Content strategy is all about connection 🤝🏼

You’re reading Future Community, a newsletter for people working at the intersection of community and content strategy. It is written by Ted Fickes of Bright+3. If you like it you could share with a colleague. That would be a super cool thing to do.

TODAY: We’re looking at how organizations undervalue the first, and often only, thing people coming to them experience – their content. The articles, stories, blog posts, photos, videos, emails, and social posts are all opportunities for connection, not just attention. Here’s why that is and how to think strategically about content for connection.

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Every website visit is an opportunity for real connection.

If we start from that point then we want to assume that people are coming to us for a reason. We are answering a question, solving a problem, or providing a service. We assume this person will return (or is coming back to us).

We want to know who this person is so we can ask them to join us or support us. And we also want to better meet their needs.

Our content is the terrain on which people discover and interact with us: blog posts, resources, news articles, case studies, action alerts, social media posts, photos, emails and even podcasts and videos.

Content strategy is has two key parts. First is understanding how to meet people’s needs with your content by making sure people can find and use content. Most content strategy work really focuses on things like search optimization. Too often it ends there.

The second piece of content strategy is relationship and community building. When you know about the person using your content you can meet their needs over time and help them help you by joining, donating, contributing, purchasing, volunteering or any of the other actions people can take.

What if we built for connection first?

Most organizations know how many people visit their site and which pages get the most visits (I bet you two of the top three include the home page, about page, and the careers or team bios page).

Meanwhile, groups spend time and money creating content with few tools for knowing who is reading and using it, the value it provides, and what people are really able to do when it comes to supporting, acting on and engaging with groups.

It’s inexplicable. And there’s a better way.

We can rethink web design, content and even emails and social media to optimize for direct connection. This would mean that we expect every visitor to tell us who they are and, at least implicitly, show us what they’re doing with our content, how they’re using it and what they can do to support its creation and our work.

I don’t actually expect every organization to get contact info for every visitor or be able to track every visitor with personally identifiable data.

But if we want to create content that’s useful to people then we need to know who people are and what they really think. And if we want people to support our group for the long haul then they need the best content, experience and relationship we can provide.

Data is not insight

Today’s organizations don’t have a clear idea who is using, visiting, reading or viewing any of the content on their sites, emails or socials. Most organizations have subscribers (an email address and maybe a name and physical address) or donors (email, name, address). And they have visitors who, unless they graduate to one of the above, are little more than electronic ghosts. Bits of aggregated data.

But wait, we have Google Analytics installed. We know which search terms people use to find our site. We know how many times a form is submitted. And we can see who clicks links in email, comes to our site and

True. But most site analytics are vague and general. They tell you how many people come to a page and, if you’re tracking an ad or email campaign, how they got there.

You don’t know who’s there. You don’t know why they’re there (though perhaps you can guess). And you certainly don’t know what they thought or if they’ll be back. A report saying that visits go up or down offers a data point. But it’s not necessarily actionable.

Content strategy vs the void

Organizations often have an engagement process that looks like:

1. Many visitors to one or more websites and/or social media accounts.
2. People click and read or view a second page or click from social to web.
3. Someone fills out a form (subscribe, action, volunteer, event RSVP, survey). It’s only at this point we discover who the visitor is and we still don’t know if/when they revisit our content.
4. A visitor becomes a supporter by donating or becoming a member.
5. A person who attends an online event or training.
6. Someone you meet at an in-person event.
7. And the smallest group: sustaining donors, members and/or activists.

A lot of people hit the top of the list once, twice or multiple times. Most never advance past that point. And many that do move on won’t be able to tell us if or how the content is useful to them.

We build content with low expectations if we assume that a nameless visit and click is OK for 95% or more of visits.

We don’t have to approach content – be it web, social, email or audio/video – with the the presumption that “views” are what matter while actions and donations are a separate channel or group of people.

Make connection normal (if not required)

Here’s another look at that engagement process with direct connection as the goal:

Visitors => Frequent visitors => Multi-page visitors => subscribers or registered users => members (and/or donors and/or volunteers)

A connection emphasis could start by optimizing for form completion. Subscribing to an email newsletter is often the only form option.

Donating is another option. Organizations and consultants understandably test and optimize donation forms.

But there are countless other possibilities to present people with forms or even register as site users (a vastly stronger option for long term engagement).

The trick is in creating content that people need and value. And providing a user experience that makes forms simple.

About requiring connection: What if we valued our content enough to require payment for it? For most organizations this is a preposterous thought experiment. “We serve the community. Why would we limit access?” Fact is, most organizations have premium content for high level donors, board members, or task oriented folks like volunteers. We see those people as valuable so we create valuable content for them (and often only for them).

The point is not to restrict content to members or registered users or to set up paywall types of experiences. These are tools in the toolbox, of course.

What does matter, however, is the connection powerful content creates between people and organizations. Too often we invest a lot of time and money in content with little clear strategy. And less clarity about its relationship to revenue, membership or programmatic results.

Great content brings people in and keeps them there. It connects people. Invest in content strategy, not just content, and create systems for measuring the value of that content to your visitors and your organization.

Links? We have those.

💡 The power of pop-up newsletters: With Help From Succession, New York Magazine Tops 1 Million Email Subscribers [Mark Stenberg / AdWeek] via Splice newsletter

✉️ Will changing your domain name affect email list deliverability? Good question. Get your answers. [Yanna-Torry Aspraki / Inbox Collective]

🔜 How to build movements with cyclical patterns in mind explores systems for developing ideas and relationships in movement downtime so you’re ready to go when events demand action. [Dave Algoso, Florencia Guerzovich and Soledad Gattoni / Nonprofit Quarterly]

📈 The Right Message: Subscriptions, Paywalls and Prospect Theory looks at research showing that people subscribe for the benefits and value they gain, not by being reminded what they’re missing.

…the superior performance of gain frames suggests that subscription decisions are motivated by feeling relatively certain about gaining beneficial information from doing so.

It’s a useful read for folks in the subscription business. And a reminder for fundraisers that crisis messaging can get attention but people invest in solutions. [Lars K Jensen / The Audiencers]

📦 The narratives shaping our organizing are hopped up on dividing people into little boxes. This comes from Reframe’s Liz Hynes and Shaira Chaer via Convergence:

In 2023, stories and narratives that transmit rigid definitions of what it means to be an American are being wielded like a pickaxe to divide different groups along the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, immigration status, disability, and more.

🤖What would a bunch of links be without an AI section?

Buyer beware. How Nonprofits Can Avoid A.I. Ethical and Legal Pitfalls. Recognize privacy risks, acknowledge the bias on which AI content is built, the factual mistakes it produces, and disclose its use. [Rasheeda Childress / The Chronicle of Philanthropy]

The dream is realized. Companies and organizations can now efficiently produce mediocre content: WordPress launches an AI plugin that will write your blog posts. [The Verge]

🌽 A few hopeful pieces from the local journalism front:

1. The Transformative Power of Letting Go describes how local journalism funding in New Jersey engaged community members. [Molly de Aguiar and Josh Stearns]
2. 2023: The year equitable journalism goes mainstream explores some of the same journalism funding programs that de Aguiar and Stearns cover in their piece. Community engagement is about more than funding, writes Lindsay Green-Barber. It’s about building power: For too long, journalism has had a laser focus on holding power to account, rather than widening its aperture to recognize the opportunity to build and share power in and with communities.
3. How a Spanish-language newspaper in Iowa is investing in English-language community reporting as big media companies shut down small newspapers. From Douglas Burns at The Iowa Mercury.
4. What could happen if we give up trying to save journalism? Jennifer Brandel’s titular question comes from her keynote at Media Party 2023. She’s trying to address the impact AI will have on the already uncertain state of journalism employment and funding. But this is really about the civic - or community - nature of journalism and journalistic narrative setting. If we collaboratively invest in the kind of care and information needed to have a thriving community then strong local journalism will not just follow, it will happen. What that looks like is, for better or worse, uncertain.
5. Great interview with Diana Filimon about how a Romanian news brand is using Instagram and TikTok to reach young people there. Full of examples about testing, trial and error, and asking people about how they want to be connected to info and believing what they say. [Francesco Zaffarano / Reuters Institute]
   

Interesting

🇺🇸 To paraphrase Joan Didion, we’re slouching towards something but it’s certainly not a shared a shared reality needed to talk about American dissolution. Timothy Denevi on how Didion’s perspective on the 1960s still resonates. [New York Times]

🏈 and 💰 Hope you didn’t plan to self-soothe the apocalypse with live games. Sports media and streaming companies are running a massive price elasticity experiment on you. [Will Leitch / New York]

Get a new job

The job market may, on the whole, be lousy. And the job search process is mostly miserable (don’t go through it alone is all I can say). But there are some solid looking roles out there in content creation and strategy, strategy, community, nonprofit advocacy and fundraising leadership, and communications.

Journalism, Media and Content Strategy

Deputy Editorial Director : Committee to Protect Journalists [Hybrid / New York City]

Digital and Audience Engagement Editor : Nieman Foundation [Hybrid / Cambridge, MA]

Story Editor, Sierra Magazine : Sierra Club [Oakland / Washington, DC / Remote]

Nonprofit Organizations

Director of Field Building : Center for Cultural Power [Remote]

Cohort Coordinator and Project Coordinator (NTC) : NTEN [Remote]

Climate Content Creator, p/t contract : My Climate Plan [Remote]

Director of Communications and Narrative Strategy : Cool Culture [Hybrid / Brooklyn]

Director, Programmatic Content : Jed Foundation [Remote]

Content Director : National Domestic Workers Alliance [Remote]

Vice President of Operations and Finance : Harness [Remote / California or New York preferred]

Executive Director, part-time : Civil Conversations Project [Remote]

Manager, Analytics (Movement Insights) : Wikimedia Foundation [Remote]

Canada Forests Communications Specialist (Part-time 1-year contract) : Stand.earth [Remote in Canada / Toronto / Vancouver]

Foundations

Associate Director, Internet and Technology : Pew Research Center [Hybrid / Washington, DC]

Program Manager, Futures for the Free World : Lubetzky Family Foundation [Remote / Austin, TX]

Digital Strategist : The David & Lucile Packard Foundation [Hybrid / Los Altos, CA]

Program Director and Program Manager for the Powering Good Climate and Infrastructure Careers Funding Initiative : The Families and Workers Fund [Remote / Eastern US]

Director of Communications : Wallace Foundation [New York City]

Communications

Senior Communications Manager : EmbraceRace [Remote in the US]

Senior Communications Campaigner, Insurance : The Sunrise Project [Remote in the US]

Manager, Communications and Content : Council on Foundations [Washington, DC / Remote]

Communications Director and several advocacy campaigning roles : Center for International Environmental Law [Remote / Washington, DC]

Senior Director, Marketing and Communications : Manomet [Remote / Plymouth, MA]

Senior Director, Communications, Pristine Seas : National Geographic Society [Remote]

Director of Communications : Pillars Fund [Chicago / Remote]

Strategic Communications Lead : Bloomberg Ocean Fund [Remote in the US or EU]

Director, Digital & Creative, Executive Communications : Pivotal Ventures [Seattle]

Senior Director, Pivotal Communications : Pivotal Ventures [Kirkland or Seattle, WA / Remote]

Marketing Communications Director : Democracy at Work Institute [Remote]

Director of Storytelling : Climate Power [Remote]

Director of Communications and Engagement (p/t) : Heard [Hybrid / London]

Community, Membership and Organizing

Community Engagement Manager : Abortion Access Front [Remote / New York City+Mid-Atlantic preferred]

Reproductive Justice Program Manager : Groundswell Fund [Remote]

National Digital Organizing Director : Run for Something [Remote]

Director of International Education and Outreach : Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting [Remote]

Director of Public Engagement : Just Vision [Washington, DC / New York City / Remote+Hybrid possible]

Senior Director, Organization Members : Internet Society [Remote / Reston, VA] NO SALARY

Other: Political campaigns, Products, Projects and Biz Dev

Social Impact Strategist : Neimand Collaborative [Remote / Washington, DC]

Director, North America : Citizen Lab [Remote in US / Eastern or Central time zone preferred]

Project Manager : Third Sector Capital Partners [Remote in the US]

Director of Research : Building Movement Project [Remote in the US]

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Top image by Ivonne Navarro at The Greats and used via a Creative Commons-Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC-BY-NC-SA).

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