MEMBER SPOTLIGHT: CARISSA PHILLIPS
/Studio IX:
Good morning, Carissa. So let's jump in. Tell us who you are and what it is you do?.
Carissa Phillips:
I'm Carissa Phillips. I work for Campaign Monitor and we're originally based out of Australia. I've been there now eight years this month. I started out doing customer support. It's just a little more technical than your normal "click here, go there" kind of customer support for software. And that kind of grew into what is called deliverability, which most people have no idea what that means. So in the email world, email marketing is what we do. Deliverability is increasing engagement for our subscribers. Customers with 100,000 people on your mailing list or 3 million people on their mailing list, they're always looking to get more opens, more clicks, more people to read their emails or click on the ads. So I'm the one that helps them figure out how to do more with that. And then also the delivery side of emails. When things break and they get blacklisted and suddenly Yahoo doesn't like their mail anymore, I'm the one that comes in and figures out what happened and what we’ve got to do to fix it. So that's all kind of within deliverability and email.
Studio IX:
What do you enjoy about it?
Carissa Phillips:
I really like working with customers. I enjoy both the people aspect of my job, but the technical part as well. Going into the weeds and having to test things over and over again, or look at somebody’s whole email program, the whole life cycle of a subscriber. For instance, when one goes to the website and signs up, what might they be expecting to receive. And then at different stages of how engaged they are throughout. Receiving those emails and then why would they unsubscribe or complain at the end. So I really like looking at the whole life cycle and the technical parts of it.
Studio IX:
What are you passionate about? Does that play a role in what you do?
Carissa Phillips:
We’re just starting to get passionate about it because it's just email and I'm not really keen on marketing - but the cool thing that my job also entails is a lot of anti spam, anti abuse type stuff. So I'm able to be part of a community that not just hunts down the spammers that are going to send you unsolicited mail, but hunts down the spammers who are doing malicious things, like stealing people's identity or putting malware on your computer that totally locks it down until you send them a lot of money to some one - all different kinds of things. I get to be a part of that community, which is a big bonus for my work. I kinda feel like I get to protect the public from what they don't know is ready to come get them, but that's just my passion in general, outside of work.
Studio IX:
Let's revisit that in a bit. I'd like to hear more about how your personal-life passions overlap with your work life.
Is there a memorable story you can share? A breakthrough, a turning point, something that happened that stood out?
Carissa Phillips:
Yes. I have lots. So because I was a remote employee from the very beginning, I was one of the first, I think, four employees in the US. So they didn't know what to do with us because they were all based in Australia and what, over time, started to happen was they would have meetups. We would go to a place that was sort of in between Australia and the US, which looked like New Zealand, Fiji, Hawaii. We got to go to some really great places and the company would spare no expense. Four days all together in these luxurious resorts, open bar all day, and just out of control. Yeah. And so, I think in that I saw the generosity of the two guys who started the company. If you had just looked at them, you would have thought they were just normal Australian surfers. And they were. They would go out in the morning and they would catch a wave before coming into the office. They were always tan and in shape, but they also knew from the very beginning that the people were the most important part and so they gave and gave and gave to us in a thousand different ways. But those meetups were pretty pivotal for me to see that a company can really love and value their employees.
Studio IX:
What's an aspect of your work that people might be surprised to know?
Carissa Phillips:
Well when you say email and you talk about spammers and things, that's one side of my job, but I do get to work with some really cool brands. I've worked with Huff Post and Oprah and Wall Street Journal and some big publishers and I like working with their teams. The email world brought me into working on a daily basis with teams like that, whereas I wouldn't have had that kind of access otherwise.
Studio IX:
Where do you see yourself headed? Do you have a sense of how you're work and the industry are evolving?
Carissa Phillips:
Yeah, so I've avoided management all of these years. It's been offered and I've turned it down every time. So now it's kind of inevitable. I have to have people underneath me that I'm responsible for. That probably starts this month or next. I have to learn those kinds of skills. The kind of "eating last” mentality of caring for these other people, letting them be the ones that get the five star reviews from customers and letting them have the last say on what kind of resources we are able to get. That’s happening very soon. And as an industry I think there's more abuse happening now more than ever. And I think those of us who are able to work in anti-abuse community, now that data is so fluid. That work is going to be all the more important.
Studio IX:
You're talking about hacking, malware, the people coming in and corrupting systems.?
Carissa Phillips:
Yeah. So even like espionage kind of stuff happens through email. So if you are somebody who is connected high up in government or within a large corporation, email might be an avenue that somebody would try to put software on your computer to watch you, to watch what comes through your inbox, whatever. So there's a lot, a lot of that that's happening.
Studio IX:
So I'd like to revisit how this might play into your personal passions. Could you talk a bit more about that?
Carissa:
Yeah. So I've thought about it. I thought about how do I sum it all up if I had to bundle it. Being consistently pro-life, I think, is how I would sum it up and consistency in terms of all of life, not just unborn life, not just last-of-days life, but quality of life in between and individuals who we criminalize.
That kind of started, I don't know, 10 years ago when we had lived in Turkey, and we had lived in a little town, a part of Istanbul, but it felt like a little town. We didn't realize that all of the people that were working in the shops below our apartment buildings were being trafficked for labor. We had no clue, and we lived there for two-and-a-half years and had no idea. We were blind to it. So then, coming back to the States and realizing oh my gosh, there were bars on the windows so they couldn't escape. Then feeling like every piece of clothing that touched me was sick because that's what they were making. They were making clothes. Then I didn't want any clothes on me that were made by somebody who was forced to work.
So then that opened my eyes to more systemic injustices that we have in terms of all kinds of labor. But then there's also this race piece that I was totally blind to, growing up in middle-class white suburbia.
Studio IX: Where'd you grow up?
Carissa: Dallas, North Dallas.
Studio IX: Can you say a bit more about that?
Carissa:
Yeah, so the race piece. I wanted to go back to what happened in this country. I wanted to hear the history again because I didn't get it right the first time. Then seeing that lynching leads, really over time, to capital punishment and being murdered by the State. So then I got really into abolition of the death penalty. So yes, being consistently pro-life is very, very hard.
Studio IX: So these things are separate from your day job? Or do you see a connection?
Carissa:
Yes, separate but it did overlap last summer at just the right point in time. So I was working with HuffPost at the time, and we were talking almost daily for a little while. So their team knew I was here in Charlottesville. Then August 12th happened. I didn't know how to come into the meeting the next time that we had scheduled. I just didn't know how to be present. It was so cool because they were so excited to tell me that their team had stayed up for two nights in a row. All their developers, all their marketing folks, everybody were pulling together this mini-website that they had created to track hate and to make it available for people to see that this is widespread, this is systemic. Because they knew I was in Charlottesville and we had been working on a HuffPost thing, it was just a perfect overlap of being encouraged that work life and personal life sometimes, sometimes can merge.
Studio IX: And in poignant ways, it seems.
Carissa Phillips: Yes.
Studio IX:: What do you enjoy about being here at Studio IX?
Carissa Phillips:
The community. Absolutely. I love that we have our little area on the side and we all know each other's names and we will catch up every now and again on how the kids are doing or who's vacation was where. I love that I can kind of have water cooler talk, but it doesn't affect my job. Like if I need to vent, I could, but I don't have to be careful about who's listening. I really like that a lot. I was at home for five years and it was rough. So this is like freedom.
Studio IX: Thanks so much, Carissa!
Carissa Phillips: You're very welcome.
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