It might seem logical that effective content strategy should be complex, top down, and comprehensive: something about the word “strategy” implies that you have to know and plan for everything before you begin. But we rarely find that to be the case. Content strategy is most successful when it grows out of and adapts to real-world circumstances.
We rarely (read: never) come into communications and content environments that are both entirely new and thoroughly researched. Instead, most of our projects involve imperfectly understood audiences, long-running communications efforts, and a messy extant content landscape. In these situations, content strategy can best focus on moving the most visible and measurable parts of the system, and finding simple ways to unstick common content problems.
In a current A1M project, the team inherited a complex communications framework that had been developed by someone who was not a content or communications professional. The framework was created to cover every possible contingency, including communication channels not yet in use and use cases not necessarily documented. A lot of time, energy, and thought had gone into this work, both by our client and by subject matter experts on the project team. This had been intended to serve as the content strategy for a large data system with many stakeholders and a diverse user base, but the framework was never implemented.
When we began doing content and communications work for this project, we discovered that almost all necessary communications were either briefings about a single major upgrade or notifications of emergent issues. The latter accounted for the overwhelming majority of individual messages sent or posted.
When we attempted to use the communications framework, we found that it was both too complex and insufficiently detailed for these messages to be managed effectively. For instance, there were review workflows for many types of updates that might be communicated, but it did not include messaging guidance, a style guide, editorial calendar, or other basic tools to enable communications success.
These issues made our process feel inconsistent, unwieldy, and confusing, with work status easily lost. In addition, because emergent issues came in clusters with long gaps between them, it was easy to forget what we did the last time. The framework hadn’t provided what we needed, and we’d had to figure everything out on the fly and then rely on our memory instead of our tools.
What we needed instead was a small-scale system that we could build from, where content strategy and communications principles were incorporated without trying to impose excessive structure.
We knew there were ideal ways we could be doing things, but until we had our basic tools set up, it didn’t matter. The high ideals weren’t getting us anywhere. Instead, we focused on the most frequent and urgent needs.
Our current process is written in a single Confluence handbook page, and new users can be brought in with two steps. We have a sample Jira ticket for clients, subject matter experts, and customer support to clone, where all of the relevant tracking fields are pre-filled, and the description prompts users to provide critical information. We also adapted the Word template created by the prior team so that users can write a first draft themselves with guidance in the document itself, and boilerplate language specific to certain audiences already included.
When we discovered that review status was a major bottleneck, we adapted it further to provide at-a-glance information about reviewers and their progress. A library of communications allows both us and our clients to see previous messages, which helps with both understanding the scope of our communications needs and with finding specific past items.
Communications are more efficient, consistent, and timely than when we started. With subject matter experts providing initial content in a standardized template, the start-up time is faster and fewer rounds of revision are required. A message that might have taken several weeks and five to six rounds of revisions can instead be prepared in perhaps a week with just two or three minor revisions.
While the time savings and consistency are valuable in their own right, there are also larger content and communications benefits:
By focusing on what seemed like small needs and small tools, we have been able to take the communications for a complex program and build up to better processes beyond our starting scope. We arrived at the big-picture needs not by imagining them in the ideal, but by building from the bottom up. As we increase our knowledge, capacity, and team buy-in, we continue to develop a content strategy that actually matches the project’s needs and will be more successful overall.
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