By Corey Vilhauer CHAPTER 10Here’s why. I went way over their heads.
It wasn’t that they couldn’t understand the plan; they just couldn’t
understand why I had spent so much time on it. The website had 20 pages
total, and they had a skeleton crew of volunteers running the organization.
They had no need for detailed content plans — they just needed insight
and direction on how to reach their audiences. They had no need for a
weekly content calendar — they barely had enough staffing to make it to
weekly meetings. They were a non-profit group. They were friends. They
took my contribution as the overzealous ramblings of a content fanatic.
But what if this was a paying client? What if this was someone who
had agreed to spend a full 50% of their marketing budget on a new web-
site? What if you delivered a pointless deliverable because you thought
that’s what they needed?
It’s going to go over their heads, too — as soon as the anger subsides.
Because you’re not just wasting their time and money, at that point: you’re
unknowingly sabotaging their internal team by demanding more project
buy-in than they can handle. We all have methodologies, but none of them
are one-size-fits-all. They’re expandable and contractable, movable and
skippable. They should be designed to work in parts, to be scaled back, and
to be adjusted for the needs of the current project.
Give someone every tool in the toolbox, and they’ll spend most of their
time trying to figure out which screwdriver to start with. Our tools will
differ on every project, and that’s the thing to focus on — we need to under-
stand and empathize with the situation in order to provide more than just
a cookie cutter solution from our methodology.
Execution: What
With a strategic plan in place, we now turn to creating actual website con-
tent, a task typically handled over what seems like a thousand days with
input from 17 million people.