4 group exercises to introduce content strategy
Cancer Research UK has a lot of content-producing teams. And as a central Content and Search team, we spend a large proportion of our time supporting and upskilling this devolved network.
We use a lot of different methods and exercises to help teams make their content:
- user-centred
- clear and engaging
- accessible
- easy to find
The exercises we tend to do the most, and those that the teams get the most value out of are:
- Writing a content strategy statement
- Doing a KFC (know, feel, commit to) exercise
- Creating a content ecosystem map
- Performing a content audit
These exercises are a great way to introduce content strategy and content design to devolved teams, whatever their level of content maturity.
The content strategy statement
A content strategy statement is a sentence that answers 4 key questions about your content.
These are:
- Who is your user?
- What are your user needs?
- What are our business needs?
- What content will we create?
It makes sure the whole team are aligned and clear on the most important things in relation to the content they’re going to be creating.
To create a content strategy statement, we tend to gather all the team members together for a 1-hour workshop. This can be in person, but works well remotely too. We will facilitate and act as the neutral party — someone to challenge assumptions and dig a little deeper into people’s answers.
It’s best to write a content strategy statement once you’ve done some discovery work, and have an understanding of your audience and their needs. But if not, you can always validate your assumptions with users as you go.
In the workshop, I’ve found it works best to write the 4 key questions up, and then ask everyone to individually write answers to each one. Give everyone say 2–3 minutes per question. Then group the answers and get the team to discuss and agree on 1–2 answers per question.
We’ll then show the team Megan Casey’s content strategy statement template, and we’ll input the answers they’ve already come up with.
We’re going to <business goal> by providing <adjective> and <adjective> content that makes <audience> feel <emotion> and <emotion> so that they can <user goal> or <user goal>.
I’ve found it works well to keep the template hidden until they’ve answered the questions, so that they aren’t led by it and can think a bit more freely.
As an example, a completed template might look like this:
We’re going to increase Race for Life registrations by 25% by providing motivating and informative content that makes novice and expert athletes feel excited and confident so they can find the perfect fundraising event suited to their fitness level.
Once you have your statement, you can then keep it to hand and use it for several things. For example, when coming up with content ideas, you can use it to check whether they align to your overall strategy.
Take the example above. A series of Instagram stories from past participants talking about their experience of the event would be on strategy. But a video from a senior stakeholder explaining why Race for Life is so great would not.
You can also use it to test any content you do create. Ask users how the content makes them feel. If they answer ‘excited’, ‘confident’ or similar, then you’re on strategy. Anything else, and you may need to rethink.
The KFC (know, feel, commit to)
This has got to be one of the most popular exercises that we run with teams. It’s a copywriting model popularised by Andy Maslen, but it also encompasses basic content design principles. That is, front-loading your content with the most important information for users.
The basic idea of a KFC session is to get everyone who is involved with a piece of content to outline what they want people to know, feel and commit to as a result of seeing that content. And then to get them to prioritise those things according to user and business needs. Again, having some user insight before starting this exercise is best.
Start the workshop by writing up ‘Know’, ‘Feel’ and ‘Commit to’ columns on your wall or virtual whiteboard. Then ask everyone to collectively brainstorm the things for each column. I’ve found it’s often best to do this together to encourage discussion, avoid duplication and maximise time.
Things under ‘Know’ will tend to be important information you want your users to know. ‘Feel’ will be the emotions you want to stir, and ‘Commit to’ will be the actions you want them to take next.
Then comes the fun part. For this you’ll need the business impact vs user need grid from Megan Casey’s book The Content Strategy Toolkit. Draw a grid and label the vertical axis as business impact and the horizontal axis as user need. Then split it into 4 quadrants — (clockwise from top left) drive, focus, guide and meh.
The quadrants are as follows:
- Focus — what content should we focus on because it’s important to our users and our business?
- Guide — what content should we guide users to because it’s important to them, but not to our business goals?
- Drive — what content should we drive people to because, although it’s not what our users want initially, it’s important to our business goals?
- Meh — what content do we want to include because we feel like we have to, but it’s not really beneficial to anyone?
Then go through the things you have in your ‘Know’ and ‘Commit to’ columns and ask the group to place them on the grid one by one. The golden rules are that nothing can be as important as something else, and not everything can go in the ‘Focus’ column!
You don’t need to worry about plotting the things in the ‘Feel’ column. These are the things that should inform the tone of your content, and you can use them later to test whether content is making users feel the way you want them to.
Once you’ve plotted all the post it notes, you can use them to start building a picture of how your content will be structured. The things in the ‘Focus’ quadrant are the most important, so should be at the top. Followed by anything in ‘Guide’.
Anything in ‘Drive’ could potentially come later in the user’s journey. And then anything in ‘Meh’ (unless it needs to be there for legal reasons) shouldn’t feature anywhere.
At the end of the exercise, you should have a rough content priority guide for the piece of content you’re designing.
The content ecosystem map
I was first introduced to content ecosystem maps early in 2019, and since joining Cancer Research UK they’re something we’re using more frequently.
I found Scott Kubie’s 4-part series on content ecosystem maps for Brain Traffic to be a great introduction.
As Scott says,
“A content ecosystem map is a picture of your content ecosystem. Your content ecosystem includes all of your products, brands, content types, teams, technologies, and/or channels.”
Essentially, it’s a visualisation of everything that relates to content (its production, maintenance, governance) in your organisation. More often than not, it’s a way of visualising how content is far more complex than people ever imagine, and that there’s a lot of stuff involved.
As a central Content team, we’ve created content ecosystem maps to try and build a picture of the organisation’s wider content reality. We’ve then used these to guide and influence decisions around new systems and processes that we may need.
But creating a content ecosystem map can also be a great exercise to do with a smaller content-producing team. Again, a workshop format works best. Ask people to write down everything they can think of under the following headings to do with their content production:
- Tools — where do you draft your content? Which CMS or programmes do you use to publish it? Do you use any tools to check its readability?
- People — who is involved with content at each stage? Who writes it? Who signs it off?
- Content types and formats— what format does your content take? Do you have videos, social media posts, blog articles, information pages, forms?
- Guidelines and documentation— do you have a company style guide? Or a design system?
- Channels — where do you publish content? Do you have a website, intranet, newsletter, social media channels?
- Products— what digital products do you have?
- Audiences and personas — who are you primary and secondary audiences?
Then start getting people to draw connections between different things. This is a lot more top-line than a workflow, but it should show the general relationship between the different items.
Pretty soon, you will probably have a bit of a tangled mess. And that’s ok! The point of this exercise isn’t really to look at how well things are working, but more to shine a light on where you can make improvements. For example, your map might help you see:
- Where several tools are being used for the same thing
- Where processes could be streamlined
- Whether content could be syndicated across channels more efficiently
- Whether guidelines need to be better embedded into a process
It can also help to choose one viewpoint from which to view the rest of the map. This would likely relate to the main problem you’re trying to solve. For example, if you’re trying to work out whether too many people are doing the same thing and how to streamline your content workflow, then make the ‘People’ section the most detailed and view everything else through that.
The content audit
I’ve already written about the big Cancer Research UK content audit we did towards the end of 2019.
But content audits can also be a great starting point to introduce devolved teams to content strategy. When working with teams on content they often have lots of ideas about what they want to create or change. But not much insight into the state and performance of their current content. And this is where a content audit comes in.
Before you start any content project, it’s good to take stock of how things currently stand. How can you plan where you want to go, without knowing where you currently are?
I find it works best to have an initial workshop where you go through the audit criteria and review a few pages together. Then the team can go away and audit the rest of their content, and you can come back together again to review the results and decide on next steps.
It’s a great exercise to get everyone in the team on the same page. It highlights how much content the team actually have, and what happens if it’s not maintained. It’s also great basis for the other exercises in the post.
Useful content strategy resources
These are just some of the content strategy exercises that we do with our devolved content teams.
If you’re on the hunt for more then take a look at the following resources:
- The BrainTraffic blog
- The GatherContent blog
- The Content Strategy Toolkit by Megan Casey
