Practical ideas to make decentralisation work in your organisation

Decentralisation, devolution, self-serve, empowering other teams, upskilling. Whatever your organisation calls it, the process is the same and hinges on teams creating digital content processes that actually work.

For the purpose of this blog, we’re using the following definitions.

• Decentralisation: the process of non digital teams creating and owning content.

• Content owners: non-digital teams who create and manage digital content.

Collaboration as a route to quality

The starting process for decentralisation often includes people sharing concerns about the quality of content going down as more people from across the organisation get involved.

From our conversations with the content strategy community of practice, our clients and our experience working within digital content teams, we have seen firsthand that better relationships between teams is integral to maintaining quality.

When people work together better, they know:

• what ‘quality’ means and why

• how ‘quality’ is achieved

• how to measure ‘quality’

Recognising expertise

There is an inherent power dynamic in decentralisation processes, particularly when one team is training and providing access to a system to another. Sometimes there’s an agenda to this process, with people trying to bypass set-out processes and sometimes it’s about people wanting to learn more and get involved in digital.

Whatever the reason is, valuing each other’s expertise, experience and perspectives is critical to creating equitable processes based on collaboration.

You can build equitable decentralisation processes by:

• asking people what, how and why they want to learn and ensure their answers are built into your process design

• acknowledging that the teams closer to the audience are more expert in that users’ needs – for example, an events team will know more about what their participants may need on the event day

• making the process two-way; instead of it being about one team teaching another, create a skills exchange

• emphasising learning and development as part of decentralisation; people will be learning new skills and will have the opportunity to deepen this knowledge over time

Practical ideas to try

We hold a content strategy community of practice for charities and not-for-profits and discussed different approaches to decentralisation in our last session. Here are the practical ideas that we came up with.

1. Create content standards and embed them

Maintaining the quality of content is a common challenge with decentralisation; not only at the start of the process but also in retaining momentum over time.

The group shared the importance of creating comprehensive guidance for teams that form your ‘content standards’. These are more than style guides; they bring together your brand guidelines and messaging with digital best practice for each channel and audience.

A publishing checklist has also been helpful for one organisation in creating shared accountability within the decentralised process. The checklist includes things like:

• are the headers correct?

• does the link text make sense in isolation?

• have you followed the ‘two eye’ process for paired writing?

Stewarding content owners through their content creation process with a checklist is a relatively low-resource way of retaining momentum, but we recommend it’s accompanied by a digital content community of practice and skills refresh sessions.

Building long-term capabilities are key to decentralisation and two ideas for revisiting content standards in a focused way are:

• an annual quiz for content owners to maintain their CMS/socials access

• content spot checks against standards/style guide

These can also be done through the digital content community of practice.

We also discussed standards dropping and how we all feel. This is a shared situation for a lot of people, however, it is also a part of the process of upskilling another team and quality will inevitably shift and evolve over time, as all parties find a new rhythm.

Defining quality standards beyond one team is integral to this approach, as organisations will start to realise the value of content being created by the people closest to the target audience.

2. Bring people together, informally

Creating a community of practice for digital content is an effective way to:

• create a space for decentralisation conversations to happen at an operational level

• retain momentum of the digital skills training

• peer review and learn from each other

• share and mitigate risks, flagging to senior stakeholders where needed

• create shared understanding of the overarching website objectives, audiences and content areas

• share ideas and best practice examples from other organisations

A digital content community of practice should comprise all content owners, with a space for people to contribute ideas and feedback in between. We recommend monthly sessions and then an online space (such as Teams, Trello or Slack) to manage workflows and share ideas.

3. Measure the success

Decentralisation can sometimes be seen as a means to getting information out to audiences but fall short of measuring the impact or tangible outcome.

Everyone who is contributing to the digital content process should understand the measures of the success of their content, for example:

• informational content on Facebook, measured through referrals to website or engagement on the Facebook post itself

• advocacy campaign on the website, measured through petition sign-up or email clicks on automated petition thank you email

Ultimately, people need to ask themselves: “has the content done what it needs to do?” and then be able to either measure it themselves or speak to people who can help them understand the impact of this.

In some decentralised models, the digital team would provide analytics insight to digital content owners across the organisation to enable them to see which content is performing well and together they’d discuss why and how to improve.

4. Focus on one team or service

Many of the success stories in the community of practice were underpinned by starting small and focusing on one team, campaign or service as a pilot.

Being able to hone decentralisation processes and ways of working with a pilot group leans into equitable relationship-building, with a continuous feedback loop where both parties can share how they feel the process is going and where changes need to be made.

Ideas to try

• Think about which team would be a ‘quick win’. Perhaps they have a suite of email journeys that would benefit from their content owner getting involved, or maybe there’s someone in the campaigns team who has used a website CMS before.

• Map your content needs and the problems that need to be solved. If a clear team comes out as a stakeholder for the solution definition then they’re a great team to pilot for decentralisation.

• Run audience-focused workshops with ‘warmer’ teams about considerations when planning content or considering a brief. For example, walk through a website user journey to help people understand the impact beyond the page or section that is being updated.

• Use shared language that recognises people’s new skills, for example calling content owners ‘super users’.

5. Normalising the process

Decentralisation is a component of most transformation strategies, however some stakeholders still view it as radical and not fitting the moulds of people’s job roles across hierarchical structures.

We talked about the importance of normalising decentralisation with senior decision makers.

“What I’m suggesting here isn’t weird, it’s normal at other organisations.”

Sharing case studies of how other organisations have approached decentralisation makes it more meaningful and, importantly, less scary for senior leaders to buy into.

6. Framing content gaps as risks

We talked about the challenges of maintaining the decentralised content model and, importantly, how to communicate that to senior stakeholders.

One leader had created a risk register to identify potential risks and also to manage initial problems that had grown.

Example risks

7. Joint planning

Planning together is key to successful decentralisation as teams can map priorities together and shape their content in line with others.

Tips for collective planning

• Align yearly content plans, prioritising the teams that you work with the most.

• Map the big campaign moment and your hygiene content as both require resource, creativity and production.

• Include capacity planning within your content calendar to be able to identify tight moments in the year where re-prioritising may be needed.

• Hold a content calendar meeting that is coordinated by one of your practitioners. These should be regular meetings. One organisation recommended monthly and using a drop-in format to encourage informal conversation.

• Create a process for managing high engagement spaces like the website homepage, or email newsletter top spot. One organisation has created a cross-sell matrix and planning meeting to shape decisions on where content goes for which audience.

• Use content meetings and planning sessions to remind stakeholders of your content strategy goals and content pillars, as well as separate channel approaches.

Decentralisation = collaboration

For decentralised digital content processes to be successful, we need to reframe them as collaboration. Recognising that decentralisation is actually about people and how they work with each other, rather than a content publishing schedule is at the heart of this.

Good content processes that are based on deeply understanding each team’s priorities and empathising with barriers, create relationships based on trust that are the backbone of effective decentralisation and content governance processes.

Share your stories

Huge thanks to all of our content strategy community of practice members for helping to shape these ideas. We know there are lots more practical guidance - as well as challenges - when it comes to decentralisation and would love to hear how you’re navigating within your organisation. Please do get in touch to share your story!