Seven barriers to creating a content-led culture and how to overcome them

Creating a content culture is fundamentally about people, mindset and change management. Too often, content strategies focus mainly on the principles, pillars and implementation. Although these elements are integral, good content strategies need to be embedded within a thriving culture of prioritising audiences, users and blending diverse perspectives to stick.

We use a lens of people, processes and tools to work on the content strategies and content culture in parallel, encouraging organisations to prioritise conversations about ways of working, processes and skills at the same time as developing their core content themes and goals.

The core principles of a content culture are:

• sharing accountability beyond the digital or content team; everyone should contribute and feel connected to content strategy

• creating space for collaboration and curiosity

• making strategy processes and outputs accessible and meaningful for everyone

• talking about why something is important and how you’re going to create change, not just what you want to do

• centring your audiences and their needs through intentional and frequent audience insight work

• anchoring your strategy in your organisation’s impact and outcomes; it should reflect, champion and enable what your organisation wants to achieve

Through our content strategy community of practice and our work with organisations across the sector, we have heard a great variety of challenges in creating and nurturing a content culture. The seven barriers below come up in almost every organisation (sometimes repeatedly!). We’ve included some advice from us, our clients and our community of practice on how to get started with navigating these.

1. Shared understanding: “What does ‘content’ mean?”

You might hear: “I don’t really get ‘content.” That’s fair.

Most people don’t think in terms of how effective content is strategic; how it can both help audiences and also meet organisational goals. Some stakeholders tend to think about either what they need content for (such as digital marketing, campaigns or supporter retention) or what the content is (like stories, facts and stats, campaign landing pages or calls-to-action).

While sharing definitions of content strategy and content design can be helpful for some organisations, we recommend instead co-creating what content means for your contexts and bringing your teams with you.

Lean into what people are comfortable with

• Use familiar language instead of introducing new or jargon terms.

• This also applies to how they see content, so talk about the stories or landing pages as a way in to talking about the content goals, pillars and audience needs that bring this content to life.

Keep coming back to your goals and impact

• Use the goals of your organisation to articulate what your content is and why it’s needed.

• For some organisations the content is the organisation; your users come to your digital platforms to access information or services which are, at their heart, pieces of content. This can be a really helpful lens to help your stakeholders understand content design principles and content strategy.

2. Stakeholder relationships: “You have not involved me”

Often, strategy projects fail or lose momentum when people feel like they’ve not been close to the project. Sometimes these stakeholders then add large or unwanted curveballs into the project at too late a stage, and this can cause demotivation and disengagement from the project leads and other stakeholders too.

We recommend getting ahead of this by identifying your stakeholders’ needs and expectations right from the start. Typically, through a stakeholder mapping exercise you’ll identify who needs to be involved and a RACI model (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) or similar will be created.

We’d encourage people to see this process less like a box-ticking exercise listing individuals, and instead to group people by what they need, not just their job title.

When you group people by what they need and expect from the strategy – and therefore what they think audiences need and want – you get much richer input into the strategy process. You’ll also start to find champions in the different groups, which can help create wider buy-in within their peers. Similarly, you’ll come across challengers too within these groups, which is good for developing your knowledge of what is and isn’t resonating with people.

Understanding what your people need also helps you to define what the output of the strategy should be. In our content strategy community of practice we heard about the benefits of drip-feeding guides and frameworks to build engagement, rather than a wholesale launch of a new strategy. This approach of gentle nudges helps to embed the content culture and creates support across peers, leaders and delivery teams who will then be champions going forward.

3. Lack of common goals: “We need different things”

Siloed working often manifests in a content culture through different parts of organisations talking about ‘their audiences’ and how each department needs something different. Instead of following this fractured approach to content culture, which perpetuates siloed working, find the commonalities and be specific about where and why goals are the same and different.

This approach is underpinned by the stakeholder engagement point above: following the process of understanding what people need across the organisation and developing these intentional relationships enables you to more deeply understand goals.

However, we recommend going further than sharing your team KPIs. Find ways to talk about what’s worrying you about the targets and define what you need to change from a culture and mindset perspective. This takes vulnerability and the gradual development of a psychologically safe space, and so it can take time. But once it’s done, this becomes a strategic partnership and a place where you can align and co-work on content culture together.

4. Ways of working: “How will this practically work?”

Another mistake we often see people make is leaving all of the logistics until after strategies have been signed off. Instead, build process ideas into the strategy development so that you’re considering ways of working throughout.

We’ve also seen senior leadership ask about the practicalities of implementation when they come to sign off a content strategy. Building in time to work this out lets them feel reassured by the depth of the process and how their teams have contributed.

It can feel overwhelming to think you need to create or reinvent entire briefing or review processes, and while sometimes that’s necessary, most of the time all it needs is for people to think about why the content is needed and where it’s come from.

Our UX & Content Strategy Manager Nic always advises people to consider “how content moves across an organisation”. Think about the journey the content has taken; through services or supporter care, audience needs and subject matter experts’ insight, and then a fundraising or campaign brief before it arrives at a content person’s desk. The more that teams across the organisation can build their understanding of this, the more longevity your content culture will have.

People-centred content culture processes to try

• Bring your content audit spreadsheet to life by making the process open and inviting input. Collaborative content audits and paired writing harness expertise from across the organisation to decide what’s important and what needs to be changed.

• Share half-formed ideas through ‘thinking aloud’ sessions, where people can listen and input early in an informal and psychologically safe space.

• Create communities of practice where people are united by their practice (such as updating website content) and ask questions and share ideas.

5. Skills and capabilities: “I don’t know how to do this”

Decentralisation, upskilling and self-serve are all terms that come up in strategy visions but not enough attention is paid to the inherent power dynamic in these situations.

When approaching skills and capabilities we recommend:

• understanding the appetite for upskilling and why people want to learn more or why they don’t – if the latter is a blocker,this needs to be addressed first or your skills programme won’t work

• Recognise that your skills programme is a learning and development programme. It will be new to some people and, in some cases, a part of their career progression as well as professional development – I’ve partnered with HR and Learning and Development teams to cement this approach in teams

• being specific about the skills, including why they’re needed and how people will be trained

• separating out the technical skills that people can learn like content design, UX, SEO, AI and accessibility from the foundational capabilities that bring the strategy to life like paired writing, co-design and working in the open

Ultimately, we need to recognise that learning new skills means wanting to learn, having the chance to practise and make mistakes, and reaping the benefits so that it becomes second nature.

6. Audience insight: “What is important to our audiences?”

A thriving content culture is an audience-first culture. However, too many organisations either don’t factor in user insight or they make assumptions that are never tested before briefing content projects.

We also see organisations creating and using audience personas that are based on demographics, focusing on age, geographic location or occupation. While this approach is important in your audience insight journey, a strong content culture means getting under the skin of your audiences’ needs, motivations and behaviours.

Often, people don’t or can’t prioritise audience insight because it feels like a large investment, both in time and money. However, we recommend thinking about starting small to enable you to build people’s understanding and buy-in internally, showing how audience insight can influence content to enable a business case for more frequent user experience research to support your content culture.

7. Measurement: “How will we know what’s working?”

Underpinning a healthy content culture is a performance framework where everyone can access live data and insights on what’s working and, importantly, what isn’t.

We recommend:

• setting objectives and key results (OKRs) instead of flat KPIs to set realistic, achievable goals that are socialised frequently in your organisation

• weaving your audience insight into your digital and content reporting to provide a holistic picture

• producing digital maturity assessments using a bespoke model that is anchored in your organisation’s goals.

As with all measurement, the key thing is to have a conversation about what it means to your teams and organisations. It’s shortsighted to view this as a data sharing exercise; it’s a fundamental step in furthering your content culture.

People, processes and tools

Using the lens of people, processes and tools to approach content culture can help you break down what’s needed, overcome these seven barriers (and more!) and plan where you can go next.

You can also download our guide exploring some of the enablers and projects that make up people, processes and tools.

I’d love to hear how this model has helped you and am very happy to share ideas and advice – please get in touch!

This blog was originally presented as a talk at CharityComms Charity Content Conference: building better content in July 2025