Content Strategy in Higher Ed
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Content strategy is the web buzzword of 2011, but what does it really mean for the higher ed world of limited budgets, low staffing resources, and multiple stakeholders? Presented at the HighEdWeb conference in Austin, TX, in Oct. 2011.
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Content Strategy in Higher Ed
- 1. WHAT CONTENT STRATEGY REALLY MEANS FOR HIGHER ED Kate Johnson Senior Web content strategist University of Denver
- 2. What do content strategists do? “When we get really busy, we may not ” have time for all that strategy stuff.
- 3. Daniel Eizans, Richard Ingram, ClearPath, Jeremy Lee James
- 4. It’s complicated Multiple people involved across departments—administrators and faculty Content from multiple sources Multiple outlets Ongoing maintenance and updates Measurement And so on… Dan McCarthy, ViralHousingFix.com
- 5. Good news! You’re already doing it.
- 6. What content strategy does.
- 7. Don’t go crazy: get a process Write it down Keep it flexible Keep it realistic
- 9. Prioritizing Gathering information Content Postlaunch & maintenance
- 10. Prioritize
- 11. Level 1 sites Map closely to institutional goals Admission, academic programs Hands-on process
- 12. Level 2 sites Indirectly tied to goals Academic advising, recreation Interact at critical points
- 13. Level 3 sites Internal facing, few pages Purchasing instructions, ombuds site Self-serve
- 14. Project kickoff Preliminary information, including: Purpose of the site General goal date for launch Stakeholders Basic technical requirements
- 16. Content/IA kickoff Go through questions verbally Set specific goals Brainstorm metrics Get branding and key messages Get realistic picture of staff resources
- 17. Information architecture Content’s role Collaborate on labels/taxonomy Check for missing content Avoid o needy content o unnecessary content
- 18. Coaching the content process Peter Morville
- 19. Content workflows vary We cover o Collecting information o Writing o Editing o Approvals We set one content contact. Map to content inventory
- 20. Content inventory. Always & forever.
- 23. Content tips for clients Do one section at a time. Name files using the page ID. Collect content via interviews.
- 24. Writing for the Web training One of the biggest challenges. Good content is hard. Simplified voice goes against academic culture. They will always want to paste content from their current site.
- 28. Be a cheerleader. Woot! Get them passionate. Solve their problems. Hamad Al-Mohannna
- 29. Content editing Have to prioritize. Often can’t line edit all pages Do a final proof when you can.
- 30. Getting to launch o Design and development o Content entry o Prelaunch QA o LAUNCH!!!
- 31. Care and feeding
- 32. Postlaunch and maintenance A lifecycle, not a launch Set regular update schedule Instructions on automatic reminders Stress the need for an annual review
- 33. Measurement Set metrics. Base them on site goals Maybe analytics, maybe not Must be specific and actionable
- 34. Toolkit Project kickoff questionnaire Content/IA questions Sample content inventory Page content template Writing for the Web presentation Web style guide Content models for faculty bios and degree programs
- 36. Me Kate Johnson @katedjohns kate.johnson@du.edu
Editor's Notes
- We’ll have different
- Other than say “leverage” a lotGuy who works in the Web. Verbal quotation marks are were definitely there. Sense that content strategy was about creating lots of reports and briefs and all kinds of fussiness.
- In fact, I have never known a group of people as into diagrams and workflows as these people are.I don’t mean to knock the diagrams, or my fellow content strategists. But when you’re in your day-to-day life, trying to keep your news site updated and your degree programs optimized for search engines, they can seem a little esoteric.But there’s a reason for them, a reason that matters to you.
- Part of what it’s done is just recognize that fact.
- One of the best things we bring to the table; a process. Mostly be talking here about new site builds, or sites being reworked to enter new template. Flexible—not suggesting that the tools I’m showing you are perfect, or even final. Every project we go through we think, if we’d just asked that earlier. Or that part’s too complicated.
- Content strategists try to pick apart a process that has so many steps and parties involved and politics to negotiate, and skill sets it requires.This is what it means to you: a set of tools for breaking down a great glob of a process into patterns and steps, finding ways to approach it consistently and find efficiencies.All the while advocating for a protecting content as a real resource, as the whole REASON a site exists, in a world where historically it’s been an afterthought.So what does this mean for you
- One of the best things we bring to the table; a process. Mostly be talking here about new site builds, or sites being reworked to enter new template. Flexible—not suggesting that the tools I’m showing you are perfect, or even final. Every project we go through we think, if we’d just asked that earlier. Or that part’s too complicated.
- Will talk you through process and show you tools. Provide link to all tools.Process is not exhaustive. Lots more you can do. Audience analysis, personas, competitive analysis, could go on all day. Boots on the ground, where we get the most bang for our buck. Though I’ll be going through our whole process, a little bit will go a long way. Just one or two of these tools can make your process a lot easier.
- This can be muchmore complex. Lots of steps—competitive analysis, risk/benefit analysis, formal qualitative/quantitative audit of current content. Goal is to be very realistic. Know that, we’re coming from an environment that’s very decentralized,
- Fact is, much as we would like to, Mid-sized school of abt 11,000, hundreds of thousands of pages. We have a two-person central content team, myself and Web editor. We’re incredibly lucky. And yet we can’t write/maintain even a small percentage of those. Conscious prioritizing. Break it down to 3 levels.Prioritizing—based entirely on institutional goals and priorities. For us, that means recruiting new students, increasing alumni interaction to increase giving.
- Fact is, much as we would like to, Prioritizing—based entirely on institutional goals and priorities. For us, that means recruiting new students, increasing alumni interaction to increase giving.
- Touch at key steps: approving information architecture, at least one content review
- Each level goes through all of these steps, in their own way. How exactly you prioritize is going to be up to you—what resources you’re going to be able to give and not give to each client. A collaboration between you and what your leadership is willing to let you say yes and no to. The key takeaway really is that you have prioritize, and have to put a lot of thought into it. Another example of all the messy issues you have to navigate.
- Swap for site questionnaireEveryone does this, all three priority levels
- Again, these will all be available later.Word doc that they can fill out. They share with group via Yammer.
- Meet and go through a verbal questionnaire. Needs to be verbal because information is detailed, context matters. Generally do this with everyone except the self-serve people.
- Keep the needy content out of the IA right from the beginning. They will be ambitious, always. News pages, for example, should set off alarms. Events that have to be manually updated.
- I love my content inventory. Couldn’t live w/o it. One document track everything about a page.Excel spreadsheet. One line = one document.Swap in an image of the sitemap, then back out.With hands-on clients, we generally start filling it out for them, fill in the first 5 or 10 pages based on their content. Continues to be useful after launch—is a working document.
- Reminder to include metadata
- Hard—I’ve been doing content in one form or another for more than 10 years, and still find it hard.Demonstrating the brand without throwing out platitudes is a challenging thing, keeping text lively—it’s sort of an art. No matter how brilliant their content is, it needs to be reviewed for best practices in writing for the Web.
- Ask clients to watch it, even if they only watch the first couple minutes.Also have very short document—couple pages—for them to read through if they don’t watch presentation, or so they can have it at hand to refer back to.
- Providing these for frequently appearing content—faculty profiles, degree program descriptions.
- Hard to elicit changes after they’ve written the text. Very smart content strategist, Karen McGrane, said 90% of what we do is change management.This is really the part that I keep working at every day, trying new approaches to. It takes intuition, different things succeed with different people. With one person, it was just being really persistent. With another person, it was really just the data. With some, you just have to nudge them a bit at a time.
- QA—consistency. Print content experience comes in handy.
- You have your beautiful, fragile young website, reaching for the sun.
- Have a maintenance conversation—an email w/lower priority sites, an in-person meeting with higher ones.Goes beyond maintenance—what strategists might call governance.
- XXXX had a good blog post about