7 Hours With Refinery29's Director of Insights

In 7 Hours With, we explore the routines of leading professionals in their space to learn the when, why, where and how they work. In each diary, we will look at what they’re doing at seven different check-ins throughout their day.

Danielle Dejoy is the Director of Insights for Refinery29, a female-driven media company focusing on lifestyle, beauty, fashion and career content across multiple mediums.

7 AM

My first of many alarms went off at 6 AM. I am decidedly not a morning person, but I try to work out every day and it takes me about an hour to get from Prospect Heights to Midtown where my 8 AM workout class is. I eventually and reluctantly get up after my third alarm at 6:45. I live with my boyfriend and appreciate his patience/am nominating him for sainthood as this snooze-fest is a daily annoyance. I take the subway to Herald Square and walk to my class at Tonehouse. It’s Friday, “Conditioning Day,” which means it is the hardest workout program of the week.

9 AM

After struggling through class, I shower and take the 6 train downtown towards Fulton where my office is. Fridays are my somewhat decadent mornings which is how I justify the expensive workout class and my coffee order. I go to Dunkin’ Donuts and get a massive iced coffee (even though it’s winter) and make my way into the office.

11 AM

After I get into the office, I spend an hour or so combing through my emails and seeing if there are any fire drills, as people sometimes forget that they need a quick data point for a meeting or a client report. I also look at dashboards to check where we closed the day prior in terms of site traffic. I rerun a few scripts to forecast where we think we are going to close the month in terms of audience consumption.

As the Director of Insights and Analytics at Refinery29, I’m responsible for creating a feedback loop between our audience and our content creators/distributors across the site and platforms through reporting and trend analysis. This involves a lot of forecasting, report automation, and ad hoc analyses to make this feedback loop faster and more effective so that we can listen to our audience in real time.

There is so much consumption data in terms of what our readers and followers are clicking on, watching, and engaging with across platforms. A lot of what I do is try to cut through the noise for teams across the company and try to distill and create stories and recommendations based on what we’re seeing from user behavior. I’ve worked at Refinery for over 4 years, and I work most closely with the editorial teams and the social distribution teams, but really work cross functionally as audience trends impact every team.

2 PM

I usually eat lunch around 2 PM. My days are packed full with meetings, so I usually run to Whole Foods at the beginning of the week and grab groceries to make a quick salad. After eating, I run to our weekly marketing council meeting, which brings together the leaders of all teams that touch marketing and consumer insights.

We touch base on what’s happening across the organization as it relates to our audience, and review cross team initiatives. After that meeting, I present insights at the monthly creative meeting, discussing performance trends and flagging potential areas of opportunity.

4 PM

I have my 1-on-1 with a few of my direct reports, and after that I have a meeting with my boss. My day to day truly varies. Since my team functions as a support team to the rest of the organization, our daily schedule and workload really depends on what the needs of the business are. Some days are spent automating our Instagram Stories performance data. Some days are spent pulling data for board decks. Some days I’m building decks for monthly recaps, so its good to check-in with members of my team frequently.

6 PM

I leave work around 6:15 after I send out my massive weekly audience report. I meet one of my friends for happy hour at this Indian restaurant we like. My boyfriend meets us there as my friend heads to dinner. My boyfriend and I head home and we order in Kings County Imperial on Caviar and I make him watch What A Girl Wants for an ideal Friday night. Again, nominating him for sainthood.

11 PM

I usually fall asleep around 11 PM (even on this low-key Friday night). I brush my teeth, slather moisturizer on my face and hop into bed. Thankfully, it’s the weekend, so I don’t set an alarm.