Head + Heart: Monica Krake has a Plan with a Purpose

When Monica Krake launched Head + Heart, A Mindful Calendar (headplusheart.com) in 2017, she brought both strategic knowhow and true passion to her entrepreneurial project. A successful public relations specialist and co- founder of her own agency, Monica had years of experience promoting other people’s plans, platforms and businesses. But in starting Head + Heart, Monica wanted to bring together her expertise in promotion and PR with something more personal: her deeply held belief that our minds, bodies, hearts and communities are connected. Today’s Workshop asked Monica to share her vision for Head + Heart and give us her insight on marketing a new platform.

Tell us about Head + Heart. What is the purpose of the website?

Head + Heart is an online event calendar service that allows people looking for spiritual, wellness, and socially conscious events, to find them all in one spot. The calendar spans California to BC. It’s also a place where teachers and organizations can post their events as a way to reach a broader community.

My inspiration is to support people in finding meaningful events that support them on a spiritual and wellness level. The categories (Health + Wellness, Spirituality, Social Justice) were determined based on the fact that there aren’t other sites that offer organizations in these spaces to list events. My motivation was to create something that would support teachers and organizations in connecting more people to their work.

Success for this project means helping connect people with experiences that lift them up and serve them in a meaningful way. Ultimately, my hope is that many people, and teachers, and organizations will know about and use this site. I’ve started by launching in 3 states and one province, because I want to focus my efforts on reaching people in this zone before expanding further, but there’s already been quite a lot of requests for broader coverage.

My future goal is to expand to all of Canada and the USA as the brand becomes more recognized and site traffic continues to grow. I may include an international option one day, too, as there are so many amazing retreats and events happening out there.

Building relationships is key right now. I’ve focused on reaching out to hundreds of organizations and teachers to introduce them to this free service, and invite them to post their events. On the flip side, I’m employing strategies to boost SEO, to ensure people most likely to attend events in the three categories, will learn about this tool to support their journeys, especially as people plan events for 2018. I’m also actively using social media to reach both of my audiences.

I’m about to issue an official press release and one of the biggest ways PR will help, is that it will help boost my SEO, while also helping me reach more people who will benefit from either exploring the events on Head + Heart, or posting their own. While we pressed start on the website in October, I’m considering those first two months as a soft launch and January my official launch, as we’ve already improved the searchability and functionality of the website in the first few months, based on user input. PR is up next!

The biggest lesson was around getting the URL I wanted. At first I settled for Headplusheart.ca because someone else owned the .com. When I realized I could negotiate for the .com, which makes a lot more sense as I’m mostly liaising with Americans so far, I had to switch gears, buy the domain, and then basically start over. I can’t believe I didn’t think of negotiating earlier to launch with the optimal name, but I guess I was being a bit Canadian-centric.

We at Today’s Workshop would like to thank Monica for answering our questions, and wish her the greatest success! Be sure to visit headplusheart.com for the latest health and wellness, social justice and spiritual events.