By Corey Vilhauer CHAPTER 10Strategy: How
Strategic planning is often handled from a user perspective (What are
our audiences’ goals? How can we help achieve them? What content do we
need?); which is fine, except that we need to do more to answer the ques-
tions under the surface. In addition to how to achieve goals, we need to de-
termine who can create the content. Along with working out what content
we need, we need to establish who can maintain it.
Melissa Rach and Kristina Halvorson define strategy as “an idea that
sets the direction for the future.”^10 A strategy is not a document; it’s the idea
behind the document. Which means it encompasses much more than a
document ever could — it’s made of culture, workforce, tools and, most of
all, people.
Therefore, our strategic plans must embrace a little bit of both worlds.
At Blend, our strategic content plans set out the following high-level
concepts:
- Reiteration of website audiences and objectives
- Analysis of current content issues and proposed changes
- Gap analysis of content needs and proposed additions
- An action plan for proposed website messaging
- An action plan for proposed website structure
- An action plan for proposed website governance
- Measurements for success
You’ll notice that apart from the proposed website governance plan,
nearly all of those items are user-facing strategies. Yet, there’s a hidden
purpose to all of this analysis and strategy: we are throwing these ideas out
not just to see if they’ll work with website users, but also to see if they’ll be
accepted by editors.
10 Halvorson, Kristina, and Rach, Melissa; Content Strategy for the Web, Second Edition, http://content-
strategy.com