17 tips to get content people in the room, for non-content people

You’ve figured out that content design and strategy is more than a magic wand wave of words. And realised you’re not able to write those yourself, in a concise, scannable, user-friendly, clear language, accessible way either.

Maybe you’ve read a book or heard a talk or done a course, and realised there’s a lot more too it than you’d thought. However you found it out, you now know you definitely need a content person for your digital product or service from early on. 

The next step

But how are you going to get content in the room, at the table, contributing valuable learnings and getting stuck in? 

How are you going to convince the Holders Of The Budget Purse Strings that content expertise is a necessity, not a nice to have? That content adds value: for the user, for the organisation – for its current reputation, and its future success.

Ideas

Well, here are some ideas to understand and support content design and strategy:

1. Advocate for content expertise whenever you can.

2. Mention in advance at project planning meetings that you’ll need a content person for the Discovery phase of a product or service’s design. And that it’d be worthwhile having content strategy input before then.

3. Go to content show and tells at your workplace, if an option, to learn more about what content can do.

4. Listen to content talks and read articles.

5. Talk to content designers and strategists about their work.

6. Shadow a content person, if you have that learning option in your workplace.

7. Attend content design training to better understand its processes and the skills, techniques and knowledge it requires.

8. Tell your colleagues about what you learnt. Give a short summary on your internal comms channel. Bonus: you can practice your new skills by doing that.

9. Look out on your organisations’s Slack, Teams, Yammer, Intranet forum or other organisation-preferred channel for any internal discussion on business goals and strategies. Tell them about something called content strategy… 

10 . Suggest they get a content strategy, if they have not got one.

11. Request to borrow a content designer from another team for a couple of days, to show your programme lead or studio manager the value they can add. That is, if it’s an option and their own team can spare them. If no in-house content designer is available, bring in a freelancer for this.

12. Ask a content designer to come to your team meeting, to showcase how content can help. For example, get them to demonstrate effective error messages to your developers. Then you’ve got the tech people’s support behind you.

13. Talk to the UX designers, interaction designers, visual designers, service designers. Ask them who creates the textual content? I’ve known designers, and developers, to be hugely relieved when they realise there’s someone else who can craft that bit. That bit being the bit users read, react to, get direction from, are reassured by, know what to do next on account of.

14. If someone holds the view that “anyone can write”, teach them that content design is not just writing. Ask them how they would present information about budgeting for university, for example. Then suggest a calculator tool, with fields for various incomings and outgoings, which can be used accessibly or comes with a clear language equivalent. Let them know that is content design.

15. Help them understand that, in fact, not everyone can write good digital content. Ask them to write up a dense legal paragraph clearly, and scannably. You’re bound to have some handy source material in your organisation’s terms and conditions.

16. Show them that content is the glue that holds everything together. Take a screenshot of any web page and photo-edit out all the titles, subheads, body text, calls to action, radio button text, microcopy. 

17. Show them examples of sites with awful, user-unfriendly content. And ask them to try to perform tasks on them. Sit back and wait for the exasperation.

Cake training

We offer online pathway courses into content design and user-centred design, plus short courses on content accessibility and writing for web.

And, we can recommend content designers, senior content designers, lead content designers, content strategists, and heads of content.