Strategies are only as good as their results. Once you’ve gone through activities to define messaging and brand attributes – including Brand Pillars, Messaging Architecture, and Storymapping – you need to translate the work into actionable tools. In this webinar, you'll learn how to this on a limited budget, using tools available to you right now.

1. Content Strategy for Nonprofits, Part 2
Developing Your Voice &
Defining Your Strategy

2. Michaela Hackner
Director of Content Strategy, Forum One
Brett Meyer
Lead Strategist, ThinkShout

4. Direction Setting

6. Web redesigns are like a science experiment….
Define Goals and Measures
● What are our website goals?
● How can we measure our impact to know if we
were successful?

8. Who are we speaking to?
Define and Prioritize Audiences
● Who are our audiences?
● Which are the highest priority?
● What’s their tolerance?
● What are there motivations?

10. What experience do we want to create with our content?
Know Feel Find Act
● What do we want our audience to know about us?
● What do we want them to feel when they read our
*Methodology derived from John Schneider
content?
● What kinds of content / information do we want them to
find?
● What do we want them to do?

14. What do we want to say and how do we want to say it?
Identity Pillars
● Organizations define how they are perceived now and
how they would like be seen in the future.
● Result in a high-level framework for organizations to
*Methodology derived from Ahava Leibtag
communicate their brand.
● Defining and adhering to Identity Pillars helps ensure
organizations stay true to their ethics and goals.

15. Identity Pillars
Current
Brand
Attributes
Future
Brand
Attributes
False Brand
Attributes
Identity
pillars
How we see
ourselves now.
How we want
to be seen in
the future.
How we don’t
want to be
perceived.
How can we
best
communicate
our brand.
*Methodology derived from Ahava Leibtag

18. What do we want to say and how do we want to say it?
Messaging Architecture
You have about 2 seconds to capture your audience’s
attention.
● Messaging architecture defines and articulates your
organization’s key messages in a clear and consistent
way.
● As information architecture defines the blueprint for a
site’s functional and visual design, messaging
architecture defines the blueprint of all site content.
*Methodology derived from Karen McGrane

20. Messaging Architecture
Primary message
Should capture the essence of “what” and “why”.
Secondary messages
Provides supporting information answering “who”,
“how”, “when”, and “how much”.
Triggers / change in beliefs desired
What should the user feel after absorbing your
messages, what change should happen in their
mind based on seeing this information?
*Methodology derived from Karen McGrane

21. This is hard.

22. But worth it.

23. How do we maintain this vision?
Vision / Product Brief
● Develop a brief document that clearly articulates these
outcomes.
● Share it with the rest of the organization, and use it to
keep your content and communications decisions
consistent, and on track.

24. Content Production Planning

25. How does our content relate to our goals – and our audiences?
Cores and Paths
* Methodology derived from Boxes and Arrows
Cores and Paths helps us:
● Focus on the content & functionality that your users want
● Consider the varied ways a user might arrive at this piece of
content
● Explore how we can engage users in supporting your
organizational goals in the context of a core offering
● Consider where we might want our users to go from there
based upon your organizational goals

26. Inward Paths
User Goals Organizational Goals
Outward Paths
Core Content / Functionality
Supporting Information
Search Terms Elements of the Core Calls to Action
Based on the work of http://www.netflow-lindemann.de/

27. What is the journey we want our visitors to take?
Journey Mapping
Explore the “journeys” key audiences take as the become
more deeply engaged in your organization. Mapping out
this experience helps us:
● Achieve a shared understanding of user needs and
goals and how they relate to the content.
● Identify what content is strong, where the gaps are, and
derive an approach to strengthen conversions.
*Methodology derived from Donna LiChaw and Lis Hubert

29. How can we ensure consistency throughout our content?
Content Creation Templates
Once you’ve defined your messaging architecture, you
need to apply those ideas to all your content.
● Content creation templates help you outline your story
before you start writing.
● Doing so ensures you weave an appropriate,
persuasive, and deliberate story across your website
and communication channels.

32. How do we ensure our content stays fresh?
Editorial Calendar
Content gets stale! Doing all the strategy work upfront is
for naught if you don’t have a plan to maintain it over time.
● Plan out the content you’ll need to write / refresh, identify
owners, and keep track of the status.
● Use this opportunity to re-evaluate older content (6+
months old).

35. Governance Planning

36. How do we ensure our content governance is successful?
Asking the 11 questions
1. Do you know how much content you have on your current site?
2. Have you (or will you) audit the content on your current site?
3. Are you archiving outdated or poor quality content on the
*Methodology derived from GatherContent
current site?
4. Do you know who is going to (re)write all the content for the
new site?
5. Does someone have overall responsibility for content quality
during the project and beyond launch?

37. How do we ensure our content governance is successful?
Asking the 11 questions
6. Do you know (roughly) how many hours per week will be
dedicated to maintaining content on the new site?
7. Does the current site have dedicated (subject expert) content
*Methodology derived from GatherContent
owners?
8. Do you know if any current content is syndicated
9. Will you have a (digital) content style guide
10.Do you have analytics running on your current site?
11.Can content be published in phases after the site launches?

38. How can we ensure our content stays fresh?
Developing a governance strategy
● Interview content stakeholders.
● Identify the good.
● Out with the bad.
● Generate buy-in from senior stakeholders.
● Establish content roles and owners.
● Formalize a plan.
● Train staff.

39. Resources

40. • Epic List of Content Strategy Resources | Jon Colman
• The Digital Crown: Winning at Content on the Web | Ahava
Leibtag
• Content Strategy at Work | Margot Bloomstein
• Storymapping, A Macgyver Approach to Content Strategy | Donna
Lichaw & Lis Hubert
• Nicely Said | Nicole Fenton & Kate Kiefer Lee
• GatherContent’s Blog
• Content First User Experience | Steph Hay
• How to Implement a Content First Workflow | Chromatic
• MailChimp’s Style Guide
• A Great Content Strategy’s Anatomy | Search Engine Journal

41. Giveaway!

42. GatherContent
1- year subscription!
How many times have you been waiting on a colleague or copywriter to
hand over the content your project needs — or had a team mate trying
to make sense of a big, badly-formatted Word document when they are
pasting content into the CMS? What if you could avoid the usual
headaches on your web projects? GatherContent is a content-first
solution that helps organisations and their staff plan, organise and
collaborate on website content. Pre-CMS.