Quality needs to be defined by more than ‘vibes’

Our content strategy communities of practice bring together people from across charities to discuss ideas, share challenges, and come up with new approaches to embedding content best practice in organisations.

We are running two cohorts of the group and this is a write-up of the conversations from the kick-off of the second group. The discussion covered everything from co-design and digital champions, to SEO, GEO, accessibility and processes. The key themes and takeaways are below, and we’ll be digging deeper into these as we progress with the community of practice.

What makes good content

Everyone has a different view of what content is and, importantly, what makes good content. We all agreed that sometimes what you know about making quality content is dismissed because someone else decides they don’t like it. Making decisions based on ‘vibes’ is a common source of frustration, with lots of us feeling like our expertise and skills are not valued as a craft.

“People assume it’s easy, but it takes craft and proper planning. It can’t be done in a day.”

Audience needs and organisational goals

We discussed measuring the quality of content through audience needs and analytics, and bringing these together to help people from across the organisation understand the impact of content.

“Good content should balance the audience goals with what the organisation wants to talk about.”

Digital analytics need to be translated into understandable insight for people to digest and then make decisions. If we see that our content isn’t reaching the right audience, then we need to change our content strategy to rebalance organisational goals with user needs.

Caring about data

Member organisations and those with user panels shared that getting insight from their audiences has been key in shifting the mindset of stakeholders from across organisations.

“There’s a difference between caring about the data, and then not caring enough about the data to make decisions based on the data.”

There was unanimous agreement that quality of content needs to be talked about more, and aligned with brand strategy and the wider culture of the organisation.

“The website represents the whole organisation, it needs to feel that way.”

Content processes and ways of working

Everyone reflected that process improvement is hard because the starting point is reactive working on a request-by-request basis.

“We have 12 briefing forms” … “That’s worse than mine” …“It’s OK, we fixed it by putting them on a shared drive.”

Processes are driven by people and everyone needs to shape ways of working with culture at the heart. Here are two ways that our group members are doing this.

1. Digital champions

One organisation has successfully decentralised their content process so that a digital team of one is collaborating with teams from across the organisation to create and update website content. The underpinning approach has been to develop their understanding of this role.

“What’s gone well is getting content creators to realise that they are content creators.”

Their content maturity is now at a stage where the digital role wants to further empower the creators to publish content to avoid any bottlenecks. This process has been years in the making and has “changed ingrained ways of working and thinking.”

2. Embedding new briefing processes

Another organisation ran a service design process to understand who needs to be involved, why and when. Creating a ‘RASCI’ matrix (responsible, accountable, supported, consulted, informed) is a tangible, practical output of this work but it needs to be embedded otherwise it doesn’t work.

People in this organisation come together every quarter to discuss content briefs and processes, and the open process is working really well.

We’ll be quizzing both of these members on how they drove change as the community of practice progresses – watch this space!

Next time

We’ll be digging into all of these themes and more in our future community of practice sessions, now running across two cohorts.

Please get in touch with Yas if you’re interested in joining – both cohorts are full at the moment but there is a waiting list!

Thanks for joining us

Candace Chan, Caroline Courtney, Charlene D’Acres, James Small, Jonny Keyworth, Louise Curry, Matthew Farrand, Miriam Zendle, Olly Bourne and Zoe Hanson.