says that strategy can also work for open enrollment programs and says she still does a regular launch cycle even for her course that is always open.
“The launch season helps me make sure that I can plan to have a certain amount of revenue. If I had a much bigger list, maybe I would just leave it evergreen. If I had a better backend SEO funnel built, maybe I would just leave it evergreen. But right now…the launching model is the one that fills the courses.”
She adds that there is also some research that shows the people who take courses with cohorts are more likely to finish and get more out of the courses, which is also why she offers live office hours, even though the course content is prerecorded.
India says creating a launch feel is part of the reasoning behind the monthly curated explorations at Pause on the Play®, that include podcast themes as well as content, workshops, and discussion in the community.
Consent Won’t Cost You
Kelly says that a major misconception that people have about integrating consent into their marketing is that it will cost them money.
In her experience, the more she has brought consent into her business practices, the better her business has done.
“In the beginning, when I was trying to do business the status quo way and use all these persuasion and anti-consent based tactics, I never really got traction. I struggled to make more than a couple thousand dollars a month. And now I make a couple thousand dollars a day, and it’s because my business is aligned…And it’s also because I can market fluidly and enthusiastically, because I don’t have any internal dissonance.”
She continues, “For me, the more myself I am, the more politically and personally principled I am, the more all of that shows up in my practices, the better my business does.”
Give Yourself Permission and Trust
Kelly says to give yourself permission to tell yourself the truth about what you want to do, and trust that you can figure out the steps to get there.
“Humans in general are ingenious enough to figure out the path to that thing…Take one step. The next step will appear. You don’t need a 48-point plan.”
Connect With Kelly Diels
Instagram: @kelly.diels
Twitter: @kellydiels
Ready to dive deeper?
Posting photos or stories about the kids in our lives has become habitual for many of us. We need to move away from making assumptions, and instead, toward a place of consent and autonomy. Pause on the Play®, The Community members Stacie Lampkin and Shannon Collins have facilitated a workshop where they encourage folks to re-examine our approach in how we share about children in online spaces.
Whether you have children in your life or not, this workshop will support you in reconsidering your why in how we interact with children from a place of respecting their full consent, especially around publicly posting private information. Community members have evergreen access to this workshop replay and our entire library of resources.
Learn more at pauseontheplay.com/community