 Hey, welcome My name is Dory Kellner and I'm going to be talking to you today about the collaborative content audit I am managing partner at sleight of hand studios the co-owner We founded the company in 2004 outside Washington DC to serve mission-driven organizations and I primarily run the discovery and content strategy for the organization for our clients and Do a lot of content work But before we get into that I'm going to ask you all to be very brave and Tell me if you have a drawer a Closet or an entire room where you live or your office that looks like this More than one. Yes Yeah, I actually Dated someone who had an entire room that was off-limits and I found out several years later. It looked like that Ceiling to floor hoarding is not something you want to do with your content And it's not just about Rearranging the drawer and making it look prettier It's about purging It's about getting rid of what you don't need and you don't use when Your audience comes to your website and can't find something It's the same as you going into that drawer You look for a while and you give up and Then maybe you go out and you buy the thing all over again and you put it in the drawer I need a look again a couple of days later and now you can't find it again and Ultimately you walk away Because we all know we never go in that drawer. We never go back to it. We just like I'm done. I'm done with it. I don't want to deal with it. I don't have time to deal with it That's how your audience is looking at your website if you're hoarding content if They can't find what they're looking for if the content isn't aligned with what their expectations are If you're not giving them a business reason to go into that drawer They're gonna go away and they're gonna go to some other drawer. That's a lot neater and a lot easier to deal with So I'm gonna read you a short story You lie awake at night thinking about your content. There's so much to fix so much to plan for You want to get ahead but you can barely keep up with what's happening day to day The last time you tried talking to someone about the big picture The conversation was cut short by yet another content Emergency and that puts you right back into reactive mode and the content keeps coming and coming and coming For those of you who are content creators does this resonate? We can never stay ahead of the content flow on our sites So the idea in this session is to help you move from being reactive to content to being proactive To creating an environment for your organization That allows you to keep ahead of the content and to ensure that the content is always viable and relevant this is your Typical content creation process It doesn't necessarily Align with everything that you're doing in your organizations, but it's pretty much what happens you're talking about who your customer is and What their needs are that you have to consider? You're asking why are we doing this in the first place? What are our business goals and objectives and why will people even bother to care and come read what we write? Then we have sort of what we call the how how is what are the distribution channels? How are they different? Which are the right ones for us? And then we have that execution phase where we're doing the writing You know, when do we post it? You know, when will it be promoted? Who's creating it? And then the and the governance and those two things work back back and back together with each other Planning it looking at performance of each piece of content talk talking about the workflows so you're all doing some flavor of this process and the idea is that Users deserve better content if you're really looking at the process end-to-end It's not about any particular department getting their content up on the site. It's not about pleasing your CEO It's about the user because at the end of the day if they're not coming and looking at your content There is no point to having a web presence So what I'm going to present today is the idea of a content audit and How that audit can help you to get control of the entire content creation process So while an audit is a teeny tiny piece of content strategy I'm going to say that the audit is the essential key to making content strategy actually work in your organization so Why do we even need them in the first place? It's because organizations run on fact not opinion So I want you to think about Supporting fact-based decision-making Having facts in your hand to make decisions about what content is on your site How that content is performing and who it's directed at and by using data that puts us all in neutral territory Nobody can come say to you, but I think but I don't agree because you're coming at them with facts, okay and Those facts are going to help meet your organizational needs your audience needs Your brand standards, which I think a lot of people forget when they write content There is actually a brand that they're supposed to align with It's going to create the entire context for your communications Help your team and your organization better manage their time and money So if you can come at someone with facts from a content audit and say hey, I can save our team money people are going to listen and It's also going to help you scope and justify content projects and content strategy the thing I hear constantly when I speak on content strategy is that People want to know how do I convince my organization to spend money on me? It's my job. I'm the content strategist, but nobody wants to spend money on me. Nobody believes in what I do Content audits are a great way to start getting attention Because you're bringing facts to the table and people are not going to be ignoring data Okay, so when is a good time to do an audit? We always think about doing an audit when we're redesigning. That's that's a no-brainer and when we're going to a new CMS, that's also a time that people say well, are we going to drag all that content over? We're migrating we're doing a lot of migration right now from seven to eight. That's a great time to do a content audit I would say on a rolling basis. You should be doing a content audit Maybe quarterly review some part of the website and see that and this goes hand-in-hand with governance see that your content is still performing the way you expect to and You know right now, let's get started and start discussing You know what a content audit's all about and and how it can help improve How you reach out to your audience? So the goals of the audit I think cleaning up before a new website is pretty obvious Although it's similar to that drawer I have seen people run out of time when they move and they then take all the garbage that they have in their house And they jump it in boxes They seal up the box and they say the junk from the front hall closet on it And they put the box on the moving truck and they move to the new place And they swear that they're going to clean that box out when they get there and where is that box five years later? It's in the basement It's still sealed they never looked at it and you know what they never missed anything that was in that box Right we all have the boxes. I have the boxes You don't miss anything that's in there. So this is a great time to clean out all the the junk from the website It's not a place to archive content I Have clients who truly believe that the website is where they archive everything that they have done and I had one client that had several thousand pages of events We didn't build the site, but we did inherit it and the event was a blob And it was all one great big piece of content and after the event They went in and they typed in paragraphs that discussed all the sessions at each event. So imagine somebody writing up a page on Drupal con and having Every session little summary paragraph with you can view the slides here That was the entire website thousands and thousands of pages that I threw away and Nobody misses them So what we want to do is improve your content performance the findability of the content the quality of the content Figure out whether the content can be reused and repurposed on other channels or content from other channels being able to be Reused and repurposed on your website and again really building that case for content strategy and spending some money on it So we want to get you a small win through an audit to get you a bigger win and have content strategy be essential in your organization Okay We think of content audit as a spreadsheet But I'd like to you to think about starting with a discovery Even if it's a mini discovery, it'll make that spreadsheet much more valuable to you So learn about how your audience is interacting with you how you want them to interact with you and You know, what do you have there that you can work with? Coming in you might be a consultant coming into an organization. You might be new to the project Or you might just not really be immersed in the day-to-day Activities of the people who are preparing the content So take a little time and figure out what's going on talk to people ask questions You always do a lot better if you're leading something like a content strategy Exercise if instead of coming in and telling people what to do you come in and ask them what they do So start out by asking the questions, you know about brand about goals about personas an audience About where the content is coming from about how they govern it I asked somebody the other day, you know, what is what's a governance plan? I was being brought in to do a review and they said we don't have one and they were very honest And I'd say that most organizations I deal with say they don't have one Hey, so we're gonna start out with that and Then we roll up our sleeves There is a lot of work to be done in a content audit and You've got thousands of pages to look at And it's not about saying oh we have blogs we have thousands of blogs will look at a blog It's not about just looking at a blog. It's looking at a large quantity of blogs There are people who say that you should look at at least if you have 5,000 pages on your website You should look at all of them and That's a heavy lift and a lot of small organizations can't afford to do that or there maybe isn't enough time to do that So well you have to have some options Available and what if you have 20,000 or 30,000 pages, you know, what percentage of your site should you be looking at? You know, maybe you're looking at 30 or 40 percent of those pages because you will have some you know repeating Look and feel repeating information Blogs and articles and things that's going to depend like for example if some of them are extremely old They might have been written by different authors than what you've currently got out there And maybe you don't even want to look at those. Maybe you're going to throw the old ones away So you really want to look at what's a lot of what's current and and available on the site to the extent possible Look at it as much content as you can and when there isn't enough time to look at everything You really have two options So instead of doing a full audit of the site the first option is to do a content sampling and That's to say we're going to look at a specific set of objectives or a specific sector of my audience Or pages that get a lot of traffic or pages that get no traffic or pages that are owned by different departments, maybe and So to start breaking apart what we can look at and pick one of those and say we're going to start the audit here and Then look across the entire site across all content types across all sections for whatever it is that you're sampling for The other way to look at it is to do a rolling audit. So maybe you take different chunks of your site Every month or every quarter Depending on what your resources are you might you know adjust this to what works for your staff and your team Because the last thing you want to do is overwhelm people with this because then they're just going to Take this content audit and throw it into that junk drawer So make it work for you. So maybe you have a section of your site. That's just for consumers Maybe you just deal with that one section. Maybe you have another section of your site. That's divided up by by taxonomy, maybe you pick one one Term and just deal with that one term and see what what kind of patterns you can find Based on that and then that will inform the other ones as they roll on and become your next step so two ways to find patterns in the content when you can't look at everything and Try to make it representative of something Hey So the first step we're going to talk about is the quantitative work you need to do So I've divided the audits up into quantitative and qualitative work And we're going to start the quantitative work with the famous spreadsheet Now this is what everybody is quite familiar with we scrape the site We get this giant spreadsheet and we put all this stuff on it You want to build something some meaningful system for your organization? So maybe you're dividing this sheet up by section like this one is there's the about section That's just shown up here You know, maybe it's by content type. Maybe it's by owner or department identify some sort of a purpose and Structure your your inventory in that manner So this is the piece we call the inventory and then you also want to which is not showing up here Have some way of referring back to every line in this in this spreadsheet so you might say about is one one dot oh and then the sub pages to there go one dot one one dot two and the sub pages to there go one dot One dot one one dot one dot two to come up with some sort of a scheme So you can keep track of this stuff because when you start talking to your other team members about this It's gonna be a lot easier to say well, it's item one dot five dot seven So you don't have to like deal in URLs That's the last thing you want to do is like try to figure out the URLs and You're gonna have on this not just what you get off of the website But you want to add your analytics to this and that's why I say you have to roll up your sleeves And take your time. This is the head down heads down work that you're gonna do alone This is not really a collaborative Activity it's something that you're going to bring into the collaborative activity later But this is what you're gonna do alone whether it's you as an individual or you're gonna divide it amongst several people You're going to end up with an inventory that basically shows everything in your system Who owns it and how it's performing? and then the next step is to Start looking at what we've put on the spreadsheet We want to look at our analytics. This is where we end up getting data that we can use and share with with our teams and the data allows us to Decide whether we need to change course You know how what are what are the page? What are page views look like and you want to look at them in different ways? Look across different subject areas look across your audiences. How are these pages performing? How often are we updating them? What is their performance look like load time which matters an awful lot to Google? If your load times are really really low Really fast you're gonna you're gonna score better What are the bounce rates? What pages does nobody own? What pages have never ever been updated? So if you put your site out five years ago and you have 80% of your pages have never been touched again because all you do is put up blogs. You're doing somebody a disservice So start reviewing all the analytics for your pages and then compare them to what your expectations are Do you already have some measures in place? And how does your content score against the measures that you've put in place? the distribution of the content across audience segments for example the frequency of updates the the content that People can't find How do you get to a page? How do you leave a page? What are your goals? So you start to take the analytics and compare it to the measures you already have now if you don't have any measures You still can do quite a lot For example, look at the top 25 pages See how I see what pages are actually really performing. This doesn't always have to be a negative This is a positive. These are the pages that are doing really really well in Google and we want to know why Why why are these pages different from all other pages? And do they align with certain audiences? Do they align with certain subject matter? Do they align with certain taxonomy? Why are these pages doing well? You'll learn a lot from what does well as much as you will by looking at things that don't perform So start looking at your top pages. Then maybe you go if you have a Site that it four different departments are responsible for You look to see if you know what what who which department has really few page views So if I say that you know There's fewer than 50 page views 15% of my site from the marketing group has fewer than 50 page views But you know 28% of my advocacy advocacy group has fewer than 50 page views so you start comparing what departments are doing and whether your content is really Distributed properly among the departments in the organization who's responsible for them You might find that some teams have a lot of time to devote to building new content or to revising content and other teams do not Target audience. What's your distribution of pages by audience? So here, maybe we have 32 percent of the pages are for members and Yet 50% of the views are going to that 32 percent of pages so that might tell us hey Maybe we need to redistribute the pages by audience we've got more people looking at the membership pages than are looking at Pages for the public. Maybe the public's not really coming to our site Maybe only our members are coming to our site and that's fine You start learning information about your audience just by learn looking at the analytics The other thing is if that's not fine if you say but we really do want the public to come now You have some more information that you can say how can we do that? How could we make that audience feel like this is the drawer we want them to look at? Revision year is another thing you can see that you know People get really excited when they have a new website and they start putting the content in and looking at it And then they get overwhelmed and they stop working on that and then by the time five years comes around We only have five four six or seven percent of the pages have gotten revised this in the past year And that's a really low number so again analytics so you can come to Understand you can and you can divide this up again by audience by department by You know you can even look at you know our people that five percent that changed does that have better page views is Our is our newer content performing better than our old than the content We wrote five years ago that we didn't bother to update and All of this then leads you to finding the rot A lot of people in the content space know this term, but if you do not it stands for redundant out of date and trivial This is basically your non-performing content and beyond the storage which storage doesn't cost a lot right now But it still costs something and let's face it any penny that you can save in your organization You're going to get kudos for that But beyond the storage your content has a shelf life It's not your archive and the amount of content that you have is going to impact the findability of the content so We just don't want to be overwhelmed by all the content on the site And we don't want our audience to be overwhelmed by all the content on the site So let's go through rot and let's go through everything in the inventory with these three elements in mind now So we've done our analytics now. We're looking at our rot redundancy How many people have had this issue where? Your clients maintaining their site and all of a sudden you start to see the same thing in multiple pages Yeah, because they're like well a member called and they couldn't find X Y Z So we stuck it on the menu or we added it to this the first paragraph on all these pages And now they have to maintain that information in multiple places So instead of thinking about gee, maybe we have an architecture problem because let's face it if you're not in the industry I don't expect my clients to take that leap and say I have an architecture problem I do expect them to call me, but they don't they're dealier at their desk They've got this person on the phone complaining and they fix it the way they know how to fix it And that's by making the content redundant putting it in multiple places Repeating it over and over again, or just talking the daylights out of it Just explaining you know the obvious over and over and over again So look at pages that aren't visited frequently That might be a sign that you've got a lot of redundancy or a lot of overwordiness to those pages and start asking the editors About whether they're updating content in multiple places You're gonna learn a lot about this and this is gonna be a great way to reduce a lot of the content on your site Now we're gonna move to out of date So you've got expired products expired services Maybe contact information that's changed You know that somebody left the organization and it still says for membership called Joe Smith Well Joe left four years ago That doesn't look good either when Mary answers the phone Really good place where this happens a lot is in news events and blog posts even in articles Where they get really old and we think well, but somebody's gonna want to go back to January of 2010 Because they said you know they went to this conference that we had and they want to go back and look at what sessions we had then No, they're not We actually hit the block limit In triple at one of our sites because yes We hit the block limit because our client had the way the way on all these these event pages were structured they had blocks on all the event pages and they've been doing this since 2010 and They they run dozens and dozens of events every year across the country And they insist that people want to go back and look at those old events and look at you know What certifications did we offer back in that event and honestly people don't want to do that? So look for stuff. That's old that has an old modification date or no modification date at all If I did that on their site, I would see content from 2010 2011 2012 that nobody has ever touched again Everything over two years old needs to be looked at If you do have really high performing content from that's over two years old I'm not saying get rid of it. It doesn't hurt to look at it though review it again for tone If it's something like a blog post and it's dated an article that it's dated You might have some Credibility problems with it even though the content is great And so for a piece of content like that you might want to rewrite that blog post Repost it do a redirect from the old one to the new one so you don't lose your traffic and people don't get mad that they've Bookmarked it and they can't find it again But really to say well, I really want to leave that blog post from 2013 up because that's where we stored all of this Information well, you know, maybe that information needs to be elsewhere now if it's that important to the organization It probably doesn't belong in a blog post So start looking for it for anything over two years old and really determine should it be rewritten should it be repurposed should it go away and Use a link checker because if you've linked to external sites a lot of those links vanish really fast I mean, you know It used to be like you could wait around a while sites sites are dropping off and and going up so fast right now People are doing exactly what you're doing They're redesigning and the pages that you link to don't exist anymore And a lot of a lot of people don't don't redirect their pages when they do a redesign Of course, we all do I know we all do but a lot of people don't so use a link checker Find the old and broken links fix them I see this a lot of government sites where they're linked to other government sites linked to places that have Regulations and things and especially in the last two years when you have a change of administration all of those sites change So go through and find all those broken links and get those fixed And then we have the trivial Content that's not aligned to what your audience is looking for It used to be I guess it was back in Maybe 2006 or 7 everybody wanted to have weather on their site So there was the little Sun and I was like weather and I was like, why do you have weather? So I had one Organization I was a synagogue and they said well, you know people want to know if we're open I said, well, just tell them whether or not you're open. They were in Chicago So yeah, it snows and things get canceled But you don't need a link to the weather channel to do that So do you need a place on your site where you can have a notification that says hey, we're closed is 12 feet of snow so Look for things on the site that aren't aligned to what you really need your audience to do and what they're there to do And look for content that doesn't meet your standards and requirements Hopefully there's a style guide that talks to You know what it is how your content should be structured What tone you should be using? So start looking for that kind of content So you find that by maybe checking the bounce rate or the time on page things that people are popping off of real quick or You know, you know don't don't want to be on Those are those are pages that I'd say you could probably get rid of look for page views that Don't necessarily align your business needs So there are business cases and then there are these edge cases So do you really need the edge cases addressed on your website? Maybe not and then Another way to find this is through the core model, which I'm going to talk about a little bit later But that's basically aligns your business needs and your top user tasks and tells you where you should be spending your time So that's how you can find your your trivial pages and then like I said to act on this You're gonna delete things archive rewrite fix And also assess the gaps because what's gonna come out of this is Gee, well, we have all this stuff for our fringe cases that we don't need But we're really missing a lot of stuff for some of our main business cases So start this will help us to assess gaps and finally for quantitative you need tools and Most people use a spreadsheet. There are some wonderful scraping tools that put all this in the cloud for you I'm not really big on saying any one type of Tool is better than another what the best tool is one that works for you that it depends on your needs It depends on your skill set I Often just ask somebody to do a view for me and just pull all the stuff out and export it And then I add my analytics onto it. You can use scraping tools And obviously you need your analytics without your analytics. You're really nowhere So now we've done all this heavy lifting all by ourselves And we've finished the quality want quantitative work and now it's time to move on to the qualitative work And I'm going to try to make the qualitative work More as objective as I can because I don't want opinion to start sneaking into this process So there are some standard audit factors that are recommended If you don't have content strategy for the web, it's an amazing book It's it's kind of the Bible of content strategy and I highly highly recommend it It's informed an awful lot of what I do in my practice and These are factors that you can start with or you can create some of your own Use the ones that work throw out what doesn't The thing to remember is there's not necessarily a right or a wrong The rest of the team doesn't know Your boss doesn't know You're going to come and say these are the factors I used and you're going to be authoritative about it and they're going to go Oh Those are interesting So put a rating scale on them Put a one to five put a one to ten whatever works in your organization. So people don't do 1.7 Use use a nice rating scale that that lets you Add to the spreadsheet one more column well one column for each factor and and start rating your pages on these factors This is going to improve your messaging the quality of your content the accuracy of your content And I'd like to say that if those things are in a good place, so will your reputation be? This is the point in which we start saying I need other people So now I've done my quantitative work. I've done my and reviewed my analytics. I've done my rod analysis I've scored my qualitative audit factors and now I want other people to share in what I've done Take all that data all those facts we talked about early on and bring them to a larger audience as As a content strategist alone, there's nothing you're going to be able to do with it But you need the buy-in of a bigger team so You need to talk to people about the goals and audience remember we did that discovery up front now You know what aligns with your goals and audience? You want to learn a little more about the content creation process and how you can be of help in that And you want to come away with consensus Really what it comes down to is if people listen to you and you listen to them You're going to end up in a better place So who is it that I'm going to be talking to and it's everyone I Say you get everyone whether it's around one great big table and one great big party Or you have individual meetings with the development design team with your business owners with your social people with your SEO folks, but you need to lead the discussion on your findings and The designers and developers need to know the constraints that you're working in but they also provide enormous opportunity They have seen everything and they can say you know what we've never seen that work on a site We always get and you know a phone call that says you know when you structure the content like that Somebody's going to call you and say well now we can't find anything when we do it that way It's like good They they have a great understanding a great body of knowledge To take your information and say hey have you thought about doing it this way How many people actually involve designers and developers in their content strategy sessions? Very few So I think that they have and especially in the Drupal space an Enormous amount of information to share a really great understanding of how content is structured how taxonomies work How views work they can be an enormous help to you And you really want the design and the functionality in the content to all be built out at the same time And we don't want to say okay I'm going to design all this with Laura Mipsum, and then you bring me the content when you're done and That doesn't we know that doesn't work right every every content strategist knows that as soon as you you do that And then you come back and you put it all together and you have that title You have that title that goes for three or four lines Right and it's in a view and so here's all these articles and and nobody planned for the title to take up this much of the space And them and the summary to take up that much of the space So gee maybe I would have designed it differently, or maybe I would have recommended as a developer To the content people hey, maybe you should keep your titles to a certain length This is where the back and forth really really helps So to have some real live content and live discussions between the teams so that we all know exactly what it is that we're trying to build Taking a clue from the publishing world governance is not an option so we want to have somebody own this process and It might be a content strategist, but then again it might be a business analyst or it might be a subject matter expert Somebody has to own the process somebody has to Ensure that politics doesn't get in the way of all this hard work. We just did So governance is essential To determining Business value of the content to determining how often it's reviewed and what the standards are what the process is Who's responsible for it? We need to understand the audiences and the relationships and build a governance plan on top of those and We have this content lifecycle You know we all we all do this But we don't always return after delete back to analyze and keep going around and around again in Order to avoid having to do another redesign We want to do ongoing content audits So that we don't keep creating new rot so that we don't keep creating new sections in the site that no longer align With our audience so that we don't fall off the tone that we wanted to create so every piece of content needs to serve the audience and after Your your content is published you do need to go back and evaluate should it be archived? Should it be deleted? Hey, we need to start again So when we talked about rolling audits going back through sections or doing it quarterly That makes the life cycle complete The next important thing to look for in a qualitative audience is tone You need to make your decisions based on tone and brand so if I'm using jargon and jargon is important to my industry Please don't put funny pictures on the site Please don't make jokes or use light informal conversation. You're a serious organization. It's okay to be serious If you're a jargon organization, it's okay to have serious tone If you're a political organization, you need to know when is it? You know watch the news and we're gonna put up new content that aligns with what's going on in the world. I See a lot of sites that you know That are political in nature Like I have a client who deals in the pharmaceutical industry But I never see them posting anything that that's talking about the problems the industry is having I have another client who deals in China business relations and I can't tell you how many articles they post a day That then align with audience and align with what's going on in the world And they get that SEO bump because people are searching for that kind of content And that's exactly what their audience wants. They don't want to have to go to 20 news sources They end up consolidating everything onto their website. It works beautifully And then finally consistency Having a schedule for the content And in leveraging the opportunities like I just said for that's the China organization They leverage those opportunities they have people combing through the news daily and making sure that those things actually get posted And that their emails that go out point to those new pieces of content And that makes you reliable it Gives you It makes everything accurate and actionable on the site There's no reason of content on the site that nobody can act on So whether that act is consuming information just for its own purpose or because you want them to buy something Or because you want them to take some other sort of action maybe fill out a fill out a form Send something to Congress You want them to do something with their with their with this with the site and by having consistency You're building trust with your audience They they understand there's a cadence to your posting and that you're a reliable place for them to go and get information On whatever topic area it is that you're working on The qualitative tools are many many so You know your journey mapping you're going to need in order to understand where your audience needs to have content Editorial calendars even if you don't necessarily have a month's worth of blog posts Figured out ahead of time and everyone says that oh, well, you know, we need to know exactly what we're gonna post every day Yeah, okay, that's hard. That's hard for especially for a small team But at least say every Monday at noon We're putting up a blog post and this is who's responsible for it at least go that far Um migration plans if you need to do redirects you've got to have a migration plan in place The scorecard that we originally talked about Measuring those different characteristics a style guide. This is not a style guide for your visuals This is a style guide for writing How do we write? What does a headline look like? What does a summary look like? Does it have a? field for a Twitter link so People forget that well gee I can have a summary that goes on that views is going to pick up and put on my news page But I can also have a picture tagged and a summary tagged to go to Twitter And it could be a different summary because it's going to fit into 240 characters All of that stuff needs to be planned and in your style guide as well as your tone Content production workshops are amazing ways to collaborate this gives you an opportunity to sit down with the content team and Some a lot of times your subject matter experts are involved in this as well You're getting your content from someone. Maybe you're creating it yourself But usually there's a team of people that are feeding content to the web team and saying here post this Okay, so what is the content production strategy for those people? How exactly do they want to go through review cycles? Who gets to who gets to write who gets to edit who gets to review where does it go back? Who does it go back to so go back to the editor does it go back to the author? Does it go back to the subject matter expert if there's a problem? How do we get the content back and forth? Who gets to post? Who is the definitive poster so that we're ensured that all our styles are met all the tone is correct everything's in place? before it goes live Content production workshop allows you to sit down with people and have them say this is how we work and help build Your website out with a workflow that aligns with that whether you're using you know workbench and collaboration Whether you're using gather content or other workflow tools You now understand how the people want to work because it's not your job to tell them how to work It's your job to give them tools to work better Okay, and we talked a little bit about the core model. I am going to do Hopefully people who are interested will come to the boff tomorrow at noon And this allows you to look strategically at your content So you're basically Aligning your business goals and your user tasks and finding those core pieces and then building out your wireframes from that so that you have some consistency and a sense of importance of information on those pieces pages Hey, so please do join me tomorrow for that discussion outcomes improved usability obviously Making your content more findable making the navigation More in alignment with how people need to find the information Again real using real content to create the architecture and the site map and the and the navigation system Aligning all of that with the channels in which you're actually posting content Sustainability can't be underestimated having repeatable internal processes to improve efficiency Making what I call a brand promise I mean every organization even if you're a government agency if your e-commerce Organize if you're a nonprofit The way people perceive you is your brand and so create a brand promise that says I'm going to give people important stuff to look at This is gonna they're gonna care about what I put out there, and this is not going to become a junk drawer And that helps to again improve the trust and loyalty of your audience and Finally cost control Having That flow of content having KPIs going back whether it's quarterly whether it's yearly whether it's monthly To the content making sure that your processes and your content are aligned with reality is Going to improve the cost of the organization the cost to maintain content Like I said, you know on on your server. Yes, you're gonna have you're gonna need less storage space But what's more important is people and ensuring that you have KPIs in place that people can measure The content against that we continue to keep this objective in fact based and that we are able to as I've heard like for the last two days Integrate the website with marketing strategy that the marketers are the ones who are really leading the charge now they're the ones making the decision and Whether you see yourself as a marketing organization or not somebody maybe a subject matter expert Maybe a CEO maybe a head of an agency They're they're advocating for that organization and you need to support them and integrate with what their business needs are So now we have a neat drawer now we have purged we can find things and and This is this is just the start what I want to say is that It's all probably seemed very obvious to those in a room who are in the content space You're like, yeah, this is obvious. Why don't people care? Why can't I get my message across the thing is? It's not obvious to them. It's not obvious to the development team. It's not obvious to the design team It's not obvious to the business team Okay, you need to make it obvious to them. You need to advocate for content strategy So if you take nothing else away from this session today It's that you are the ones who need to advocate for content strategy And while content audits are just a small piece of content strategy I say that because we can make it objective because we can base it in fact that it can help you in to get content strategy brought into your organization and seen as a norm instead of People saying to you. Well, why do we need to do that? And so if start with your audits start thinking about how everything you do can be objective and fact-based and You're be able to expand to a broader content strategy based on that work Before we go into questions just a shameless plug Drupal Govcon one of the organizers of Drupal Govcon. We would love to have you all there We have three full days of sessions just like Drupal Con. It is completely free and It's not just about government We do get the space in that at NIH in Bethesda, which is just north of Washington, DC for For our conference. So we have called it Govcon. We have a lot of commercial there We have a lot of nonprofit there. So I have some palm cards and stickers if you guys want I hope that you will all join us So with that said any questions Hey, we're using the workflow module to kind of come up with a workflow to audit our content and We're having some problems in trying to figure out how to send notifications I don't know if you've ever run into problems using the rules module with the workflow module or something like that Sending Right when when the status of the content changes for it to be moderated It's kind of a technical specific question, but maybe you Is it Drupal 7 or 8? 8, yeah. Yeah, haven't used it in 8 yet. I have used it in 7 I would say that I have tried to use rules in Drupal 8 and have not been very very successful I know yeah, yeah, so I it was interesting because because our developer did Set up some rules for notifications and they weren't doing anything And I just went in there and I wiped them out and I'm not a developer I wiped them out and I rewrote them and they started working and I did exactly what he did So I don't I don't know what's going on with rules in Drupal 8, but yeah, right You're you're on the right track. You've got to get the notifications out. Yeah. Yeah, we can get the rules module to work Yeah, I'm sorry. I can't help you with that Are there any other questions? How long does it take you to? Analyze a content piece for a single piece of content in terms of like planning for budget and how long it's going to take Once you've identified the content that you're going to analyze. That's a really good question A lot longer than you think a single piece of content You might spend several hours on If you're talking about putting the spreadsheet together then You know, it's depending on how much content you have it could be a week It can be a month that could be two months because you're really kind of going through all of it and Adding in the analytics and then analyzing those and then adding in your qualitative factors and analyzing those So that does take quite a lot of time Just to review a single piece of content for tone and alignment and all of that You probably need it's not just going to be you Because you're going to want your subject matter experts will be looking at it and other people to be looking at it So in combined together, I wish I could remember the number that I went through an exercise with somebody on that and It was something like eight hours of of labor time for a page something in that space And we can't all afford that So that's why maybe doing a subset of pages or doing a rolling audit of sections is Is better and like I said, you know if somebody was if you had a certain set of authors now Versus in the past maybe you don't deal with the ones in the past and you get rid of that content And you deal with the authors now and see are they in alignment with tone and whatever and you can probably tell pretty quickly What patterns you find and then maybe you can say okay? We're not going to look at the rest of those We've reviewed 50 blog posts and we see the patterns. We're done So yeah, you might want to drop off at that point Are there any other questions yes You had a photo of the empty meeting room with all the people sitting around it And I sort of blacked out because I was like whoa Right, just imagining the vortex that that can become I have like a million questions about how that happens, but To simplify, how do you sort of prepare that meeting or how do you structure? How do you prepare before the meeting or how do you structure the meeting so that it doesn't just become? The loud voices in the room sort of dominate and say we want this on our page period or you know, whatever, right? So that's a good question. So I would say, you know, it's not necessarily one meeting But one kickoff that has all those people to get them on the same page is a very good idea And I think that's the meeting at which you just present the quant the quantitative results So just anything that's objective. That's where you do your presenting It's not having all those people in the room is not the time where you want to start talking about any Individual piece of content or any department getting more stuff than another department because that's where the loudest voice is going to be heard So absolutely correct. So use that meeting to say, okay, we've just conducted a content audit of X Whether that be the entire site or just a chunk of it or a cross-section of it. What however you did that Here's what we want to present Do that rod analysis? I like to present the way I did today charts and graphs give them real quantitative Evaluation of what you've done of those those success factors Again, you can say hey, we found that 30% of the content is off-tone We found that X percent of the content is not in alignment with our audience It's more a factual meeting when you have everyone in the room from all those different departments and It allows you to kind of rise above the nitpicking You're not really pointing fingers at anyone. You're not telling anyone they wrote their con any particular person You wrote your content wrong. You're not saying are you know to the developers. Hey the you know the Taxonomy is not where you know, why'd you do it? Why'd you do something a certain way? You're just presenting the facts So when you have people from all those departments together just present the facts and then you're going to move into other meetings So a content production workshop meeting, you know different meetings for different groups That will allow them to then drill down into how am I working? That's contributing towards the information that we learned in that main meeting Does that help? Any other questions? Great. Well, thank you all for joining me today and the day is over Have a wonderful night. Have a great con If you want to join me at noon tomorrow, we'll be in boff one in the expo room and have a good night everyone We should have met let me give you. Yeah Yeah, absolutely Content strategy is such a piece because it is expensive and I'm just trying to think like how other people I am analytics Look at it. Yes, and how do you price that and you know obviously you need to assess how much time To play it out over how many pages you think you're gonna need to look at it. Yeah Yeah, yeah, we've got some ideas for that. Yeah, that's cool. Okay. Yeah, let's get together. Yeah, totally. Absolutely. Thanks, Jen I