by Janus Boye
There’s good news at the moment: Digital strategies and playbooks which used to be just gathering dust are now being put to good use. Also, silos which have so far made internal collaboration difficult are coming down. And perhaps most importantly, the importance of the digital mindset is no longer questioned.
Ashley Budd from Cornell eloquently summed it up our member conference call yesterday:
We can’t rely on the content strategy of the past
As recently promoted Director of Marketing Operations at Cornell Alumni Relations, Ashley generously shared with our community her recent lessons learned drawing on her background as a content strategist.
What’s the new approach to content?
In the call, Ashley used her recent blog post on managing a centralised content strategy instead of a slidedeck. Have a look in the post or the recording from the call (see below) for more details, but to me, in particular two of the steps stood out:
Creating various ways for people to help and make it easy for them to contribute
Content themes to showcase the breadth of what your organisation can offer
Among the challenges she covered, was mining the good stories that are out there and how coordination remains hard work. That’s probably familiar territory to many content professionals.
Identifying the content gaps
Content themes at Cornell Alumni
In the Q&A part of the call, our UK-based member Gavin Colborne from web governance vendor Little Forest asked to elaborate on how Ashley had identified their content gaps.
According to Ashley, she had started by looking at how others organised their content, like LinkedIn Learning.
To organize the content gaps, their 7 content themes as seen on the illustration were used.
Career support came up quickly as a theme with an immediate gap with need for more content. Wellness was another topic, where Cornell wasn’t producing as much as content as alumni were looking for.
Learn more
Ashley kindly shared her template for digital content using Airtable, one of her favorite tools. Back in 2008, Ashley also wrote about Higher Education’s content conflict.
She also mentioned their ‘digital download of the week’ as a new content piece, which has been very popular.
If you want to get out from behind your screen, you can consider joining our European peer groups and Content Operations and Digital Communication.
We were originally introduced to Ashley via our UK-based members at GatherContent. They are founding members of our ContentOps peer group and also among our conference partners for the upcoming Boye conferences in Aarhus, Denmark and Brooklyn. We’ll be sure to cover this topic as a part of the conference program!
Finally, you can lean back and enjoy the entire 29 minute recording below.