Effective content takes commitments
If your organization has a content strategy, it means that you have at least some of the following:
- strategies for determining the audience and the measurable business goals for your content
- policies for planning, creating, and governing content
- identified roles, responsibilities, and processes for content
- standards for content style, quality, readability, voice, and tone
- a single, organization-wide taxonomy
- a plan to measure content effectiveness and make future decisions based on what you find
Congratulations on getting there! This work was likely the result of substantial time and thought by numerous people in your organization, possibly helped by external consultants.
Effective content is a partnership between people who have subject-matter expertise and those with expertise in content creation, management, and/or promotion. And it requires ongoing buy-in and support from the executives overseeing the organization’s programs, products, services, information, resources, and tools — because that is what the organization’s content is about.
Simply having the content strategy documents is not enough. In order for content strategy to become part of the way your organization works, each person involved in planning, creating, managing, reviewing, publishing, and promoting content must make a commitment to stay true to the strategies and policies. Executives overseeing the organization’s programs must also make that same commitment.
And that commitment must be explicit — each person needs to actually take the steps to make the commitment. We have developed a commitments document outlining the commitments for each person with a content-related role: Each subject-matter expert, each member of the digital, content, communications, and marketing team involved with content, and each executive who oversees any of those areas.
Download the content commitments document:
http://bit.ly/content-commitments
And if you need help with the content strategy itself, or with anything related to these commitments, get in touch!
