 All right. I think we're going to get started. Two things you should know. I'm kind of loud and I talk really fast when I stand at a podium. So, apology if it goes too fast, like raise arms and throw something at me if you want me to slow down. But we are going to be talking about project management and content strategy today. Woo-hoo! Who in this room is a project manager? Yes! Do you know there never used to be a project management track? Years I would come. I'm so sad. This is awesome. So, year two. I'm super excited. And then anyone that didn't raise your hand, we just know that you want to be like us. Because we love project management. All right. So, if you care to do it, it really helps me when you tweet stuff out. That gives me a sense of when you guys kind of like something or something sticks. So, it's a good way to give me feedback. Hashtag obviously Drupalcon. My Twitter handle is linwintermn because I'm from Minnesota and I waited way too long to give my Twitter handle. But you should also know that means it's the first time I brought my legs out since the summer. So, don't stare directly at them. I'll try to stay behind the podium. They're really white and I'm 100% German. So, they're a little scary to look at. So, my name is Lynn and I work at a company called August Ash. We're a 20-person agency in Minneapolis. I have a job called the production director, which is kind of made up, but it basically means that I'm in charge of a team of people that build and maintain websites. So that includes project managers, front-end, back-end design, and UX, and we do all the maintenance and the building of the new sites. But I think it'd be helpful to take a little step back and see where it came from and why this topic is really passionate for me. I started at PBS, not like at the PBS, but a PBS affiliate in Minnesota. It was called Twin Cities Public Television. They went through a branding right when I started and they called it TPT, which the public then called toilet paper television. So since then, they've gotten rid of it, but I lived with that for all eight years I was there. So it was amazing. But I spent eight years there, had multiple titles, but basically I was a project manager. Loved it. People knew what that role was there. It was very established. They knew what to come to me for, they knew how to hide from me. But it was respected and I appreciate that. And I think that's because it's been around for so long. Television was evented in 1927. So there was a person before me, and then a person before that, and then a person before that, and a person before that. And so I wasn't making the roll up. Then comes 2008, see this makes me feel kind of old, but I went to this company. There was four people there and I joined them and I was the only project manager. And it was great. It was really small. I got to do a lot of different things. I got to do some user experience, some content strategies, some user testing, QA work, and then of course project management. And it gave me a lot of experience. But it was kind of hard because it wasn't a really clear role. Drupal was released in 2001, which seems like eons ago, but it really wasn't that long ago. If you think about our role, we're literally defining it right now. It hasn't had that length. So I struggled with that for a long time. I got my job because they literally took two people, and there's someone here that used to work with me. But they took two people's job and they wrote down all the crap they hated. They literally wrote down all the crap they hated, right? And they made a job. And I loved that stuff. But my role was the things that people didn't like to do. So it was kind of hard. It was kind of hard to find my people too. I was at Drupal cons going, oh, you're a project manager and I'd be running across the room, be my friend. Let's talk that stuff. It was a little awkward at first, but look at us now. So there's been a lot of growth. So it was hard for me to figure out what my role should become. And then I realized, stop being a baby about it, and realized that we can do anything. We literally can do anything right now with our role. We can be anything we want to be. There are so many things going on. And anywhere you work, you can kind of stretch the role to make that big impact. So if you don't walk away being convinced about content strategy and how that's part of your job going forward, at least think about how you would want to make your job evolve. How can we change it over time? For me, it was thinking about what made my clients happy. Happy clients, meant happy projects, meant happy team, so on and so forth. And I kind of had a moment maybe four years ago where I was like, duh, we're not getting any of our projects done in time because we can't get our content written. Clients aren't getting their content done and we're stuck. We're running over. Timelines aren't happening. Everyone's starting to get crabby. So how can I fix this? And so I decided to get more involved in figuring out what content strategy was and how I could bring that into our process because it turns out we were a small company and nobody else was super passionate about it. As time went on, there's multiple people that kind of did it. But this is the thing, is the bulk of content strategy today is not about writing content, it's about project managing content. And that's what we do. So I wanted to walk through nine different things that I think have been the challenges clients have over time and then some of the solutions that we can do to solve them and they will run from the start of a web project all the way to the end of it. So the first challenge is that the clients are lost. They don't know where to start and they don't know what path to follow. Think about it. If you guys ever read content strategy books or start following blogs, there's all these different techniques and tools and things out there and it's really overwhelming and then go say, hey client, go do that thing. It's overwhelming to them. What we need to do is put blinders on and then show them the exact direct path that we want them to go down. So really the solution to that is that we as the project managers are the leaders. We're going to get out front of them and take them down that path and drive them in the direction we want them. So what does that mean? Well, I think the first thing is you have to figure out what your MVP process is. See I'm talking so fast. So MVP process. We want to be over where it's the ultimate, the utopia, the best content strategy possible. But it's 2017 and we're not there and we need to all cut ourselves some slack that we're not there now. What we need to be doing is figure out what the very minimal things you need to do to make the project successful. And after you do that a couple times, add the next layer on, add the next layer on. And then over the years, we're going to get to kind of the utopia land. So figure out what your projects, where I used to work, all my projects were six figures and up. Where I'm at now, I'm with 20 to 80,000 is more where our sweet spot is. And so the process I have is very different based on who my client is now. So kind of think about your situation and what makes sense. Part of that process is providing very clear boundaries. And so if that's not something you've been doing for a while, I encourage you to make it up. And here's why. As we have experience, we're going and doing all of these projects, we know better than our clients are. So through the process, for example, when we get to a kickoff meeting, we say, hey, you know what? I want you to get me all the names of people on your content team. I want to make sure there's at least three people on there. OK, now you're going to meet every single week. You got it? You got it scheduled? OK, now we're going to look through your content. I want you to cut 50%. Yes, 50%. So you have 300 pages, it's going to be 150. Whatever it is, just make very clear rules and they will follow that. Having ambiguity is what drives the process to go all off page. The other thing is don't worry about the cost and time it's going to take up front. The hours that you spend 10, 20 hours up front, you'll save that when the project doesn't go over the timeline by two, three months. You're going to waste that time anyway. If you can get up front and the client's kind of grooving and on board with you, you're going to have a wash and money over time until of course you keep adding to your process. So that's the best thing is that as the project manager, we can lead them and give them the exact path. And it's whatever path you define is the right path for your projects. Challenge number two is that they don't have time, nor do they have experience, right? I'm not a writer, I can't start writing things and I don't have time. And the solution for that is really we need to hire talent. And it doesn't have to be overwhelming where we think, oh, we have to have a writer, great, $10,000. We can just hire a writer to copyright edit. We can hire a writer to write the first 10 samples that we can then copy from. There's different ways to do it, but we need to be hiring some folks. And the reason is, is the average person works 47 hours and new little overachievers in the room, four out of 10 of you work 50. So if someone is, our clients are busy all day long and then they say, okay, now we'll write stuff and do all this work. Unless their role is to do this, which is probably not the case for most of our situations, they don't have the time to do it. And on top of it, they're not experts. They don't go take pictures, they don't shoot video, they don't write content. And having Bob in accounting or I know a friend from high school or that kind of thing, that's not gonna get us where we wanna get. So we need to invest and we can prove that. There's a lot of stats out there that say that investing in content marketing will lead to more leads, get them where they need to get and spend less money over time. So it's well worth investing in writing. The other thing we can't forget about though is the visuals, right? That's much more impactful these days than anything. Video, 74% is the web content we consume. And so we can't just be thinking, we're gonna have a pretty video background on our banner. That's nice, but we need to be incorporating that video into unique pieces of content or content we're constantly pushing out. So we need to have a budget for that. Or we need to be thinking about all these other tools like Periscope or Facebook Live, that things just pick up a phone and get some content out there. But we have to have that in our plan. We also need to be thinking about articles with images. When you're on Facebook, right? When it doesn't have an image now, whew, I'm just past that. I don't even think about it. Now they added that beautiful like full colored box with the text over it. They caught me again, even though I don't like how that looks. But it pulls us in. We want something visual. It turns out you get 94% more clicks. It's a no brainer. There's a lot of free video, well less free video, but a lot of free images out there. Like all my pictures came from those sources that people can use. So that's a great start, but a photographer can be three, four, $500 for minimal work. Also, we don't wanna forget about graphic design. 80, 800% over the last year, which is kind of mind blowing to me. But icons or infographics, those are kind of things that we wanna incorporate into our design and keep them fresh. Challenge number three is they have no clue what they have anymore. And that's just the case. Mostly when your site gets really old, people stop investing in it, both technology-wise and content, so they kind of don't know what's there. So we're gonna do the old content inventory. How many people have done one of those before? Keep your hands up, how many people like them still? So I think that's part of, to be a product of content strategy, you have to kind of get into it and it can be a little hard. I've done anywhere from 50 pages to 20,000, so I hate 20,000. I'm feeling better about 1,000, but it is a lot of work. The nice, fun thing is when you make all these decisions and help the client with them, you can kind of impact the navigation and the UX of the site and it gets you a little more involved in the creative which I like. When we do inventories, so we try to do this before the kickoff means so that we have a sense of what they have going right now before we even meet with them. But we do an inventory and work with the client when it's a certain size. So when it's medium to large, we work with the client. When it's a really, really small site, we just kind of make the decisions on our own and move on. Because usually those are less sophisticated clients or sophisticated needs, not always. But tends to match up a little bit. So let's break down the roles of who should be doing what. So our role is to create the document. We like to use Google Sheets. That way we can share it within our team and we can share it with our client. We put everything in there, the typical stuff, the name of the page, the URL, item notes about it, different things. I do skip numbering. If you look these things up, most of these content inventory number things. The problem is every time you move something, your numbering system's off. So I just skip it because you have numbers within the sheets or Excel anyway. So we'll do that. Then we're going to add notes about the features. I like to color code them. So I'll make one color, a code like yellow, will be if it's an internal thing we need to talk about. I've got questions for the developer. I want to point this out to the user experience person. I'll make that color yellow. Then I'll make it blue if I have a question to the client. Like what is this? Or are you guys doing this anymore? It's not very clear to me. So I'll make it a different color so I can easily scan it, which is helpful when you get a bigger size inventory. The third thing is I like to make a quick evaluation. I will literally write into a column if we're going to keep it or delete it. And it's a bright red color and I write delete and I write why I'm going to delete it or I write keep. Turns out when I started doing that, I was really afraid that people would get annoyed with it or was there a little baby and it would hurt their feelings. I've gotten feedback from clients over and over that thank you, it made it really clear to us. We didn't have to argue about it internally. So it gave them kind of a stepping stone. So I find that most people just kind of stick with it. A client I'm working with right now in school district, it's very cute. They broke it into different pieces because like nine different people reviewed it and they wrote in their challenge. They want to challenge me on it, which I think is awesome. But then it goes to show that you have that authority. I just went through and was like, yeah, that's got to go for reasons, right? But they're listening to me and want to challenge it, have a conversation. So that's always helpful. And then analyze the data. So if you're really into Google Analytics, go to town, get a lot of data, put it in there. If you're not, what I would just do is look at your top 100 pages or where it really drops into nothing and just write it into a column. How many people are visiting 10% 1% because when you start evaluating all the other reasons like, does anyone use it? Do you need it for your initiatives? That traffic really helps with that, if that makes sense. What I need them to do is I want them to look at the list. Can they act? Can I actually just get rid of it? You probably should check. That school district I was talking about, they had things about pest control on the website. I was like, and gone. Never looked at the pest control in my kid's school, but they have to have it there for funding reasons or something. So they have to have it on there. And so what they did is they also updated because it was two years old. So they made that change on their live site. So they need to review that. They also need to scurry around their offices and find out what's new. I have no clue what new content that they're making that they're not putting on the website. So I need them to look through that and send that to me. Are there images or their videos or their newsletters? What's out there? So we have a good sense. And as project manager, I can gather that together and hand it off to the user experience person. Also, they should be in charge of who's gonna own the content, whether they're gonna write it or they're gonna be responsible for getting it done. They need to assign that because I don't know their organization well enough so they have to pick that. And finally, they also need to prioritize for launch. I have maybe worked on one website that was bigger than 10 pages that got their content done on time. It just doesn't happen. And I was pretty floored when it actually did because they had a sizable thing, but they have to prioritize. We're not gonna get there. So what do you wanna get done and what are we gonna let go of? It's also a great message to be passing on. I like to do it at the beginning, like if the sales team can kind of mention that. And then also at the start of the kickoff meeting, hopefully there are bosses in the room so they don't get pressure just to start copying and pasting crap. Cause that's what happens when I fall behind. They're like, oh, I'll just copy that. Like no, don't do it. And then you get the same crap over and over. So it's good to make that message really clear in the beginning. So here's an example. My inventories tend to look slightly different every time. I don't know why maybe. I just like to change it up. But you can see the biggest thing that stands out to you is the column of go away, keep, or a couple of things I put in orange cause I really just didn't know what it was there for. So that's what we used and they took and they divided that thing up and just gave us some feedback a couple of days ago. When we're done with this, the project managers work with the client and then when they get the final navigation, we clean it all up and then put it into the right navigation order. So the URLs are really gonna be for reference. That's what it currently says just so you can reference it while you're writing. But we pull out all the things we're gonna get rid of and we start categorizing what type of content they're gonna be in this document so we can get our kind of full scope list. So that's really the inventory. The challenge number four is they can't say goodbye. It is very hard to get rid of content. I don't think it's as much as like, oh, I wrote it, I feel bad as much as I'm overwhelmed and I don't have time to do this and it probably doesn't matter. And so I think it's important to help give an understanding of why you should get rid of things and why you should keep them. So one idea is for project managers to provide defining the value, what makes a piece of content valuable. So what I did is I wrote up a document to actually share, which is great because it turns out that a lot of people that I meet with to go over the activity are not in the room. Oh, well we decided to hand that off to this person and this person, I'm like, oh, super. Hope they know what to do. So this document will lay that out and it has six different points and I'll walk through those points but I think the key is what are the right points for you and then I would encourage it to be written. It doesn't need to be in a fancy document but something, an email, something that can be shared. I'd also be extremely happy to share this with someone and grab my business card afterward and I can send it over if that's helpful. So here's the six items. One is useful. Is the audience coming to that website to get what they need? Are you the authority on it? As well as is this a key initiative as a client that you wanna be pushing out? If it's not, it's probably taking up space. Hasn't been updated recently. If it hasn't been updated in a year, ask yourself why and why will that change? If it's not going to change, it better be something like an old blog post or a news item or something that is past dated. Is it accurate? You wanna make sure that you are credible on the site, especially if you have any medical information, financial, something that people are making decisions. We worked on a website for an AIDS organization in Minnesota and they have a page called HIV 101. Now it wasn't updated for a long time. Things change in that space. New information is found out and they should really have that updated all the time. Otherwise they shouldn't be the source for that. They should be driving people other places for that. Does each piece of content have an owner? If it doesn't have an owner, it gets thrown away right off the bat. Someone should stand up and think it matters and if they don't, it's never gonna be maintained or created as perfectly as the other pieces so it goes away. We're in a mobile world, right? Is this content going to be digestible on our small devices in an enjoyable way? Are there diagrams or graphs or things that are gonna make it really difficult to use? How long am I gonna be scrolling? Is there clear ways for important information that are gonna be called out that pop out to me? So we gotta think about if this is gonna be really mobile compatible. And finally, traffic, is anyone going to it? And the kind of hard part is when you do this and it's an old site, you find that most of the content is it being got to. But that doesn't mean it has to be thrown away because it still might be important. I worked years ago with the Science Museum of Minnesota and they had about 1,500 pages and they cut it by about 60%, which is awesome. What they found is they had so many layers deep. They had really critical information about their exhibits and they have exhibits that come and go and but they have exhibits that stay all the time. And so what they decided to do is on that third level they took all the content that was just fluffy stuff and just filler and they took it away. So they dropped like 85% of that content and they took that 15% and they moved it up to the second level and they just kind of made it called out and really critical. And so they just realized no one's going to that even if I change what this looks like or what it says, they're still not going that deep. How do I pull that up? And I think that's a great way to think about that problem that if there is content that's not getting visited but it's a key initiative, how do we pull it up and make it more meaningful? Challenge number five, they forget about the ongoing content needs. Basically this entire process is focusing on what do you have now and what are you going to write in the future? And a lot of what you're going to write in the future is probably more static stuff. And this is how are we going to constantly be marking ourselves and making new content? And I think honestly, I think we forget about this a lot. I'm super guilty about this. It's hard to think about and talk about in that time you have just to build this new website. So the solution is, is we should start talking about upcycling. Has anyone heard this term before? So this is new to me, but when I walk through this, I think you'll be like, oh yeah, because I heard this eight months ago and when I watched a video and then explained it, I'm like, oh, this makes perfect sense. So what upcycling is, is that you take one really good, solid piece of content, you break it up, you push it out on different channels and you repurpose it. So each thing you push is really strong, but you push it out smart time so that you can have the greatest amount of impact. So let's think about this in an example. So take, I think, I haven't gone to the bay yet. The bay that way, the water is that way. One direction this way, that way. So we go to the water, we take a big boulder and we're gonna chuck it in the water, right? And what happens is, is that we get big rings, right? We all did this as a kid, like watching the rings go out. And so before those rings dissipate, we're gonna throw another one out in a different spot and then those are gonna come out and then essentially as we keep throwing these rocks, the impact gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So how to do this? Well the reason also why we would wanna do this is essentially it should save time and money. It's gonna be hard right off the bat, but if you have to produce one big concept, either every two weeks, every four weeks, you only gotta do it once. And so it should save some time and money eventually. We're also recognizing that people aren't just coming to your website to read stuff. People are going to social media to read stuff and hopefully they're coming back to your website, but that's where they're going. So we need to make sure that we're making stuff for that space that drives us back. It also forces us to make really good content to start with. So we can't just kinda be like, oh, good now, just publish it out there. Oh, no one saw it, that's great, all that time. We're really forced to do that in planning. So what this might look like. So we wanna make a video, right? We're gonna create a video, super easy right? We can all make really fancy videos. Let's just say we can. We're gonna throw it up on YouTube and they have a nifty little button to get the transcript from it. So you're gonna get all the captioned audio right in your little hand. You're gonna take that, you're gonna make a blog post with it. So you've got your blog post, you're gonna shorten it all up, right? Cause it's super long and wordy. You're gonna put titles to make it really readable, grab some images in there, throw that video in there. And now you've got a new blog post and you're gonna be driving people to the site for that. Take that video as a next step. You're gonna shorten it cause people don't really wanna watch as long as a video on Facebook. You're gonna put captions on it because 85% of the video we watch on Facebook have no sound. They also have really nice feature where you can put the captions frame by frame to make sure that it flows really well with the video. And then you're gonna drive people back to your website. Then you can also be promoting this in your newsletter and driving people to the site, just a short little snippet and taking them there. And then finally you can make an Instagram quote card. So you wanna make sure the content is something that is substantial. So maybe like an e-book that can be broken a series, essentially something that is thought leadership, like what is this organization or company really known for that somebody might be coming back for? A real example is Jamie Oliver, the Naked Chef, right? He probably sits at home all night and makes his Facebook posts. He doesn't have anyone to do it. So he put a video up about the roasted tomato soup on YouTube, it's all up there. And then he also, they also made a post on Facebook, right? With a picture and they're gonna drive people to the website and then the website will have the actual recipe. So it's the same thing, different information on different channels. Another example is at the Science Museum that I was talking about. They always start their brand with a print. They still have to send out a lot of print and it's highly effective for them. So when they have a new exhibit, they come up with a video campaign and a print campaign and it's all based on the same imagery so that can use for everything. So you can see that the print is on the left, the video, they have rolling video on their banners for their exhibit. They also use that, they started with a bigger video that they put over the airwaves and then they cut it down to that. And then they're also promoting different pictures from the exhibit on Facebook. So it's kind of like stuff you've all seen and I think it's helpful if we put a name on it and then I think the big thing here is as our job as project managers that we need to be talking about it so we don't lose that opportunity because the website is just a website and the marketing is what's driving them there. Challenge number six, they are paralyzed by the blank white page. I don't know, have you guys ever in your past just told people to start writing and like just go right on a piece of paper and write content? I used to do that and I feel really bad about that now because I don't know how they possibly did it but they did. So I think the challenge is for us to break things down into as many digestible pieces as we can and that's not just the content but also the timeline and deliverables for us. So what we do is after the site map is made and the wireframes are done, the project manager has a goal to get everything ready the basically the tool they're gonna start writing content with one week from the date of the wireframes. So what they do is come up with the unique types of content so is it a blog, is it new as item, is it a page, is it a school, what are those pieces and then they're gonna finalize the full scope I mean the full list of pages, right? All the different things that they need to be writing they're also going to invent word limits cause we probably know better than clients do cause we're around it more often and clients have a real struggle just saying how long do I write for I just have to fill this in so we make up the word limit we do that just based on our experience we look at the wireframes and sometimes we'll look at competitors and see what they're doing. We're gonna set some firm deadlines so every single week we wanna set X amount of content to be written, so on and so forth. So if you have a two month span we gotta break that up cause I can't say go and then see you in two months we need to break it into two tiny little pieces every single week. We're also gonna decide where that content is created. So when it's small we might just be doing word document we might be just adding it directly into Drupal we might be using something else when it's bigger we really like to use a tool called gather content. Anybody using that? Couple people I love it you guys love it? Okay good cause I'm gonna talk about it for a little bit. So after that wireframe meeting the project manager's gonna grab that site map those wireframes and they're gonna start filling this out and the best part about it is they're gonna be like wait a minute we don't have a wireframe for that wait a minute what's that we're missing that piece we're missing that piece so they go meet with the user experience person they sometimes meet with the developer and they fill in the pieces so instead of waiting till we're to the build portion and having all these conversations we're flushing all that out right off the bat. So gather content you can get it at gathercontent.com it costs about $80 a month and you can have 10 projects so if you're an agency you can have up to 10 clients on it if you kind of want to ease your way in or if you're an internal project manager the first month is free so most of our projects right now complete content creation in two to three months so really you're paying maybe 160 bucks. It's totally worth it. It is a tool that we can set up and we can monitor what's going on and the client can add content pass it back and forth between their teams and put in line notes like you should add this here what about this so it's this really collaborative tool it also connects with Drupal it's a little picky about how we build Drupal at our company but I know a lot of other firms that use it and do the import with it and it works just fine. So the first thing that we do is we set up the template so these are we're identifying all the different items that we're gonna be making content and unique different pages. So for this site we had training classes we had a home page we've got the donate page the staff bios and so on and so forth so we make those and we do that by on the left hand column is all the flexible pieces so we basically drag and drop as many things as we want in and we title the field we can add text underneath it to describe what it's about and then we also set that fun word limit it also lets you do characters you want and what happens is as the client is writing it turns red and then they call you and say oh my god can I go over my word limit and we go yes you can do it and then they feel really bad and they don't do it they kind of stick within it and that's how we get shorter and shorter more compact text it's awesome everyone feels really bad and I love it so you fill it out and then you create your templates. And then you go and we now make the navigation so everything on the left is the navigation of the site so we've taken the site map and we can put it in there and you can put it in the tree structure and then if you mess it up you can drag and drop the item so super easy to work with from that then we assign the template so then the client when they're coming in here they're gonna click what they wanna write the template will pop up they'll add their content in and boom so now all the contents and tiny little pieces for them we also have a due date so our project managers break everything down and assign due dates but we wait to do that until after they've assigned who's gonna write cause I don't wanna assign like 10 pages to Molly and then Bob has like one so I wanna wait for them to do that so we give them a delivery date for assigning all the content to the right people so we can get through that. Oh you can also in the right hand corner to see when the last time they updated something so you can catch them we're working on it no you're not I see that that's the best part of all the tool I can actually see what they're not doing you can also enter a workflow so here you can add any old workflow you want if you wanna have multiple reviews one review if you need a subject matter expert kind of reviewing certain page you can all add that in there and it's completely editable and then finally the little very simple status bar you can see where you're at so say you've got a three month project you're one month in we better be one month into that content entry or we're all in trouble and so it allows you to easily see that and I think it really makes people a lot more accountable for what they're supposed to be doing cause usually there is no visibility you get to the end and you're like you're not gonna make it oh we're just a little behind how behind like three months okay so I love this tool challenge number seven the content maybe isn't good enough right ever get content from your client to put in the site and you're like that's not good or you get content you think it's good and then you find out later no one's getting the page right there's a couple things to do one we ask our clients to deliver us one to two samples of every unique template before we start building and so that we can build to that and we can also say oh look this isn't any good can I give you some direction it also is they've gotta get stuff done anyway so if we can front load anything we can get that done and move on from there so the way to figure this out is to teach testing anyone do user testing before awesome so it's really easy right that's the best part about it I think that's the biggest barrier that has to be complicated I've actually done like the lab testing which is ridiculous by the way it costs like 20 grand kind of fun but really weird you're sitting behind a wall and everything but you're not interacting so you don't get as good of information that way what I've also found over the years of doing it because I've done lab testing I've done in person and I've done online testing is that I think the biggest problems we have is with the content not usually the functionality not the UX and not the design it's the content that's tripping people up they're just not comprehending it and so I think it's important to do some things and the three areas we can kind of go through with our clients is testing for readability testing for findability and testing for comprehension and really as you go down it's really the more investment you have so maybe your MVP process is just starting with readability so for readability it's important to know this is essentially can someone read the text on the page right well 21% of US adults read at a fifth grade level or lower fifth grade that's it and 14% or 32 million can't read at all so we're making websites a fancy fancy fancy fancy that are really high level education needs to be PhD and we're losing people on top of it people that can read in easy way we don't want to spend the time trudging through complicated text we want to get on there fast so we need to be testing the level so readable.com is a great way to do it if you haven't used it before you take your piece of paper you copy all the text you throw it in you hit a button and boom you get a grade level so for whatever stuff I was testing this day I got a grade level nine so if fifth grades are bar nine might be too high depending on who my audience is right we've got to figure out who our audience is how high it should be if you have trouble like if you're at a higher ed place a lot of times I hear well we can't drop or grade we really should be at that PhD or college level you don't want to be people don't want to read that kind of thick stuff unless it's like a specific case study or something that's in that kind of content area next one is findability can you actually find it on the page and there's two kind of tests that work for this you can also do in-person testing but two other options one is tree testing and the other is first-click testing so tree testing is really a navigation test where you put the navigation tree in and then you ask like 10 questions and say where would I find this and so we're making sure that they can find the content item that they're looking for first-click testing is taking a look at the page asking a question and say where would I find that and then they click at their first spot where they think they'd find the content I will very clearly show where if you're on track this is also both online tests so that you can just grab people and do it in a much quicker time finally comprehension is really can a user read the content find the content and then can they do something about it can they act on it can they donate money can they engage with us can they reach out comprehension is huge and that's really where I would recommend doing the in-person testing and who drinks Starbucks here that's less than I thought we have the app right you put a little app and you push a button and coffee shows up at your table that's what you're gonna do you're gonna go to Starbucks or whatever coffee is out here and you're gonna sit down and you're gonna hit the app and you're gonna have your first user testing person you're gonna run through your questions and done, you'll be done like that and all you have to do is buy them a $5 coffee you can do that, you can go to an event and a client maybe has a big event and you can just grab some people it's super easy but we wanna make sure people are understanding be able to make some good decisions number eight they've reached the finish line but that is it how many people are doing governance? it's hard so my new theory is maybe we should just wait we get to the end, we're exhausted maybe someone's boss won't let them keep working on it maybe they just need a mental break so my new idea is that we need to wait for those that might not know what governance is this really is just the plan of maintaining for the content creation to publishing what is the process, who's doing it and how do you maintain that content in between so now that you've done making the content for the new website now you've gotta figure out how to maintain it and make new stuff so I'm thinking let's just wait three months and then as project managers schedule a meeting with them and do this, we're gonna go there and we're gonna ask them how is the website working for you? it's been three months, the honeymoon period's over what could we have done differently so it's a great way to re-engage with them and do a little retrospective sales person maybe wants to also come along have good vibes there or account manager and then we're also gonna say, okay now's the time to check in with what you're doing and so my MVP for that process are these things and yours might be a little different but I just wanna be like, okay so who's making content now? I know you guys all are doing it but there's probably less people right now, right? so who is it gonna be and then how are you getting it from idea to that, well, I don't know we haven't thought about that we didn't do that yet okay, well let's talk about it so we wanna figure out the new workflow to get content published with the least amount of barriers possible we also wanna make sure they're doing an editorial calendar, right? like, I'm not a writer I don't make these things but I know that there's multiple channels they should be publishing on there's different content they need to make they should be doing something every week let's sit down and make that and get through a couple ideas and then they can finish without their own that way at least they're constantly making some stuff we also don't wanna forget about all that new stuff we wrote like it's done I will never think about it but they need to look at it I think the very low level is look at it once a year that's the low level the other one would be to kind of break it down by the template and then decide how often you should review it cause some stuff can kind of sit there and then some stuff should be iterated on more often and then make sure someone's looking at analytics and kind of changing content based on that just make sure it honestly like someone will raise their hand and tell us what you're doing otherwise you gotta make sure someone's doing that I actually had an interesting story we worked with a member organization that we went through massive, massive content items and they actually hired BrainTraffic if you ever heard of them they're out of Minneapolis really great content strategy firm they heard them do a workshop and they did this whole workshop and then everyone on their staff read the book the content strategy book and they're all in it and they did it through the whole project which was awesome and then they stopped and then I talked to them a couple years back and said, okay, you're doing a new website now how's your content going? And they said, well, we've added 3,000 pages and I said, what? 3,000 pages in two years? They stopped those people that had done everything right quit when it came to maintaining that and doing governance so I think we gotta cut ourselves some slack and then just focus on the minimal stuff without us as project managers telling people and explaining that to them I think it just kinda gets thrown to the side the ninth and final challenge is their coworkers want to help not really and have interesting bad ideas yes, politics so we need to help them manage politics I tend to find this in either large organizations or very siloed department organizations where everyone's fighting for their turf I actually just met with someone a couple weeks ago where they're gonna definitely have that challenge they're gonna have to figure it out it's like, well, what about this? Oh, you need to ask that department well, don't you have an opinion about it? No, they need to talk about it so it's challenging and I think the big thing is how can we mitigate it? Cause it's not gonna go away, right? So the first thing is really communication I had a client once decide when they had all these tough squabbles internally he picked out two or three key people that were really the problem people that were gonna go to the full staff or go to the meetings and just be a pain in the butt, right? So he picked them out and met with them individually for like an hour before the project started he met with them again in the middle of the project and then he met with them at the end and let me just tell you he really mitigated that problem so I think that is a really good option another thing is, is I tell folks that when there is like a ring, right? So there's not just a web group and then the staff, but there's a web and then there's the kind of stakeholders but not stakeholders group meet with them every three weeks there's always something to share there's always some document or some decisions made show that to them ask for their opinions and move on and it turns out those folks tend to ever disrupt the boat they just wanna be heard they just wanna know what's going on and giving a very set structure and I like having clients to have a scheduled every three weeks because otherwise they're like oh well it's probably not important we probably don't need to share it no, every three weeks it's gonna happen get it set right off the bat and then you're set the final thing is doing internal stakeholders so just grabbing some of those key people that are in that middle ring and just as an agency meet with them and ask them questions you know what do you like about the website what don't you like about the website what do you see going forward how is the organization structured different things like that that would really just flesh out some of their ideas give them a place and a space to give their thoughts the other thing is data you know what if you're gonna all complain about your stuff like here here's the truth here's the facts and I really go back to that tree testing again really if you have a problem of where people are gonna find your content or I just moved it in the footer we're gonna test that no big deal I'm gonna make 10 questions I'm gonna put the navigation in there and I'm gonna send it to 50 people outside your organization and I'm gonna send it to everybody inside your organization and we're just gonna see what happens we'll learn a couple things but we're gonna probably find out that people can find your stuff just fine and the test is great because it gives you if they actually had a successful response and how long it takes so if it takes someone a really long time to get there well then it's probably also a problem so it not only helps you as a development team it also eases that kind of tension I think this is a really big huge one that helps also provide a backup I find that in educational situations maybe school districts or if someone is less savvy in technology on the team they start to panic about the change they panic about not getting to see stuff and they're really good with having things exactly as they used to be and so if we can take their old site we can put it on our server and say hey you can go look up prom 2016 over there when you gotta put that on your site then they're fine it kind of relaxes them most people don't ever go back to that but if you can just put it over there it'll kind of calm them down the final thing is feel free to be the bad guy how many people are internal PMs? here how many times have you told your coworkers or supervisors how something should be and your great idea and your process and they don't listen to you and then how many times is someone like me walking and say the exact same thing and they listen to them right? unknowing! so people like me need to use that power to help out that client PM we can work with them and then help them get their message across and be the bad guy there is nothing, this is not about what does the client need this is about being a really good partner and sharing, you know, giving them the best product, right? so if we're a good partner we're gonna tell them how it is and we're gonna try to make the best route possible and so helping those internal PMs is what we need to do and support them so be the bad guy so that's the nine topics and before we go into questions we do have some extra credit because you're project managers and I know you want it but have you ever gone to the project manager summit the digital project manager summit? like it starts at 8am and the entire place is full like project managers are... so extra credit these are my two favorite books they're really easy reads but if you don't want to read them you can easily read chapters or sections or like oh I wonder about that tool what's that about? and then you can read that section and kind of add it to your MVP process so those are my two favorite and then I wanted to leave everyone with one more final quote it's really that the demand for content project managers has risen 500% over the last year which is massive and I'm totally making that up but we can do that we can do that in 2018 right? I'm so glad I got you but either way, challenge yourself how do you want to evolve your role whether you're an internal PM or external what do you want to be? we can do anything and I'm pretty proud of the PM community both digital and Drupal so let's make a big difference and we got questions yes the slides are actually available on my slide chair and I'll provide a link right at the end so they are already up there yes yeah I think honestly I just have a come to Jesus conversation it's nice the first thing is when you're making that schedule with them if you know them tell yourself like is this actually realistic for them or anybody are they actually going to do it and if you think it's on the edge maybe pull back and put a couple things over on the side and say let's start with this first and see how it goes and evaluate in a month or two and then add some stuff in and then if they're just not doing it pull everyone together and say you know what I want you guys to be successful you need this to meet your marketing goals what's the hindrance and it's okay no one's to blame here but tell me why you think this isn't working how can we change it because sometimes maybe it's a tool maybe someone's not the right person you need to move people in or out and then also say you know have you thought about hiring someone do you need someone from the outside as a contractor part-time to kind of fill that in but I think the worst is like letting it go too long but also you know you know if they can do it right like you're like all right we'll just cut back and then start out from there just don't do it at all have you been with the client for a long time he's nodding yeah I mean part of it is you can have no control right you can't sit there there is like a level of how much they ignore you or they don't and also supervisors so there's things like if they just disappear can you pop it in their office say hi want to bring cookies what's going on make them feel guilty there's also maybe some pressure you can put from the side or from the top so like if they're supervisors sometimes I'll just copy a boss on something like hey guys haven't seen a lot going on what's going on like we use basecamp and so those kind of things we wouldn't put in basecamp but when we're just working with the project manager they're not doing stuff I'll put that in basecamp all day long hey everybody nothing's happening something tends to happen or you could call someone on that or at the next meeting that you guys have for whatever in the project bring it up like here's where we're at guys based on this our timelines moving back is that okay with you what do you want to do about it so I think pressure make them feel bad no we don't yeah that's I should have mentioned that in the beginning but essentially a lot of this is if you don't have a content strategist on board because we don't and I don't think a lot of people do but I'm hoping like in two three years we'll all have them on our staffs but I think in your situation when you have one I think what's their scale like some people are good at details but the people aren't so that they're a little more creative and airy-fairy that's where filling in those pieces and kind of working with them but I'd imagine it changes based on whoever it is but a lot of times a lot of these things that we talked about are really project management stuff all the detail tracking the timelines the bugging all that kind of stuff is so I would just unless you know I'd actually step over the line until they push you back if you're not sure because otherwise things are probably falling sorry falling in the holes so I would just just start filling in the gaps and say hey let me know if I'm taking something you want to do and go from there yeah awesome mmm well the goal would never be working with someone you don't get along with so we can blame sales um I do that yeah I mean I think maybe trying to take the relationship outside of the project so every time you're meeting all you're doing is talking about the project so maybe grabbing a lunch and just talking about ideas and saying how we can work together I also like doing a project to take a break in the middle depending on if it's really big a couple breaks and say we're not talking about the project today all I want to do is say how is it going how is it going what's working for you what's not working for you but I'd probably just try to take that relationship into a different space so it's not always like who's in charge kind of in the meeting but just be like hey let's grab lunch let's talk about it what who are you what do you like what's your home life like you know if you can make it a more of a personal relationship that will probably ease that a lot more that helps when the client says they're not the they're saying to you you're not the content expert yeah and you said that's great I'm not the content expert either I don't write I'm the project manager and I'm going to help you get through the process so if there's no one on that side I think there's often not someone there so that eases the tension if you say we're going to do content strategy I'm going to lead you through that but if there's someone there you're not trying to fill their role anyway you're just trying to fill around their role and so I just focus on I'm the project manager and let me help you what are you going to do and how do you want your role to be in this process and just try not to compete even though you might be doing some stuff under that role just don't tell them and kind of go I can tell you a story about that there's a confab for higher ed by the way there's a content strategy conference for higher ed that conference in general is awesome they have the general one in Minneapolis and I've been to it so it's really good but they do have one for higher ed I actually know someone at the University of Minnesota and she worked on this website where they had the exact same problem so what she decided to do is put in all pictures and text about Gravedigger you know the monster truck thing the big monster truck Gravedigger and so they set deadlines set deadlines, set deadlines and you know what that sucker launched with Gravedigger all over it and that team got that content done within one week it was amazing but she has the same problem because they're experts they don't trust you and so if you can kind of figure out how you can promote them as the subject matter expert because that is important they need to be putting that input and that you're kind of just there to guide them that's the best you can do but timeline wise to me when I work with government or education I stretch the timeline now I just go with the reality of it because it's not going to move that fast and then I prioritize you know here's all what we're going to do tell me what the most important is because you're not going to get it well no no no you're not going to do it and guess what we can launch and then we'll just add it no one's it's not going to bother them as long as we're not missing some key information about how to get there we'll just add it over time don't worry about it you're super busy you're doing important stuff teaching people I think ego and then like just stretch and cut that gather content has dates in it there's a couple other ones but I like keeping everything in gather content so while like it doesn't set up as a date there's another one out there that I can't remember that's more for content creation ongoing that has a more traditional editorial calendar and I can't remember what it is but if you Google you'll find it pretty fast that's super helpful but we do we put the whole thing in there yeah but we don't all the inventory so he's asking you know do we put everything from the inventory in to gather content and we do put all of the navigation in there we don't copy and paste over like the URLs and all the extra stuff we really get rid of that at that point but we do put it in there and then prioritize I think it's important to have the full list so they can kind of see their choices along the way and then what we do for things like blog we'll write like blog title one blog title two or if there's something really big that it's going to be done for an import or it just seems really silly like we don't tend to often write like a lot of staff bios like for the school there's going to have 200 staff bios I'm not going to put 200 staff bios in there they're going to actually just start entering that and drip away before we get it themed and ready to go we're just going to make that content site first because the quantity is so high so yeah so if you have a high quantity you if you're going to do and gather content you make sure you can import it over otherwise don't make them do that because it's just not nice but yeah so we sometimes pull some stuff in there oh yeah anyone else I've got a couple anybody know of a Drupal module that will do the readable.com concept basically gives you a score of what grade well we are at time so I'm going to go through my mandatory slides so join the sprint Friday 9am feedback it's actually really helpful not too many people did it for me last year but all the stuff that they wrote really helped me out so all you have to do is go to the schedule session go to my tab and put some submit feedback and then if you want to connect which is always fun there's my information the slideshare is at winterlinn the slides are already up there and then my gmail is winterlinnmn because I'm from Minnesota at gmail.com and then my handle thank you guys so much I really appreciate it have a great trip