Content maturity: content design training (7 of 7)
This is the last in a series of 7 blogs about Scroll’s new content design training modules. It talks about what ‘good’ might look like for a content team, including the organisation of a content team, prioritising existing content over new, and measuring success.
By Andrew Charlesworth
Andrew Charlesworth is a content strategist and Scroll consultant. He specialises in helping organisations measure and improve the impact of their content and efficiently manage its life cycle. He's trained content designers from public and private sector, journalists, and PR execs.
What does a high-performing content team look like?
Content professionals like to complain. The content team never has enough people, time, up-to-date technology, or buy-in from the rest of the organisation.
Leaving aside that the marketing, customer service, operations, and finance departments probably all feel the same way, what would a fully resourced, skilled content team look like? And how would they relate to stakeholders outside the content team?
Scroll has developed a range of customised, modular training courses for content designers. To develop these courses, we drew on many years’ experience of working with content teams in the public, private and third sectors. We’ve helped teams with specific projects, business-as-usual shortfalls and training.
That’s given us a picture of what makes an effective content team, what ‘good’ looks like, and what to aim for with our training.
Evidence-based user needs
In a high-performing content team, all members must be fully conversant with evidence-based, user-centred design. This is a given for public-service teams, such as those in government departments. But it also applies to content marketing teams, whose success is ultimately linked to sales volumes.
To provide the right content, everyone has to understand what a user needs, whether it’s regulatory guidance for citizens, or an up-sell nudge for customers.
How do you discover what users need? Through evidence. So team members must have access to the output of analytics, audit tools and user research to shape publishing requirements and continuously improve the organisation’s content estate.
That doesn’t mean all content designers have to be web analytics whizzes or accomplished user researchers. They have to interpret data, not necessarily originate it. They should be able to tell a story about data, and draw convincing, actionable conclusions for content.
Stakeholder management
There is one skill that a content designer must be good at to succeed: stakeholder management. A mediocre writer can be a good content designer if they can manage stakeholders successfully.
Allowing for specialisms, team members should be able to take a brief from a stakeholder, advise on publishing solutions at a strategic and detailed level, and execute those solutions.
Importantly, their advice should be sought - and listened to - at the beginning of the content requirement process, not after a stakeholder has ‘drafted something that just needs a bit of wordsmithing’.
As part of being a good advisor, all team members should have the skills and power to veto inappropriate publishing requests with full support from the team lead.
Managing trumps creating
Team members must understand the imperative to manage content rather than successively publish new content.
The team should be following a development plan that ensures content is managed over its lifecycle, rather than executing successive layers of publishing. Rolling audit should cover 100% of the content estate annually. The most valuable content identified by the audit should be regularly subjected to analysis and testing with relevant users for continuous improvement.
Team members should understand that decisions must be made in the context of all the relevant content for a given user need, including content 'owned' by other stakeholders, not just the item that needs changing or creating.
Organising for content
Not all the attributes of a high-performing content team are based on skills that team members can acquire. Other aspects concern the way content teams are organised and empowered, the process the organisation adopts for publishing, and the standing of content designers and respect for user-centred design in the organisation.
One question we are often asked is: what is the appropriate size of a content team?
The answer is how much existing content they have to manage, not how much content they will be creating.
For example, in government departments which publish a large volume of guidance content aimed at citizens, one content designer per 800 ‘pages’ of guidance is deemed reasonable. Whereas in a media organisation or content marketing operation, where the CMS can automatically archive out of date content, then a higher ratio would be appropriate.
The skills base, permanency and reporting lines of the team also matter. A team of 5 highly skilled, experienced content designers may be more productive than double the number of juniors, especially if they can automate some of the content grunt work in the CMS. But they will be overwhelmed if the volume of content to be managed exceeds their capacity, or they are constantly bombarded with commissions based on vanity, not user need.
While contractors are a great resource for executing specific projects, a long-term imbalance of contractors to permanent team members in business as usual (BAU) operations signals chronic understaffing (as well as contravenes IR35 rules).
If the content team reports to a manager who is unsympathetic to user-centred design, then no matter how many their number, or how skilled, their efforts to improve user experience through content will be thwarted.
Measuring success
Ultimately, an organisation has to decide what the measures of success are for its content team, and equip them with the skills and resources to achieve it.
For teams managing public support content, that measure may be a reduction in the number of call centre interactions. For content marketing, success might be linked to sales revenue. For content maintenance roles, the measure might be the number, complexity and velocity of support tickets.
This is where Scroll’s modular training bleeds into content strategy. By involving stakeholders from outside the content team in some of the strategic workshops about process and governance, we can help the content team to become agents for change in their organisations.
Scroll’s new modular training
The focus of Scroll’s new modular training is on developing skills that content teams struggle to acquire:
Content design basics
The role of user research
Content process design
Stakeholder management
Taking a brief
Thinking like a user
Accessibility
Discussion, review, and 2i
Co-developing content
Measuring content and audit
Content lifecycle management
Read more about Scroll’s content design training.
Talk to us about improving user experience by upskilling your content team.