 I think we can get started. So talking with a few folks ahead of time, it sounds like there's a lot of folks have a lot of content authors to manage. So looks like picked a good talk. So whom I, and why should you care? Why should you listen to me? So I work for a company called BlueSpark. We're a full-service digital agency. We do a lot of digital strategy, user experience design, Drupal development kind of stuff. And me, I'm the managing director. And my background is in user experience design and experience strategy. And it's been the last bit of my career focusing on how you merge kind of business requirements, business analysis, the mission or vision of an organization with kind of a great user experience and thinking even bigger than that beyond digital in terms of service design. Which kind of led us to, led me to thinking about operations of a website. How do you create something that your staff and your team can use to actually engage your audience and drive your mission or your vision forward, deliver results on that. Worked with a variety of clients in various capacities from Red Hat, Indiana University, UCLA library, and all of these are managing from 50 to a few hundred content authors. Red Hat's even managing a large community. They have community contributors for content. So it's really fascinating the different challenges that these organizations are facing. So before I start, probably wondering why I have a quote of Carl Sagan. I kind of want to lay a few of my philosophical ideas. We don't have to go all the way back to the Big Bang, but do want to lay a little bit of groundwork about where I'm coming from and where some of these tips might be coming from. First off, I'll talk a little bit about who this talk is for. I like to think in terms of the content steward, the person that is responsible for gathering all the people and making sure they're producing quality content. And this content steward serves various roles. Certainly editor being chief among them, but project manager, particularly for bigger pieces of content that need to get published, writer at times, therapist, certainly. But ultimately, it's the content steward's job to bribe, control, convince people to publish content for the website. And not just content, because anybody can write content and anybody can write content they think is good, but what you're after is content that engages your audience, I'm just gonna read it, content that engages your audience and delivers results on the vision for the website and the mission of your organization. Because otherwise, what's the point in having a website if it's not delivering results? So what makes for good stewardship? What makes for good stewardship? And I think there's just six traits here, and I'm gonna quickly go over them because I don't have a lot of time and I wanna make sure I get to the meat of the presentation. But good stewardship is educating, is teaching your content authors what it means to create good content and coaching them and guiding them and really bringing them along. It's championing the idea that your website is there to engage your audience and it's getting out there and helping people see why they should be doing it. I'm getting a little ahead of myself, but it's encouraging people to publish, writing content is a tough thing. We've all stared at the blank page and been overwhelmed by that. So it's getting out there, being the therapist, being the cheerleader and getting them to publish. It's supporting them whenever they have questions, whenever they're struggling. It's celebrating the success, not just with your content writers, but also with their managers and it's listening to the challenges they're facing and helping break down those obstacles. So in my mind, these are the qualities of good stewardship that whether you're managing a small number of authors, a large number of authors, whether it's just yourself writing for the website, these are things that you're doing. Common challenges that we face whenever we are, particularly whenever we're stewarding content for big websites is this often is not your only job. This is just one thing that you're responsible for and it's easy for that to get set aside in favor of other responsibilities that you have. I'm guilty of the second one. People like to have written. You don't want to write, you want to have written. That makes sense, right? There's a publish it and forget it mentality. So we put everything out there, we put it out there and we're on to the next thing. How is it performing? How can we have made it better? What can we do to improve it? It's the web, it's not a printed material. You can go back and change it if things aren't clear, if you got feedback on it. Another big thing, particularly I think with when you're dealing with hundreds of people who aren't writers by trade, especially if they think they're good writers, writing by its nature is a personal thing. We think it's an expression of ourself and so any kind of criticism of the writing is often taken as a criticism of them and that's very difficult to overcome and it can be very emotional to have those conversations with them. I was going to ask what other challenges we have but I thought I was gonna have closer to 40 minutes but I only have 30 so I'm gonna keep going. But I'd love to hear other challenges that you guys might be facing in your organization if any of those weren't covered afterwards. But this brings us to the topic for today's talk which I want to give you 10 tips for managing a multitude of content creators. These are tips, advice, things that I've seen, that I've observed in working with the organizations that I've worked with. There's no silver bullets, no magic formula. It all takes time and effort and energy and persistence. So number one is easy reference material, right? A style guide serves as a great reference for how they should write what grade level of writing they should be targeting. And you don't have to write these from scratch, you don't have to have your own. There are lots of really great style guides out there. MailChimp has a great style guide that you can say, look MailChimp is the one that's our starting point. Here's the link, go read that and then you can add to it. If you have an intranet or a wiki you can add to it. Worksheets, there's some really great worksheets to break down like okay what's the purpose of the article that I'm writing? My son has one of these fifth grader and it's like man, we should use this for writing online. You start with the purpose, where do your four or five key ideas and you use that as the basis for writing your article and you stick to the key ideas. The content life cycle. So one of the things mentioned in the challenges is the publish it and forget it mentality. Well if we think about the content life cycle from the idea to the draft to the reviewing, how we had metadata, what kind of metadata we should add, the publication of it, promotion, follow up and in some cases the retiring of the content and we set expectations for each of the stages of the life cycle. That's gonna be clear to your writers what's expected of them and then checklists. Checklists are just great. Does anybody here question checklists and why checklists are awesome? Do I need to go into that? So just like a 10 point checklist whenever they're going through it, did you do this, did you do this, did you do this? Great, you're done. Publish it, move on. But it's not enough to have the material. It's not enough to even have written it in a way that's easy for your content authors to understand. Make it easily accessible. Remove all barriers to publication. So make all your reference material, your style guides, your worksheets, your checklists, make all that, like when I go to publish, it's right there. Give it to them in PDF format, it's in their email, it's in Dropbox, it's printed right there on their desk. Like they can't turn around without hitting the reference material somehow, some way. Yeah, they will. They will, no doubt, but use your job to try to prevent that. See, streamlined workflows. This is one of the challenges too, but I think particularly whenever we're designing, we think about the challenges and issues and trying to put in constraints in terms of, well, let's try to make sure that we're actually publishing good content, and a lot of that makes sense, but we gotta be careful not to put too many constraints in place, otherwise it discourages people from writing the content they need to get published. This content still needs to get published, we would like to be of a certain quality. But as long as it's getting published, we can iterate to that quality. So think about how we streamline our workflows and even think about working outside of the content management system. Have people start writing in Google Docs or some kind of shared content authoring system that's not like a wissy-wee editor that feels as dry as Drupal's UI. Sorry, Drupal developers, it's kind of bad. But the great thing about Google Docs too is you can comment, you can make suggest changes. It's a full-on word processor and it's a richer environment for providing feedback. Focus UI, if you do have to stay inside Drupal, I think I was talking to somebody over here, like if you have a content author and their job is writing, strip away everything else, except just the features that they need. And Drupal will allow your developers to change the admin UI based on the developer's role and based on the role of the author. So strongly recommend you're working with your dev team to get them to do that. And don't expect it to work the first time. You're gonna probably, oh, I wanna do this. What happened to that field or what happened to that feature? It's gonna be a little back and forth to get it just right. But if you can streamline and you can simplify stuff, that would be a good stuff for your authors. Another big challenge for writing is not just the writing, it's if this is a promoted piece or something you typically have imagery associated with it. That's another big roadblock for a lot of folks is they don't like, how do you select good imagery? So where do I go to find them? What's approved, what's not approved? So making sure they have access, they know where media sources they can go to, whether it's a videos or, what's your policy in publishing YouTube videos? Stuff like that, right? And make sure it's all centralized in one place with easy links. And how do you cite images? So if I do use a creative commons image, how do I make sure that that's cited properly? Never stop training. So we all think about onboarding. We think about that initial training step where we want people to come in there and we're gonna sit and we're gonna talk with them or we're gonna review it, or we walk through and maybe that's an hour, maybe it's 90 minutes, and they'll create great, you know everything. Maybe, probably not. So do the initial onboarding with the new folks, then meet with them regularly. Have weekly office hours. If you have a Slack or some kind of chat application be available periodically for that. There are some folks that need extra help and they have questions about how to do stuff if you've ever used Calendly or where you can block off like a little bit of time so that people can schedule 15, 20 minute conversations with you where they can say, hey, I have this problem or have this challenge. I just wanna sit down and brainstorm with you a little bit so you can help me think through this and you can actually get some problems off at the pass before they develop into bigger issues. And then I strongly suggest monthly refresher trainings. And kind of sample agenda here where get people to share their appreciations. You know, the more people feel appreciated for the work that they're doing the more likely they are to continue doing it and to engage with it even more. Celebrate successes, review published content, what was good about it, what wasn't so great, what they could have done better. But prepare people ahead of time. Like I said, you know, writing is a personal thing. You don't wanna spring that on somebody, you wanna make sure they're comfortable with it. Then an open Q and A just to give folks a chance to just ask whatever questions they have. And then don't forget to promote the training. Get it out there, let people know, make people aware of it. Just don't schedule it, put it on people's calendars and expect them to show up. That's not gonna happen. That's just, you wanna get out there, you wanna make sure they're showing up, do what you need to do to get people to show up. Next one, and I'm sorry, I'm really going through a lot of this stuff pretty quickly. But know your staff. Know the capabilities of your staff. What are they good at, what are they not good at? Don't ask if you're working on promoting, you've got an event coming up and you don't ask somebody, okay, can you go out and select some good photos for this for somebody who just doesn't have the eye for it? So know what their capabilities are. And be on the lookout. So you might know that this person has a tendency to write more academic than what you would like. Be on the lookout for that. And be ready, okay, they're publishing some content this week. Once it goes up, be ready to give them that feedback or try to get out ahead of that. Schedule some time, just sit down and review it with them. So just think about your staff and think about what they're doing and what their strengths and their weaknesses are and try to compensate as much as you can for their weaknesses. A recruit assistance. So you're gonna have people who are really good at what they do and maybe not initially, but they develop that over time. Can you get some folks to, you like maybe sit in on some office hours with you? Or where they're reviewing some content and taking that off your plate? Now these folks are doing your favors, so maybe you can bring coffee periodically or something because they're making your life a little bit easier. But can you find people, especially if it's just a one person show that it's just you as the content steward, can you find other people on your team that the other authors who are good at their jobs and kind of use them as a, to help train the rest of the staff. Touched on this a minute ago, but celebrate the success and celebrate what's working. Point that out, it's so easy, particularly as an editor, when you're looking at a piece of content to focus on, get the red pen out and strike through everything and it's like, okay, this is what we need to improve. Or, okay, the traffic to this article that we published that we needed X% of traffic for, it didn't hit it. So easy to focus on the negative and then that just wears people down and discourages them from writing more content. Celebrate stuff, always find stuff to celebrate. Even if you gotta show them an article that's completely red, find the one or two pieces in there that's good that you can compliment them on. You can always find something good to compliment people on and you gotta do that. You gotta take the time to do that and show appreciation. Cause like you, this is not their only job, right? In fact, this is, maybe it's 25 to 50% of your job to kind of be the content steward. For them, it might be five or 10% of their job to write the content for the website. So be appreciative and encouraging of that. Another really, I was just about this flip, but I wanna focus on the fourth point too. The more specific you can be in your celebration or your appreciation, the better it is received. Be as specific as you can. I do art with the kids at home. I volunteer and kind of teach art with fourth graders. It's in a very rewarding experience, but every like, you can tell the difference when you say, oh, that looks great versus, wow, I really like the shape of that circle there. You got a really interesting curve to it and it's very different. The eyes light up and we do that as well. The more specific you can be in your compliments, in your encouragement, the better received it will be. Share results, right? This is kind of a continuation of celebrate, but show people the results that matter to them. So not everybody's gonna care about the traffic to a webpage and in fact, some pages are probably only gonna receive four or five hits and that's really all that it should get. So what are the results? Maybe you got some feedback from your user. It says, I was looking for this information and this was clear and I got this and this was really great. Really appreciate that this content was out there on the website. Whether it's an anecdote like that, whether it's, maybe some people do respond well to metrics where they wanna see, okay, how much traffic did my event page get? Because we're waiting just, I wanna see how many people are gonna show up. But share the results, pass that information onto your authors. Ideally, we're not there yet, but I would love to see a Drupal dashboard where whenever I'm signed in to my, I'm looking at my content, I can actually see like metrics associated with what's going on, whether it's okay traffic or maybe there's a signup form on there. Like how many people signed up after they visited? So like be able to identify what the key metrics are for that piece of content and have that show up in my dashboard so I get as the author, get immediate validation that my content is successful. Or it's not and I can go in there and tweak it and fix it, right? But that faster feedback could be really, really helpful. Automate as much as you can, right? So data architecture is one of the great things about Drupal is just how much metadata you can associate with a piece of content from tags to categories to dates, all this stuff. And so if you can have, okay, we know that this event is at this location and it's in this category and we know that, okay, obviously it should show up on that location's calendar but maybe it should, based on the tags it shows up but it's promoted in other places as well. So we can use data architecture just to get it out there and get it promoted very easily so we don't have to do a lot of that by hand. Use readable.com, sitebeam.net, these are really great resources. They're subscription services but they're really great resources that you can run stuff through. And the nice thing about something like readable is that you're taking some of the sting out of the feedback. You're not, it's not so personal. It's like, look, we set a target readability score of fifth grade, sixth grade. So those are reasonable. And Mr. Professor, yours is a college level wording and phrasing here so we need to kind of bring that down and this is just what it is. I'm not criticizing your use of semicolons. I think they're brilliant but this is what we have, you know. You're on to me. And then just review the results. Like bring this up when you go to your weekly meetings with folks like, hey, look, our site readability score is here, right? Or whenever you're reviewing a piece of content, talk about what the readability score is. But don't just give the feedback to your writers, your authors, give it to the managers too. Help them get that promotion. Help them get that raise, right? Like they're gonna appreciate you so much more. Appreciate the feedback if they hear it from their manager. If their manager goes, you know, I was talking to Jane the other day and Jane says, you're doing great. You're killing it with the content. I'm so happy to hear that, right? That, who doesn't wanna hear that from their boss? So manage up, manage to their boss but not just their boss, manage to the executives. Tell, create reports. I mean, one of the big challenges that if I'm an executive or a manager, you go to Google Analytics and what do you see? I don't know what I'm looking at. I can't make heads or tails of this. So create a simple one-page report that you can explain very clearly. Look, this is how our website is being successful and helping drive our mission forward, helping our vision for the website. This is how we are being successful with the website. And here it is, very simple, very plain. And everybody across the organization who's working on the website gets that praise. So we'll benefit from that. The other value to that too is as you start to feel overworked and overwhelmed, which you will and you do, I know you do, that starts to lay the groundwork for getting some help, right? Like you're showing the value, you're showing what's going on, you're showing why this is working and why they should continue to invest in this. And then eventually like, okay, you love this, this is great, I'm overwhelmed. Can I get some help, please? Part time, contract, whatever. Speaking of overwhelming, take a break. Small breaks throughout the day. When you go to lunch, turn your phone off. There's virtually no emergency that can't just wait a little bit. This is a marathon, it's not a sprint. This is gonna be a lot of work to get all this stuff done, so you can't just go, go, go, go, go, go, go. Another, this was something that, I saw this as developer time versus manager time, and this is really helpful for me at some point, so I kind of tweaked it a little bit. So editor time versus focus time. So there's stuff that you need to do outside the scope of managing all these authors. There's also editing and other stuff you need to do. So let's separate that. Let's say, okay, a couple hours in the mornings, I have my office hours and a couple hours I'm gonna be reviewing stuff and editing stuff, and then in the afternoons it's all blocked off for me to focus and to do other stuff. Try to create blocks of time so that you can, when you need to focus, you can, when you're interruptible, you are, because you can't, like, if you have stuff you need to focus on, you can't be interruptible. It's just, you're not, it's never gonna get done, you're gonna go mad doing it. Another thing to think about stuff, a way to think about things is, is this important or is it urgent? Right, and 90, 100% of the time the urgent is gonna trump the important. So unless you make time, block time, set aside time, make sure the time is blocked and you're focusing, you're gonna work on the important work that you have to do instead of the people knocking on your door, hey, can you help me edit this or fix this or do whatever, your important work is never gonna get done and that important work might be selecting which style guide you wanna use, figuring out how, dealing with other kinds of content issues or working with the developers to integrate with the readable API or streamline the UI, all that stuff has to get done but you're busy and unless you block off time for it, it's not. So to recap, I won't go through them again because I've got a minute and a half but I'm sure my slides will be available. The 10 tips, the key takeaway is big, you can't do this alone. It's a big site, lots of content, you're not gonna be able to do this alone. You need competent and powered staff that can help you but to get there, it's gonna take time. It's gonna take time, for some folks it could be a few months, for other folks it could be a few years but it's just gonna take consistent, persistent effort. I was hoping we'd have time, a little more time for questions but I'm here. So if you wanna ask questions, we can. That's it. Go ahead. So the question is how often do you see like a core web team that's responsible for developing all the content versus where it's kind of more distributed and it really depends on the size of the organization. Like if you have smaller organizations say of less than 100 people or closer to 50 like you might see a smaller web team that's responsible for it rather than kind of having it distributed. It also depends on how much content the organization is producing that's responsible for producing. Like if it's a very singular, we just have this little bit of content that's gonna be more controlled by marketing. Whereas say governments and libraries and just sheer volume of content that they're producing, the policies, all that stuff, it can't be controlled by a central organization. So I think a big part of that is just the size of the organization. Go ahead. In the strategies and getting process where you're trying to achieve manager buy-in pre-editors and sort of somewhat relatedly how does one navigate the situation where you're the content manager but they're the subject manager experts and you're trying to critique or develop their writing on subjects that they're the experts on? That is a great question. And really there isn't, like there's no silver bullets for the first part of the question. How do you get buy-in from the managers, particularly the managers of the content authors? I'd sit down and listen to what concerns they might have. Is the person overworked already and they're worried about how much time they're committing to it? They feel like that's not necessarily important. Like what are their concerns? They listen to them. There's a book called People Skills that really talks about active listening. So, and I find that that kind of process like it helps people feel heard. And if they feel heard, they, and then you turn that around and get them to help you come up with solutions. It's like, okay, look, I hear you, these are all problems, but this is what I need. Help me figure out. So you're enlisting their help to come up with a solution. And if they're helping you come up with a solution, they have ownership by buying into the solution. And that's, you know, you still might get pushed back and they still might forget that they did that, in which case, I mean, it's still a management. They're still going back. Hey, you remember, we talked about that. This is what you said. It's following up an email. Okay, we had that conversation. Here were your concerns and here was the outcome for that. And, you know, just getting them to agree, getting them to agree and encourage publicly too, where they have other people that they've committed to is also helpful. Another great book to read in addition to the people skills for active listening is influence in just the different ways you can rely on influence to, well, to influence there, what they're doing, what they're saying, so. And what was the second half of the question? Managing the tension is sort of the expert on writing content and then just the expert on the content itself. Yeah, so that's great. Great question. I think there's two parts to it. One is goals. What are the goals of the content and is the content achieving that goals? And that's where too, like we talked about what's the readability score that you're after, like what are the guidelines that you're following and to be able to point to those guidelines, to be able to point to that score where it's objective. So as much as possible, making it objective, taking it out of you to be being critical. I mean, certainly, you know, if the style guide says you need to use serial commas and they're not using serial commas and if you're not using serial commas, what's wrong with you? Just saying. But right, so what does the style guide say? So make it more objective. The other thing too, that I think, hands down, get users in front of the content, get the recordings of users trying to understand what does this content mean? So whenever you need to do this, where is the answer on this page and they're reading through pages and pages of text and they're like, no, it's not here. So it's not me who's offering this to the user. Exactly. So get it out of you, as much as possible, you're not the one providing that feedback. It's, well, this is the style guide. This is what it says. This is the user. This is what they're saying. This is your readability score. So make it more objective, because if it's coming from you, it's subjective. Other questions? I think we're at time. Excellent. Thanks, everybody. Appreciate it.