Content Governance: Unlock Results For Your Nonprofit’s Digital Content
Nonprofit communications staff live in a world of content — blog posts, videos, fundraising appeals, podcast episodes, social posts, educational resources, action alerts — and if you don’t have a clear system for managing your content, life will be … challenging.
Enter content governance.
This may sound dry and boring, but content governance is the key to taming the chaos of content ideas, content creators, formats, and channels.
Establishing a content governance plan for your organization will make it easier to plan and fill your editorial calendar, develop high-performing content, and answer questions about what content to produce next.
Table of Contents:
Key Tools for Content Governance
Staff Roles and Content Governance
What is Content Governance?
Content Governance is a set of rules for creating, publishing and maintaining content. Developing a content governance plan for your organization will help with numerous challenges you’re probably facing as an overworked communications team member facing a sea of existing content and a never-ending flow of requests for new content!
A content governance plan can help you and your team in the following ways:
Clarify the decision-making process about what content to produce (and what content to prioritize)
Help ensure every team member understands their role in the content production process
Achieve greater consistency and quality across your content
Make content production and publishing schedules more predictable
Improve efficiency and resource allocation
Yes, you will have to put in some work to realize these benefits. Developing and implementing a content governance plan will be a team effort. Adopting a content governance plan may also require a culture shift, as the entire staff learns to relate to content production in a way that matches their role and the skills they have to offer.
Key Tools for Content Governance
A content governance plan relies on several other key tools for success. If you have some or all of these already, great! If not, consider how to develop these alongside as part of your broader content strategy process:
Organizational Strategic Plan
Your organization’s strategic plan will be a key reference point for your decisions about content strategy. In the strategic plan, you should find your organization’s mission statement, goals, descriptions of your target audiences or stakeholders, and the tactics or programmatic work your organization conducts.
The target audience and the goal for each piece of content should be clearly linked back to the organizational strategic plan.
Content Library or Tracking Sheet
There are a variety of ways to manage, organize and track content, from a web-based Content Management System (CMS), to a spreadsheet. Whatever system you choose to adopt, your team should have an easy way to review lists of existing content that includes titles, topics, formats, publication dates, and target dates for refreshing or updating content.
Content Brief Form
Setting up a templatized Content Brief Form is a really powerful tool to make sure every new content idea is on target. At minimum, the form should prompt you to describe the following details for each new content piece:
Target audience (from your strategic plan)
Goal or objective this content will help achieve
Key messages
Subject matter expert or sources
Deadline for publication or other significant dates
Whether the content is evergreen or only relevant for a certain time period
The most simple content brief form is a fillable document or a Google Doc that’s easy to duplicate. However, consider automating some of your content workflow by using a Google Form or other form builder that will allow you to feed new content ideas directly into a spreadsheet or project management tool like Asana.
If you can invest some time in training, you may be able to share the content brief form with staff outside the communications team. This allows staff who lead programmatic work for your nonprofit to get engaged with the content creation process as well, while adding some guardrails and structure to the way in which new ideas are presented to your team.
Editorial Calendar
An editorial calendar is key to managing the publication schedule and promotion of content across multiple digital channels. There are a variety of tools to use here, from a basic calendar application like Google Calendar to more complex project management tools like Asana or Trello. There are even tools that combine editorial calendar functionality with social media publishing, like CoSchedule.
Invest some time in finding a tool that works for your team.
Style Guide
Your style guide should cover the following elements:
Design and branding
Grammar and spelling choices (like which formal written style guide you follow)
Editorial choices (like ideal length for different content types)
Accessibility standards
Staff Roles and Content Governance
Clearly defining staff roles is a key component of a content governance plan. At a minimum, try to identify who will serve the following roles on your marketing and communications team:
Managing Editor: provides editorial oversight and serves as the project manager for your content workflows.
Writer(s): one or more writers will produce the final written content. Writers may be writing from scratch, or may be transforming raw content from subject matter experts into written content.
Designer: produces the graphics, visuals and images that accompany your content.
In addition to these roles on the marketing and communications team, your content governance plan will also identify how the team will interact with subject matter experts (SMEs). These individuals may be staff on other teams at your organization, or they may be community members or other external stakeholders. The key distinction is that your SMEs have deep knowledge about the topic you want to cover, but are not necessarily communications professionals.
Some SMEs may feel comfortable producing an initial draft of written content. In such situations, the expectation should always be set that their work will be edited to match your organization’s style and other guidelines (with an additional review and approval step with the SME if necessary).
Other SMEs may be more comfortable sharing their expertise in a conversation that a writer records and turns into written content later. Recordings of webinars or training events are also rich sources that can be mined for written content by communications team members.
Optionally, your organization may also want to define roles for more professionals with more specialized skill sets, such as a video producer, sound editor, or interviewer. These roles will become critical as you expand into additional formats like video stories or podcasts, and might be filled with trusted contractors or as staff roles.
How to Introduce Content Governance at your Organization
As noted above, developing and implementing a content governance plan often requires a culture shift within an organization. As with any culture shift, it’s important to think about how to manage that change, and to ensure key decision-makers and team-leaders are involved in the planning process. Try to get buy-in as high up the organizational chart as possible.
With the need for change management in mind, now you can follow these five steps to get your content governance plan up and running:
1: Audit Your Current Content and Workflows
To get started, you need to understand what you currently have in place:
What types of content do you already have?
What processes are involved in creating content right now?
Breaking your content down into types or categories can be helpful, and the way you do this will be unique for every organization. An easy place to start is to explore content format (eg. blog post, webinar recording, press release) and topic.
For each content cluster that emerges, try to answer the following questions:
Who is involved in creating the content?
How long does it take to produce this piece of content?
Is this content typically only relevant for a period of time, or is it evergreen?
How does the content help advance our goals?
Who is the audience for this content?
How well does this content perform?
What are the challenges we face in producing this type of content?
Is there already an approval process in place?
2: Establish Workflows for Each Content Type
For each type of content, make a list of the steps that need to take place, in order, to move from idea to publication.
For example, a blog post process might look like this:
Record a conversation with the subject matter expert
Draft the title and content
Get SME edits and approval
Draft promotional copy
Produce design elements or select images
Managing editor approval of final draft + promotional copy + graphics
Schedule for publication
Publish
Add to content tracker
Monitor performance
Pro-tip: Noting the average amount of time each step takes can also help implement a content strategy, and provide team members with more insight into how long a piece of content might take to move from ideation to publication.
3: Assign Team Roles for Every Step
Once each content type has a workflow mapped out, you need to assign each step to a specific person. If you struggle with this step, that may be an indication that you need to consider restructuring your communications team.
This step is simple, and it is critically important. Having clearly defined steps, with timelines and specific staff members in charge is what makes a content governance plan so powerful.
4: Establish Style and Editorial Guidelines for Every Content Type
Make your team’s life easier: establish clear style guides and editorial standards to reduce the number of decision points as you create new content. Setting guidelines doesn’t just make content creation easier. It also helps ensure consistency, and that all of your content is aligned with values that your organization has determined to be important.
Here are a few examples of the types of guidelines you may want to consider:
Setting a target length for written content like blog posts (# of words) or live/recorded content like webinars (# minutes).
Setting accessibility guidelines such as ensuring that all images have alt-text, and that content can be read by a screen reader.
Always including a call to action, or a step for the user to take that deepens their engagement.
5: Create a Process for Maintaining Your Content
This final step can be the most challenging, and can also yield the most surprising gains.
As you create and publish new content, make sure you are adding details about each content piece to a content library or tracking database. For content that is intended to be evergreen and continue to receive traffic, set a target date for revisiting that content and making any updates that are necessary to keep it fresh. Depending on the topic, that date may be a few months or even a year from the initial publication date.
Making minor updates to existing content can be an easy way to get more mileage from previous work, with very little effort. Don’t skip this last step!
Conclusion: Increase Impact with a Content Governance Plan
Once you have the right workflows and tools in place, you will start to see the results quickly.
Team members will benefit from increased clarity about roles and timelines and you'll be confident that all content pieces are contributing towards the big picture — helping you organization fulfill its mission.
