Strategy, Audience Growth & Training for Communications Teams

Structured Content Strategies That Drive Engagement and ROI

Runcible’s highly structured approach to digital content strategy is based on a successful repositioning of the World Economic Forum’s digital presence from 2016-2020 and more recent strategic work with the UN Global Compact, Reliance Foundation, the Noncommunicable Disease Alliance, and the International Labour Organisation. 

There is a particular focus on alignment – ensuring as far as possible that all elements of the strategy reinforce one another – and on the economics of content production, which needs to be tightly managed on the basis of engagement results.

The approach is informed by the main digital content blindspots I’ve encountered when working with purpose-driven organisations:

• Effective digital content strategies  either require a huge promotional budget or a content team that has sufficient agency to uncover and meet real audience needs. Most have neither.
• Organisations tend to favour complexity while users crave simplicity and clear structure. 
• Audiences have questions and seek trusted sources, too often they get unsubtle messaging and unoriginal ‘thought leadership’.
• Half the battle is consistency – getting engaging content out on a regular basis – but few organisations invest in the necessary processes and training. 
• All digital content generates data – it demands to be constantly reviewed for engagement clues, but seldom is. 
• ROI: You can’t do everything, so focus on things not only with the greatest impact but also contribute most to your ‘content ecosystem’. 

1. 360-degree Strategic Review

The first stage is a hard-nosed analysis of your current digital footprint and the content landscape you are operating within. This involves interviews with staff and stakeholders, desk research on the current performance of digital production and engagement, and a broad survey of similar organisations to establish the following:

• Mission: What are the core values of the organisation? Who are the key stakeholders? What is unique about the organisation? 
• Goals: Given the mission, how could/should digital content contribute? What would success actually look and feel like? (Most organisations focus on followers and website visits, but is there a richer set of indicators to help you towards your goals?)
• Distinctiveness: What is it about your organisation that will help you stand out? 
• Audience: Who do you need to engage to achieve those goals (likely to be more than one audience)? What do you need them to do?  What are their unmet needs? What can we say about their preferences for channels, topics, and style? Can we create ‘personas’ to guide decision-making? 
• Current performance: How well does the organisation do on site performance, social media, Search, and other digital media?
• Peers & models: Who else is doing something similar online and cutting through? Are there models from other fields worth considering? What do the algorithms think are similar organisations? 
• Engagement Model: How comprehensive will activities be? Do they include Media Relations? Paid promotion? How widely will content be distributed? How broadly will content be selected and framed – just stories about the org (‘broadcast’) or including stories about the topics the org addresses (content marketing) or stories of interest to the target audiences (publishing)? 
• Digital Identity: What kind of image should you project given target audiences and unique qualities?  How visual/accessible do you need to be? Can you describe what your online persona should be?
• Leveraging networks: What organisations and influential individuals could amplify activities?
• Resourcing: How much bandwidth is there available?  Do skills need to be upgraded? Is it possible to add resources to the pot?

The answers to all these questions need to be synthesised and the following outputs created:

1. An engagement model that filters possible content tactics through filters for engagement potential and required effort.
2. A clear narrative that links the engagement model to the organisation’s wider goals and makes it clear to stakeholders, users, and staff why the engagement model makes sense.
3. A set of operating principles to support consistent decision-making when it comes to operations. 
4. The identification of skills, capacity, technology, and workflow gaps. 
5. A comparison set and stretch models to aid the future analysis of performance.

2.    Capacity-building Action Plan 

Opportunities need to be costed, scored for impact, prioritised, and sequenced. This stage requires an honest assessment of where the organisation is, where it wants to get to and a realistic approach to phasing development. This is a major piece of change management and a crucial input at this stage is the time of internal decision-makers. The resultant action plan creates a timeline that draws together the following capacity-building strands: 

• Prioritisation: Which workstreams should come first because they are foundational? 
• Targets for production and performance across Web Content, Social and other key strands. These will be set with a range of benchmark organisations in mind. 
• Staffing: Sequencing the deployment of staff time and onboarding external resources. Who will produce the content? Who will handle any website changes? Is there a need for specialist support for promotions? 
• Workflow: Setting out the processes, tools, templates and checklists that will be needed by internal and external staff to create a production system that is smooth-functioning and scalable. 
• Roles and responsibilities: Clarity is needed over who is responsible for each aspect of the plan. 
• Internal buy-in: Agreeing the commitment of time from internal stakeholders to ensure they are lined up with the workflow development. 
• Workshops, coaching and other training to build up the skills and efficiency of internal and external staff in ideation, production, and media relations.
• Realistic milestones given staff dependencies: What is the likely availability of staff? Who will need to sign off on new strands?

Most action plans address the following content and distribution elements: 

• Website: At the very least an upgrade to improve speed, particularly on mobile, but more usually structural changes to reflect a more engaging user-first approach, to improve visibility to search engines. In some cases, a complete site rebuild is required.  
• Content production system: A set of processes to ensure that production is streamlined, from ideation through the framing of ideas, to publication, social promotion, and replays.  
• Packaging: A focus on the stage that tends to get rushed – the final packaging of content before publication, from SEO to Social. Workflows need to be honed so that imagery and text are used effectively, and visual storytelling exploited. 
• Appropriate AI: Tools like ChatGPT cannot write or produce well, but they can massively speed up production processes and should be baked into workflows.
• Subscription product launches: Newsletters, Podcasts, and Instant Messaging services deliver very high engagement rates and normally deserve a place in the output portfolio.
• Content resourcing: When bandwidth is scarce may include the recruitment of specialist agencies and/or freelancers to provide a steady flow of content.

3.     Delivery: Build, Operate and Transfer an effective Engagement Engine

In the third phase, a smart, data-driven, scalable production system is built using the plan agreed under 2 above. The Consultant shadow-manages the operation during this phase to ensure that progress is as fast as possible. The key work streams at this stage are: 

• Website: Specification of any enhancements or, in the case of a rebuild, drafting the request for proposals, screening agencies, thought partnering on or supervising the build.
• Content: Set up processes for ideation, commissioning, production, approval, and publishing. These draw on templates, collaboration and AI tools, and checklists.
• Workflow: Access to imagery is secured, collaboration tools customised to support systematic content creation, and tools to monitor social, media, and search introduced. 
• Capacity-building: Workshops and coaching for staff; selection, onboarding and initial oversight of external agencies/experts. Continuous coaching. 
• Monitoring and Optimisation: A crucial part of this phase is the setting up of regular all-team reviews to discuss the data on what’s working and what’s not. 
• Management mentoring: Coaching for  the person or people who will continue to run the operation. 

The aim is to set things up so that internal staff can not only continue to run the system but also to continue to innovate and optimise once the launch project has finished.