The realities of creating and embedding content strategy in charities

Our content strategy community of practice brings together people from across charities to discuss ideas, share challenges and come up with new approaches to embedding content best practice in organisations. It’s also a space for some much-needed solidarity.

“I’ve been wanting to connect with more charity content people for some time. This week, the first session of a content strategy community of practice made it happen. I learned lots – there are so many shared challenges for content people across the sector, and also some amazing work being done.”
– Ruth Stokes, Senior Content Designer, Action for Children

Strategy doesn’t need to be heavy, it needs to be relatable and usable

We kept coming back to this: content strategy sounds big and important, but it can often be a series of quiet nudges and supporting colleagues.

One leader shared that they didn’t even call their strategy a ‘strategy’ and instead shared ‘guides’ and ‘frameworks’ designed to help people create and update content.

Drip-feeding tools, creating templates and breaking down how to use guides practically is the hard work behind strategy implementation, and the stuff that needs to be continuously happening behind the scenes. When adoption is the goal, considering how to make it relevant and easy for colleagues to apply strategy to their own, often demanding, roles is key. For more on this see our blog on adopting a people-centred strategy approach.

Processes can be messy

Lots of people are juggling blurred roles and responsibilities. Who owns content? Who signs off what? And what happens when people leave, or when organisational priorities shift?

Decentralisation also came up as a big topic, which we’ll be digging into further as we get into our future sessions. The shift several years ago to empower teams across charities to own their content has had mixed success. Some organisations’ subject matter experts are taking this on and developing their skills. Others have the content teams picking this up, or worse still, high value content is remaining out-of-date.

Our approach is to build upskilling into content strategy processes from the outset, bringing people with you and ensuring that they understand the wider context of the content so it doesn’t feel like a chore.

Navigating stakeholder engagement

It’s not just about getting buy-in. It’s about sustaining it when teams change, targets shift, or someone else’s priority shouts louder than yours. Some teams are finding allies. Some are leaning on agencies to make the case. Some are just tired.

There was strong agreement that trust takes time and clear expectations matter – two core elements of any successful strategy process.

Looking at user insight holistically, not just as anonymous data

Everyone was in agreement that the most impactful content meets user needs and adapts as those evolve. However, we also talked about how easy it is to lose touch with real audience insight.

Some people reflected that there is little time or access to user insight or measurement on how their content is landing.

We’re going to focus on this theme more as the community of practice progresses to ensure that we’re creating strategies that are user-centred and therefore more impactful.

We’re all wearing too many hats

Content people are being pulled into everything – fundraising, policy, social media, service delivery – often without the right stakeholder support, team capacity or training.

Some of this is exciting and some of it is exhausting. We observed and reflected that content teams are incredibly dedicated and there’s always an appetite for training, creating models and processes and experimenting with new formats and channels. There’s also recognition that we need to collectively work on getting people to approach content more strategically.

Working collaboratively and with a clear sense of purpose to serve our audiences is where content people flourish, rather than being reactive or overwhelmed.

Trust and credibility are fragile

One of the more sobering reflections was that content can do damage when it’s incorrect or outdated, especially for organisations with information or service delivery content.

However, sometimes content can be seen as easy or something that doesn’t need revisiting and so it doesn’t always get the time or scrutiny it needs. We talked about the cost of de-prioritising the basics, and how high that cost can be.

Prioritisation and stakeholder engagement as part of this theme came up a lot and we’ll be supporting each other within the community of practice to share ideas and advice on how to approach this challenge.

Next time

We’ll be digging into all of these themes and more in our future community of practice sessions, both in this cohort and also our second group which will kick off in September.

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

This was a brilliant way to kick off the content strategy community of practice, and thanks so much to Graeme Manuel-Jones, Alex Anning, Katie Pavid, Dave O’Carroll, Charlotte Young, Rory Stamp, Ruth Stokes, Jack Ithell, Katherine Newbigging and Caitlin Pearce for being a part of it!