Blurring the Lines with Monica Earle at Duolingo

This week I spoke with Monica Earle , Senior Public Relations Manager at Duolingo . Monica joined the company after working in communications, marketing and production at Archetype , Cox Media Group and Vizergy Digital Marketing . She's also currently earning her Master of Business Administration from the 美国佛罗里达大学 .

Tell me about your career journey up until this point. How did you get where you are today?

My path was not as straightforward as some. I always think back to Steve Jobs saying, “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

I graduated college in 2011 with a degree in PR at a time when no PR agencies were hiring because of the recession. After working in the food service industry waiting tables for a few months, I got a job at a local TV news station through a former manager at an internship I had in college. I was producing morning news, doing overnight shifts. I loved the experience but realized after turning down a promotion to launch a weekend morning show that this wasn’t a long-term career goal for me. I left and went into digital marketing for a little bit afterward, but really wanted to work in PR.?

One day I sold everything I owned and moved from Florida to New York City for an entry-level job at a PR agency working on tech clients. At that agency, I got to be on the pitch team for Slack and support them through their IPO, and also got to work on Coursera , ecobee , Waze , and more. After proving myself to leadership and gaining their trust, I asked to be put on accounts that were more mission-driven. That led to working on Generation Investment Management, which is Al Gore’s investment management firm that invests in sustainable businesses, and other brands that were doing really impactful work. When I started to be open to leaving the agency, I knew I wanted to go somewhere mission-driven.?

That's how I ended up at Duolingo. I’ve been here two and a half years, and the mission at Duolingo is to build the best education, and make it accessible to everyone. And I was really drawn to that. My first task at a PR internship was drafting a local pitch for Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, which is a book gifting program that mails free, high-quality books to children from birth to age five, no matter their family’s income. So coming to Duolingo feels “full circle” because I’ve always been passionate about education.?

You have landed interviews for executives with outlets like Ad Age, INSIDER, The New York Times, NPR, Rolling Stone. What advice do you have for people pitching interviews for executives or managing thought leadership platforms for them?

It helps when your CEO is the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." People want to talk to him. Now, we’ve been working on expanding our spokesperson bench for the past year. It's not just the CEO and co-founder speaking anymore, which is really, really fun work for me. I loved building up a person’s profile while on the agency side. Especially if the spokesperson is open to feedback and excited about PR, it makes the work that much more fun where you don't feel like you're pulling teeth.

My process is to sit down with the person you want to build a profile for and ask them to talk about their background—their story, in their own words. Then, you put on your reporter hat. You start to find little nuggets and soundbites that are interesting. Maybe they have a unique pivoting point in their career, or maybe they're doing something nobody with their background has done before.?

We have a bunch of people on our team at Duolingo who have fascinating degrees. It's interesting to see people who thought that they were going to be language professors or linguistic researchers and ended up here. Our bench of spokespeople has experience in lots of different, interesting areas. I think that's the key. Get the person comfortable, get them to tell you your story, and then you can sift through that and figure out what's most interesting. Part of putting on your reporter hat is identifying the stories with a natural tension and then getting the buy-in internally to share that story. The way I explain my job to people outside of marketing at Duolingo is that my job is to find the intersection of the stories we want to tell and the stories journalists want to write.?

The next piece of it is really understanding the people that you're working with and their comfort level and making sure they're set up for success. We have some spokespeople who don't want to get on stage in front of a thousand people and talk, but they are much more comfortable in a podcast setting, more one-on-one.?

The executives I work with are also just incredibly busy, so I'm always looking for email Q&A opportunities. These are things they can review over their lunch hour or in a break between meetings, but they don't necessarily have time to sit down and have an hour-long interview.?

This newsletter is about the merging of many types of work that historically has been siloed, but Duolingo is a brand that seemingly has incredible collaboration between its communications and social media strategy. What advice do you have for people on the PR side in regards to working with the social media team at their brand?

I am incredibly fortunate to be in the position I’m in. When Duolingo was transitioning from a startup to a public company, the infrastructure was put in place for there to be a ton of cross-communication between teams. Our current structure has communications and editorial side-by-side with the influencer and social media teams as their own entity, but we’re all equal partners who report directly to our CMO, Emmanuel Orssaud .

We’re also a very Slack-oriented company, which creates a ton of collaboration and transparency. If you want to know what the social team is thinking or working on, you can pop into that channel and look. And so as a publicist, I'm hopping in and out of those channels all the time. I don't pitch out every single thing the social media team does, though, because a lot of that work stands on its own and gets attention organically, the way it's supposed to.?

I've been at Duolingo for two and a half years, and in the first six months I learned pretty quickly that a lot of being in-house is constant education on how PR works. In partnership with our head of communications, Sam Dalsimer , we’ve made an effort to bring PR to the table at the concepting phase of bigger campaigns and moments. Duolingo is very scrappy, we’re social first. Social impressions aren’t our only KPI for campaigns, we’re focused on earned media, too. If you don't bring PR in earlier, we cannot advise once the plan is fully baked out. PR has got to have a seat at the table earlier. And I think in the last two and a half years, we've dramatically improved at giving PR the chance to weigh in on what is newsworthy and what is not.?

The majority of consumers prefer to buy from brands that are authentically aligned with their personal values. Can you talk a bit about Duolingo's social impact work?

One of the best parts of working at Duolingo is that our mission truly drives everything we do. We're headquartered in Pittsburgh, which is unusual for a tech company, and we think global but act local. A lot of our social impact work is focused on the Pittsburgh area, and we’ve invested a lot in the local community. Last year we announced a $1 million per year investment as part of our “Duolingo Early Learners First” program that helps expand access to quality child care for the Pittsburgh community. We’re partnering with local child care providers and this really aligns well with our mission to improve access to education and be a good neighbor in our local community.

There’s also another business line called the Duolingo English Test that thousands of universities around the world accept. Many people might not be familiar with this, but if you’re a student outside of the United States who wants to attend a college or university here, you need to take the ACT and SAT for college admissions, but you also need to take an English proficiency test to make sure you know the language well enough for undergraduate school. These tests have traditionally been very expensive and not that accessible. We were the first company that made it accessible, adaptable, and affordable.?

When you look at everything Duolingo is doing from a communications and marketing standpoint, where are you investing most of your resources and time (i.e. creators and influencers, events and experiences, social, etc.)?

That’s a tough question, because so much of our work is deeply integrated. It’s never just an event, or just an influencer campaign.

The big thing for us is continuing to reach new audiences, so that’s a big focus you’ll see from everything we do. Right now, we’re interested in fandoms. Because that helps you reach an audience that’s already engaged and passionate about a topic, and authentically plugging into that fandom can yield really great results. For example, last summer, we partnered with Crunchyroll , the largest Japanese anime and entertainment streaming platform. We updated our Japanese course with popular phrases from anime shows, created an anime version of Duo the Owl, and collaborated on social media content. The campaign had great creative and earned awesome results. I also have to give shout-outs to Hitakshi Shah for finding us incredible influencers and creators who get our brand and to Melissa Yeung for diving deep on fandoms in the last year. So you'll see us go after specific fandoms because entertainment and language are so uniquely tied together, and these collaborations provide authentic ways to plug into other audiences. And we’re doing that through a combination of creative marketing, influencer relationships, and partnerships. It’s a little bit of everything. I don't think that those things are in standalone buckets for us.?

Are you using artificial intelligence in your personal or professional life? If so, how and what AI tools are you using?

I use AI when I’m stuck and need a quick thought starter. But I’m still a big believer in the human-in-the-loop approach to AI. The way I've heard someone explain it before is to think of AI as an army of interns. You would give them really, really specific instructions and then check their work when they’re done. You wouldn’t just pass that work onto the next step without reviewing it. That's how I treat any of these AI tools. I also use these tools to help soften my language, because I can be very direct.?

What advice would you give to someone about to graduate college that wants to work in communications or marketing, or someone who wants to expand their role or pivot into this space??

Be curious. Consume news and content.?

If you’re trying to find a job or pivot into a new role, you need to network, network, network. Networking is stressful for some people, but I think of it as relationship building. In fact, every great job I have had has come from knowing someone who knew someone. I’ve never cold-applied to a job and gotten it. I’ve always known someone who introduced me to someone who passed along my resume to someone else. It’s so competitive out there, and those personal referrals are how you can stand out.?

My last piece of advice would be — and I'm not perfect at this — is the art of the follow up. Let's say you go to a Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) event or you go to an industry event. You meet a bunch of people. Great. Now what? Follow up with those people within a couple of weeks. It could be a simple note saying how great it was to meet them, or even scheduling a coffee date to hear more about their careers. People love to talk about their experiences. It’s what we’re doing right now.?

So be curious, network, and follow-up.?

Rapid Fire Questions:?

What’s your favorite song right now? Femininomenon by Chappell Roan

What’s the last book you read? The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Who’s one person in this industry that inspires you, that everyone should go follow? The Bobbie marketing team, specifically Kim Chappell , their Chief Brand Officer.?

What brand do you love following on Instagram or TikTok? Brooks Running

What is one word you would use to describe 2024? Messy