Hilary Marsh in action at a past Boye conference in Denmark. You can meet her at our Brooklyn 21 conference in May.
and other ways executives care about content strategy
by Hilary Marsh
How does content strategy deliver on issues CEOs care about? The best way to find the answer to this question is to ask the CEOs themselves. I did just that as part of the ASAE Foundation report on content strategy adoption and maturity I co-authored with Carrie Hane and Dina Lewis.
I interviewed four association CEOs whose organizations have advanced-level content strategy:
Barbara Byrd Keenan, FASAE, CAE, CEO of the Endocrine Society
Arlene Pietranton, PhD, FASAE, CAE, CEO of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA)
Christie Tarantino-Dean, FASAE, CAE, CEO of the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT)
Scott Wiley, FASAE, CAE, President and CEO of the Ohio Society of CPAs (OSCPA)
CEOs focus on measurable business results, smooth processes, and confirmation that the organization is using its resources most effectively. And content plays a significant role in all three of these.
Content supports measurable business results
CEOs want to know that the organization’s offerings — its products, programs, services, information, resources, and tools — are achieving their goals. Content strategy success with this lens means the organization is doing several things:
Creating content of and about its offerings that inspires the target audience to see the organization’s value and benefit and that inspires current people to use the offerings. Executives value audience engagement and retention as important metrics.
Creating content about the organization’s offerings that inspires prospective members to join/buy because they see the value for themselves.
“It’s important that our organization is seen as a thought leader,” said Wiley.
“Content strategy could be viewed as a tool to ensure that the organization is talking about the right things to the right audiences for the right reasons,” said Keenan.
For Tarantino-Dean, “Content effectiveness means that members are actually taking advantage of the resources we offer. If the topic doesn’t hit the mark or the content doesn’t work for them in the way they need, it’s not effective. If we’re not providing value to people the way they want it, ultimately they will go elsewhere.”
Wiley cited an example of a Supreme Court ruling that affected OSCPA members. Previously, he said, they “would have created a public policy statement and disseminated it through the communications team, while the learning team planned a separate event.” In contrast, the team worked together to develop a plan to bring in thought leaders to create the content the day after the ruling and had content live within 36 hours. “We had a guiding strategy, so we didn’t have to wonder how we would approach this – we already knew,” he said. “That is valuable to me as a CEO, because it positions us as top of mind and ahead of the curve. People have come to trust that we know what’s happening and can explain it in a way that’s digestible and useful. That makes us valuable to our audiences.”
Smooth processes and content governance produce effective content
CEOs have made strategic decisions about what the organization offers, and they put the right leaders in place within the organization to hire staff to keep those offerings compelling, current, and relevant to the audiences.
This takes a deep understanding of the audience’s needs, as well as their context. Associations’ structure gives them a unique challenge and opportunity: Volunteer members serve to direct or validate the organization’s priorities, offerings, and initiatives (the model varies in each association).
Some associations use volunteer committees to validate how they present their work. This approach is not always successful, because committee members know too much about the organization to serve as stand-ins for less engaged members.
Organizations need content governance to support leadership decisions and prevent internal politics from getting in the way. “As CEO, I’ve set out the vision and made it clear that people can’t come to me to pick a side. We need a model to guide us down the path. A lot of organizations like to say they are doing content strategy because it’s a popular buzzword, but have they given thought to how to put the infrastructure in place to make it happen effectively?” Wiley asked.
“We have completely changed how we think about content,” said Wiley. And they reorganized their teams to support the new vision. “Our events team has become a learning team responsible for content and curriculum development, marketing is now part of our member experience team, and communications has become a dedicated media and content team focused on our content strategy.”
Tarantino-Dean specifically pointed to the value of the empathy-based personas they created as part of the content strategy. “We overlaid our personas on top of our member needs research, which showed us which audiences we were serving well and which ones we weren’t.” They identified a clear gap in content for a key audience segment, which they are now addressing. “We’re talking about how to use content to deliver value to our audiences in a completely different way, and we are looking at our programs through a member lens.”
ASHA’s Strategic Pathway currently has eight strategic priorities, each classified as whether it’s in run, grow, or transform mode. “Everyone understands how their work – and their content – fits in on this pathway,” said Pietranton.
Content governance is key, said Wiley. “If there are conflicting decisions, I ask people to walk me through where it lies in the governance chain. If we’ve done this well, we’ve already figured this out. I’m not going to pick winners and losers.”
All CEOs said they use analytics as key points for making decisions about what content to create, as well as whether the audience is finding and using the organization’s content (and, by extension, its programs, products, and services).
Content validates that the organization is using internal resources effectively
The CEOs all mentioned that the organizations formerly had silos, and now that the silos have gone away, everyone in the organization is thinking about content in new ways.
“Having a content strategy gives us the opportunity to look at our content differently,” said Pietranton. “We still have some decentralized decision-making, but we’ve become more enterprise-wide in our thinking. In ASHA’s workplace culture, people think about how they can add value to each other’s work.”
“Content must be properly resourced, and it’s key that you educate people on how to work in cross-functional teams,” Keenan points out, and adds that culture is a critical element of content strategy success. “If the culture doesn’t buy in to the vision, they will find ways to fight it. I know I can’t do that alone – I need strong lieutenants as champions and I also need to provide them with enough resources to learn how to develop content in a new way while they still have demanding day jobs. CEOs need to understand that it’s a strategic pivot to stop developing content by department, which are inherently in siloes.”
IFT thinks about its content by topic. “Topic is a much better lens for presenting content, rather than by department. You shouldn’t have to know the structure of our organization in order to find anything,” Tarantino-Dean said.
“If content wasn’t working, people would be running into my office all the time,” Wiley observed. “I would see that it is out of alignment, which means we could be duplicating or wasting time and risking that our message is not consistent across the organization.”
Summing up…
Content is something all CEOs should care about – it needs to have responsibility, authority, and also accountability in the organization,” according to Wiley.
“CEOs need to understand how important and fundamental content and content strategy are to what we do,” said Pietranton.
Learn more about content strategy
Hilary Marsh gave a popular presentation on building your content strategy back at the Boye 15 Philadelphia conference.
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