It’s such a strange time of year for comms and digital people. There’s money, but not for much longer, and the budget you’ll have next financial year is still up in the air.
How do you get value for what you have, and maybe even set your team’s work for the year ahead?
I’ll share some options to help frame your thinking, based on my experience delivering large digital, comms and content projects for well over a decade.
Principles
I’m only sharing options that are:
- Useful. Will this make things better — for your audiences or users; for your team? We’re not spending money just to spend money.
- Vendor agnostic. I want you to get value from my advice. Of course, this post is a low-key marketing effort for True North. But everything I’ll say here will make just as much sense if you take it to another provider.
- Contained. You must be able to start and finish before June 30, or make good headway. Sometimes we see major projects that need to be invoiced in this financial year, but that’s more about managing big buckets of money than getting value from what’s left over.
Your options
My ideas for you are:
- Training
- Strategy workshops
- Focussed workshops
- Content health checks
- Content creation and editing
Training
What you’ll get
A tailored session for your team on any aspect of comms and content, such as:
- Writing for the web
- Business writing skills
- Information architecture
- Content strategy
Value
Particularly with an uncertain economic outlook, giving your team skills to do more in-house is a sound investment.
What’s involved
- Talking to you about what your team needs. We may also ask to see existing strategies or research.
- Tailoring a workshop for your team, using examples from your situation
- Deliver the workshop (in person or online), making it super interactive, and empowering.
Strategy workshops
What you’ll get
A high-level comms or content strategy for your organisation, defined and presented back to you, typically covering areas such as:
- Comms vision and mission
- Value proposition
- Audience definition
- Current state analysis (your comms, plus the systems and capabilities that support it)
- Priorities
- Roadmap for next steps.
Value
Giving you a clear vision and a basis for prioritising action. Out of all the comms and content we’re doing, what will give us the most value?
What’s involved
- Brief discovery (a conversation with you, as well as looking at key organisational documents).
- Defining the agenda in collaboration with you.
- Running the workshop.
- Writing up the insights and themes.
The emphasis here is on engagement and drawing out insights from your team. You’re unlikely to complete detailed research or internal engagement in 8 weeks! It’s about getting people aligned on a direction and capturing requirements. This will also often define a future stage of work, such as:
1) Research the needs of a priority audience that we’ve identified.
2) Define what work needs to come next, and the dependencies.
You can use this workshop to lay the groundwork for a more comprehensive piece to follow.
Focused workshops
What you’ll get
A session to solve a specific question or problem, such as:
- Defining communications priorities (we use the Northstar Framework)
- Generating a content calendar
- Capturing requirements for a new website.
Value
Comms teams spend so much time in reactive mode. This is a chance to take one step back and solve a problem. For example, running a communications prioritisation session with a government team, straight off the bat we saved them $40,000 on a proposed software purchase they didn’t need.
What’s involved
Similar to the strategy workshop above – some discovery, the workshop, and the synthesis.
Content health check
What you’ll get
An expert review of your website or digital channels for performance, quality and alignment with your business goals.
Value
To build the business case for improving what you have, getting a clear picture of your content’s current state is crucial. Analytics on their own are useful, but will miss the context and that question of strategic alignment. You want advice, not just a metric.
What’s involved
- Brief discovery. A conversation with you, as well as reading key documents. We’ll also ask for access to your data sources (such as analytics or search logs).
- Analysising the data and content quality. One of our expert content nerds will combine automated analysis with close review of selected pages.
- Sharing back what we’ve found, with clear recommendations on common issues, and how they can be addressed.
Content creation or editing
What you’ll get
Before EOFY, you may not be able to rewrite a whole website or suite of policy documents. But you can rewrite key pages, edit a guidance product or generate content for a campaign.
Value
A chance to meet an urgent need or tackle a piece of content that’s been on your to-do list for a while.
What’s involved
We follow the standard process:
- Brief discovery: A conversation with you, as well as reading key documents. We may talk to subject matter experts as well.
- Setting up systems: How will we get the content done? This includes defining workflows and clearance, as well as choosing the tool we’ll use to author the content (MS Word, Google docs or GatherContent)
- Delivering the content: Our expert writers get stuck in, creating polished content for your review
Get in touch
If these ideas spark interest, or you have another idea for a project that’s useful and contained, get in touch. We’re always happy to share what we’ve learned.
