Opportunities and ideas from the CharityComms Charity Content Conference
Strategic content that works harder: doing less but doing it better
This year’s CharityComms Charity Content Conference was a welcome reminder that we don’t always need to create and do more. The theme was ‘Building better content’ and this became a rallying cry for doing less and doing it more effectively. This is something that our team supports our clients to do on nearly every project we work on. And we know it’s easier said than done.
The day was packed with brilliant talks, insights and tips. Across the sessions, you could feel the shared belief in the power of content as the foundation of impactful products and services. Our team cheered on our own Yasmin Georgiou as she delivered an excellent keynote about how to overcome common barriers to creating a content-led culture, which brought together so much of what we’d heard throughout the day and set strategy within the context of the people who bring it to life.
The reality of creating and embedding content strategy is that it’s a long-term, organisation-wide commitment. As a team who have worked with content, both in-house and supporting clients, we know that it can be demotivating when we face the same challenges (and fight the same battles) that we have been facing for years. However, it is also affirming to know that our challenges are shared and to be reminded that we are doing the right thing and we are enough (even when we might not feel like it!).
If you’re working on improving how your organisation communicates with its audiences, these are some practical tips from the talks on how content strategy and design can help. They also include ideas for how you can put them into action in your organisation and bring your colleagues and stakeholders along with you. Credit to the speakers for their excellent presentations.
Strategy is the foundation of everyday decision-making
Trisha Brandon’s talk set the tone for how an effective content strategy can also be a practical tool for navigating everyday decisions. When you’re flooded with requests, a clear strategy helps you prioritise where to spend time and also give stakeholders visibility of those choices.
“Content strategy is a set of user-centred, goal-driven choices about content throughout its lifecycle.”
― Kristina Halvorson
Building on this definition, Trisha explored these three fundamentals further:
1. Align your content strategy with what your organisation is trying to achieve
This goal-driven approach will provide focus, help you lead content conversations with stakeholders and give you an objective framework to respond to requests from colleagues. In response to AI-driven changes to search behaviour, Trisha also reiterated the need to hone in on what your organisation is uniquely doing, and doing uniquely well, to create valuable content.
2. Work across all stages of the content lifecycle, from initial ideas to ongoing maintenance
We’re often so caught in a perpetual loop of creating and publishing that we can lose time for planning and measurement. Establishing ways of working, roles and responsibilities across the lifecycle gives colleagues a shared vocabulary and stake in a cycle of continuous improvement.
3. Understand your audiences and give them what they need
Of course, none of this is possible without first understanding who you’re trying to reach and what matters to them. Being equipped with evidence-backed insight gives you an objective way to navigate stakeholder discussions and decisions about content that can often slide into personal preferences.
Opportunity: build up user insight by starting with any existing audience personas or segments. Enrich these with what you can gather from analytics, surveys or helpline teams. Add detail about challenges, motivations and behaviours. This understanding will help you advocate for your audiences.
Make user research part of your practice
Another way to gain audience insights is to speak to them. The session from Scope colleagues Ilonka Ligteringen and Liz Evry was a powerful reminder that user research doesn’t have to be complex or expensive to create valuable insights. By listening, learning and acting on what you hear, you can include your audience in your products and services. For Scope, this is one method of keeping disabled people central to their work and amplifying their voices accurately.
We know that getting buy-in for user research can be a challenge, with barriers including a lack of time, budget or expertise. Other common objections include:
“we know what we want to share”
“we already know our audience”
“an ‘expert review’ will do”
It can help to talk with stakeholders about the unique perspective that users bring, but it’s much more persuasive to demonstrate it. You can learn so much from 5 to 6 well-structured research sessions. One of the benefits of user research and testing is the opportunity for the whole organisation to build understanding of your audiences with a focus on their stories and experiences, bringing that perspective into your content strategy and design. When colleagues can observe users experiencing frustration, confusion or delight firsthand, it can galvanise support for improvements.
Opportunity: start with the secondary data you already have, such as customer service logs, survey responses, or search terms. From this, you can form hypotheses, test one piece of content with users and build from there. Over time, you can grow a practice and get support that fits your budget and capacity.
You can start small when applying content design principles
Ruth Stokes (Action for Children) also championed basing the content you create on research and evidence, so that you “can turn push content (what you want to say) into pull content (what the audience wants to read).” Ruth highlighted that content design principles are for everyone and all channels. It’s about putting the user first, making things clear and usable, and testing your assumptions.
“The main difference between many other forms of writing and content design is that content designers generally don’t move without research. It can be desk research, usability research, expert research, any kind of research really but there has to be data and evidence of what the audience wants and needs.”
― Sarah Winters
This doesn’t need to wait for a large project. You can start small by choosing a journey or section of your website and reassessing it from a user’s point of view. What tasks are they trying to complete? What could be getting in the way?
Ruth shared that you’re more likely to gain stakeholder support if you can identify something that is an organisational priority and apply content design principles to that. Start small, test, improve and show results.
We support clients to find the ‘sweet spot’ where user needs and organisational goals overlap. This is your core content and should be a priority for continuous improvement.
Opportunity: identify a piece of content that isn’t performing, explore whether it might be confusing, too complex or at an unhelpful stage of the journey. Run your own review for readability, accessibility and how it flows. Use analytics and feedback tools to give you data to benchmark from.
Prioritise to reclaim space for strategic content work
Pia Dawson shared how the Parkinson’s UK content team are being empowered to say no ― in a way that still supports colleagues and keeps content user-focused. By planning the team’s capacity, sharing their strategy widely and reframing requests, they’re protecting time for more impactful work.
We know that this is hard to do, especially when you feel like you’re constantly putting out fires. There’s often a shift needed for stakeholders to see the content team as a strategic partner rather than a service provider. This shift can be gradual and may involve differentiating strands to your team’s work to ensure that minor content updates and fixes can still be responded to.
Getting buy-in from senior stakeholders to make space for more strategic work is something we’ve discussed in our content strategy community of practice. We’ve explored how to build a shared understanding of:
how effective content can move an organisation towards its goals
the amount of time it takes to do that well.
Pia shared that her team were helped by having:
a clear content strategy and foundations to support them that are visible across the organisation, particularly with senior stakeholders
a transparent process for how work is prioritised
Opportunity: if you’re feeling overwhelmed or reactive, try recording what you’re working on and prioritisation decisions. Even a simple spreadsheet can help show where your time is spent and what it really takes to do content well. It can feel like another admin task, but having this data is a starting point for stakeholder discussions to make changes.
Keep your audits focused and revisit them regularly
The session from Victoria Clarke showed that content audits don’t have to be overwhelming. Starting with clear goals and aligning your audit measures with these will keep your insight focused and relevant.
We know from website projects that content audits can feel like an insurmountable task.
Here are some ways to help them feel more manageable:
Make use of templates that already exist and adapt them for your own needs.
Don’t try to audit everything! Choose a representative sample to explore in detail and use your findings to inform broader decisions.
Buddy up and share your most interesting findings as you go.
Opportunity: try to build regular auditing into your ways of working, rather than only being prompted by large projects like a website rebuild. This ties back to a strategic approach to content across its lifecycle. Always start audits by defining your measures, scope and scoring. Look for patterns as you go and share what you find in a clear, visual format.
Final thoughts
Across every session, the message was clear: we’re all striving to work on content that’s more focused, more useful and more aligned with audience needs. That doesn’t always mean radical change – just small, deliberate steps in the right direction.
Ways that our team can support you include:
helping to create, refresh and embed content strategy
getting you started with user research
facilitating joint team working to design more user-centered content
If you’re thinking about how to bring more focus to your content work, we’d love to chat about how we can help.
And if you missed the conference and would like to catch up, you can still register to watch it on demand.