What does it take to create a whole-organisation content strategy?
What’s the optimal model for creating a content strategy for your university?
By audience group?
By channel or platform?
By objective?
By your internal departments and teams?
By content type?
By user journey stages?
It won’t surprise you that I don’t believe that there is a right answer to this question. In many cases, it’s about simply choosing a direction and empowering that choice.
But one choice that I often see removed from the table faster than the speed of light is the choice to create a whole-university content strategy.
“The scope is too big”
“We don’t control all the content”
“They can do whatever they like on that channel, we don’t have a say”
“We wouldn’t know where to begin”
I could go on. The reasons why we choose not to attempt a whole-organisation content strategy are endless. But when we play the “can’t” and “won’t” game, we close ourselves off to possibility.
Creating a whole-organisation content strategy is entirely possible. We’ve done it. Multiple times. The image below shows my optimal model for how to do this, whereby we address overarching vision, connected content and content operations at a whole-organisation level, but then start to explore individual content topics and themes aligned to specific audience interests and needs at a more granular plan level:
This model looks reasonably straight-forward, right? But in order to make this work we must lay an essential foundation that is more to do with culture than content.
So, what is in that foundation? Is it audience research? Your user stories? Some personas? A content model? A new system?
No. That’s all important - essential even - but there’s a layer deeper than that that will determine how successful your whole-organisation’s content strategy will be.
The five foundations of a whole-organisation content strategy
I believe that there are five core cultural foundations that are needed to create a successful whole-organisation content strategy:
Purpose
Leadership
Courage
Collaboration
Compassion
Purpose
Creating a shared purpose or declaration of your commitment that exists on the other side of the content strategy is essential.
The purpose is not the same thing as a project objective or goal. The purpose is the thing that you want to achieve as a consequence of the work that you will do.
For example, the objective of a content strategy might be to create a consistent and cohesive user experience across all content. But that objective won’t speak to all of your stakeholders and what they care about. So, we want to arrive at a statement that everyone is inspired by.
A purpose statement might therefore be something like “to open the doors to education for everyone”, or “to inspire curiosity and a lifelong appetite for learning”.
At the heart of defining your shared purpose statement will be questions like:
So what?
What for?
Why?
To what end?
Leadership
Leadership isn’t a role or job description. It’s a mindset, a way of being, a behaviour.
Adopting the being of leadership is essential to create a whole-organisation content strategy. This requires us to see ourselves as leaders, and to be willing to step forward and be “the one” with the conviction, commitment and integrity to make the strategy a reality.
The qualities that leadership brings to a process like this are:
The willingness to see oneself as “the one” to lead a change and make that difference.
Ownership
The articulation of a vision and shared purpose
The ability to enrol other people in that vision and purpose
A belief that win-win solutions are possible to mediate different stakeholder objectives, not settling for compromise
A commitment to make choices and empower those choices
The courage to relentlessly hold others to account in service of the bigger purpose.
And that brings us to our next foundation…
Courage
Developing a content strategy doesn’t sound particularly courageous, does it? But developing a whole-organisation content strategy - especially in a complex organisation like a university, or a research organisation - can take a tonne of courage.
When we aim to develop effective whole-organisation content strategies, we are quickly confronted with critical challenges:
Internal power struggles and fear of embedding true content governance
Embedded cultural contexts such as silos, decisions by committee, waiting for top-down direction, compromise solutions and avoiding difficult conversations
Performance metrics that don’t create the favourable conditions needed for a new approach (for example, customer service teams who are rewarded based on the number of calls they handle - it’s not in their interest to reduce the number of customer calls through a content strategy that empowers speedy self-service).
The willingness to have the conversations needed to embed a whole-organisation content strategy takes courage, and a relentless commitment to the overarching purpose that we discussed earlier.
Collaboration
Collaboration also takes courage. True collaboration requires us to be willing to have difficult conversations and to move beyond them without residual energy lingering. True collaboration requires a willingness to hold people accountable, to own and design collaborations, to create and invent new ways of working, and a willingness to fail and reinvent.
True collaboration is not a meeting or a workshop or a technology. True collaboration is a practice and a commitment. It’s an act of empathy, creativity, vulnerability and accountability all at once. And in many cases the challenge of making the time and space for collaboration will also require us to confront our relationships to time and how we choose to spend our time.
A whole-organisation content strategy without true collaboration risks just being a collection of slightly awkwardly fitting parts serving different purposes. It becomes lots of parts instead of the whole. Aiming for the “whole” requires a true level of connection, commitment and togetherness. And to achieve that, we need a strong foundation of compassion…
Compassion
Compassion might sound a little fluffy. I’m also deliberately choosing the word “compassion” and not “empathy”. We can always - and should always - strive for empathy. But true empathy requires us to actually live in another person’s shoes. And the performance of empathy without true understanding can be inauthentic and disingenuous. So, we’re looking at compassion instead.
Compassion is essential for collaboration and defining a shared purpose. It’s an act of understanding and valuing the importance of another person’s perspective, goals and challenges.
A whole-organisation content strategy developed without compassion for and between all stakeholders won’t work. It might work for a while, but eventually those stakeholders will return to old patterns of working because they’ll continually feel “this content strategy isn’t for me. It doesn’t understand my needs, so I will get them met another way.”
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It’s worth saying, that these foundations can be laid as you are developing the strategy. They don’t have to be in place before you start. So, my advice here is to view your content strategy projects as an opportunity to effect cultural shifts, to lead those changes, and not something that you wait for or avoid. If you wait, you’ll never develop that strategy. If you avoid the changes, your content strategy will only have limited success.
At Pickle Jar Communications we support our clients by addressing culture as well as content when we’re developing content strategies. We bring a coaching-led approach, and a belief in possibility. We also have the courage to ask the challenging questions. Why not have a chat with us about how we can help you?