Site and content publisher communities
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It’s common to corral a party of ‘champions’ when launching a new intranet, but ideally you should have a thriving publisher community in place for long-term engagement and support. More than just a forum to chat about technical matters, your publisher community should be the hub for content quality, intranet improvements, and a trusted source of feedback. Suzie and Wedge discuss the features of a useful digital community hub for intranet site owners, content creators, and publishers. The 45-minute webinar covers: Technology choices for near-synchronous and asynchronous support Topics, including reference material and training Keeping members engaged and informed. And several questions from audience members at the end.
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Site and content publisher communities
- 1. Site and content publisher communities Engaging and helping people write, publish, and manage their sections of the intranet
- 3. About ClearBox Consulting 4 ClearBox Consulting Ltd. is a specialist independent consultancy that believes in making the workplace a more productive experience. We understand technology, but we approach it from the people side first. Our goal is to help organisations collaborate and communicate more effectively.We specialise in intranets and the wider digital workplace, including internal social networks, enterprise mobile strategies, and real-time collaboration tools. @ClearBox | clearbox.co.uk
- 4. Community spaces Community guidance, engagement, and development Reviewing and making changes to the intranet ClearBox Consulting 6 Agenda
- 6. Who the community is Content creators Content publishers Content approvers ClearBox Consulting 8
- 7. Community spaces Delivery? MSTeams Yammer & site Non-MS collaboration tool Meetings* Workshops* When? Pre-launch Post-launch Content? Top-down (direction and resources)* Bottom-up (questions, feedback and concerns) Side-to-side (conversations and support) ClearBox Consulting 9 *We’re going to discuss these in more detail
- 9. Training scheduling • Why create anything? • Content planning - gap analysis, need discovery, define audience. What to create • Draft process, user stories, job stories, skeleton outlines. • Review process. How to draft • Information architecture (structure and menus) • Department focused?Topic / task focused? Where to publish • Page layout, templates, image sourcing. • Tech skills. How to publish 11
- 10. ClearBox Consulting 12 Should accompany, not replace, training Include reference material (intranet launch and governance) Format is important – written, video, and / or audio – as is findability Apply your own advice to your content Add more / fill in gaps beyond launch ‘How to’ guidance
- 11. ClearBox Consulting 13 Style guide (how we write around here) Brand guide (colours, image use) Image library List of acceptable stock photo websites Easy access to
- 12. ClearBox Consulting 14 Share the roadmap, progress, tips Don’t call it a blog Specifically for the publisher community, but maybe open to wider audiences Regular blogging?
- 13. Governance ‘policing’ Don’t expect people to read it Document should be digestible Guide people through it Use it yourself Continually evolve ClearBox Consulting 15
- 14. Onboarding new publishers (New starter process) 1.Who receives the request? 2.Train them 3. Invite them into the community 4. Grant them permissions 5. Update your records ClearBox Consulting 16
- 15. Reviewing and making changes to the intranet ClearBox Consulting 17
- 16. ClearBox Consulting 18 Benefits: Engagement and investment Feedback from across the business Relevant development Tips: Make it fun / informal Get comments in advance Take feedback Share plans and early work Break into sections Take actions and work on them Quarterly meetings
- 17. IA and menu reviews ClearBox Consulting 19
- 18. ClearBox Consulting 20 Members can be the ‘second pair of eyes’ outside of the content author’s actual team The community can develop a consistent approach to reviewing new content, and editing existing pages Content reviews
- 19. ClearBox Consulting 22 Effective headlines and summary descriptions Write for your audience (not for your boss) Page layout The mobile experience Content planning with content design techniques Get training hello@clearbox.co.uk
- 20. Expert intranet review ClearBox Consulting 23 Get a roadmap for how to improve your intranet with our one-week consulting package clearbox.co.uk/improve-your-intranet/
- 21. 24 Contact ClearBox hello@clearbox.co.uk www.clearbox.co.uk @ClearBox United Kingdom 🇬🇧 +44 (0)1244 458746 ClearBox Consulting Ltd.Treliske House, Queens Park Road, Chester, CH4 7AD, UK Republic of Ireland 🇮🇪 ClearBox Limited, 77 Camden Street Lower, Dublin 2, Dublin, D02 XE80, Ireland
Editor's Notes
- Site and content publisher communities. Think about the term ‘intranet champions’ and how we really need to move past that to respect the in-depth work publishers do throughout the year.
- Hello hello, my name’s Wedge, and I’ll introduce Suzie and myself properly in a second. We welcome your questions throughout the webinar. Please use the Q&A panel – if you wiggle your mouse cursor, you should be able to see the Q&A icon, please open that panel, and use the Q&A system for any question you’d like to put to our presenters. If you use the Chat Panel instead, that’s fine, but we might not see your questions as easily. We are recording this webinar, and I will send you the video via email. Hopefully you’re listening comfortably, but if you need to switch to your telephone, just mute the sound in Zoom and keep the presentation on screen while you dial in. The local phone numbers are listed in the email from Zoom that you received about an hour ago.
- It’s Suzie Robinson and me today, you can find us on LinkedIn and Twitter.
- The poll will pop up on your screen in a couple of seconds. ‘Read the question’ – ‘talk about the question’. Just 10 more seconds to vote. Thank you very much, we’ll close the poll and the answers should appear in one more second. So that’s interesting ‘the two of you talk about the answers’.
- SUZIE – We’ve split our session into three, which translates into: Who the community is and what the spaces do The content and how to keep the community engaged How to go about making changes to the intranet with involvement from your community
- SUZIE – so first we’re going to look at what the spaces are and…
- SUZIE – Community is made up of ‘content owners’ who will perform one or more roles Creators - Produce content, subject matter experts and / or skilled writers Publishers - Will transliterate and / or add content to the intranet Approvers - Have overall accountability for the content (although responsibility may be elsewhere), will approve content in the source / draft format, and / or when in-place on the intranet. WEDGE – there are some people who only create content as a one off – they often hand ‘approved’ content to the publisher. Are these people part of the community? SUZIE – yes they should be included, but how involved they are will probably depend on how senior they are (so worth including them but manage your own expectations around their level of involvement) WEDGE – let’s remember that it is the publisher who should be responsible for the end user experience, so they must be allowed to discuss the shape of content that gets given to them, consider overly long pages, and the lack of subheadings.
- WEDGE and SUZIE WEDGE DELIVERY: On what? MS Teams + site / Yammer + site for content? (Or non-Microsoft equivalents, plus in-person workshops post-Covid). SUZIE When? From the start of the project and beyond – it’s important to get the space up and running as quickly as possible then maintain it SUZIE What to include? Top-down direction and resources (how to videos and training materials) Suzie WEDGE - Bottom-up queries and concerns Side-to-side peer conversations and support (publishers as champions for the whole site) Suzie Next slide is new section.
- WEDGE training schedule next slide
- WEDGE The publisher community should be the place to plan classroom or virtual classroom training and make training materials available. We should avoid only training people at the start of an intranet replacement project – we need regular offerings to support new members and engage experienced members. Training is often a two-way process – the training material can inspire conversations about best practices and change our internal processes. The publisher community members will develop ways of working that go beyond the official training, but such learnings are only impactful if shared and solidified as working practices. Your training materials should probably cover the content Lifecyle, and not merely focus on technical training around which buttons to press. For example. What to create (why create anything) – Surely this has to start with user needs – what our colleagues need to work well. But yep, business needs influence much of the intranet, but let’s define those business needs rather than make assumptions. How to draft – why not offer some consistent process tips so that people can more easily collaborate and help each other? We might assume that everyone knows how to draft a Word document and send it for review, but I still see some people attaching files and emailing stuff round. Horrendous. Also, if we mean to publish truly useful material, shouldn’t we have a way of ensuring content is useful and needed before we spend hours drafting something? Content design techniques like user stories, job stories, and skeleton outlines help us start well. Where to publish - The structure and menus may have been set months or years ago, but I wonder if every publisher has a shared mental model? Department focused intranets are the easiest to manage for *publishers*, they just publish to their own department section, but … Topic focused intranets can be easier to navigate for end users. I think intranets can drift away from the planned information architecture unless publishers have a shared vision of the overall goal. How to publish – People want to feel confident and competent when they start editing the intranet. A simple page might only take 5 minutes to set, so training doesn’t have to be overwhelming. But there are finicky things, like linking to documents or laying out a table. Training might be able to cover these things, but it’s the community that will develop best practices over the months. So we need the community space to share that knowledge.
- SUZIE ‘How to’ guidance is likely to form a core part of the content for your community Should compliment the sorts of training that Wedge has just talked about, not replace it (self learning doesn’t consistently happen) Include longer documents like strategy document, planning materials for the project, governance guide – reference materials that some may find interesting Linked to previous point, consider how you’re presenting the materials – eg if you’re sharing a large strategy guide then break it into pieces, or transform ‘how to upload’ into simple videos Content should be findable, so apply intranet guidance around metadata, titles etc. to your own content (client example) Evolve this guidance beyond launch, keep it updated as things change but also pull out specific guidance where mistakes are repeated in new content
- WEDGE Publishers need easy access to everything Suzie just listed, as well as training materials, and I suggest these four items. I hope your ‘writing style guide’ will be a suite of intranet pages for easy linking and reference, but I can imagine your brand guide will be a PowerPoint or a PDF. Comms teams often provide an official image library, but I frequently see that it’s hard to find, and people forget it exists. Please link to it directly from the publisher community and talk about it often, like every time new images are added. But I also wonder if appropriate external image libraries should also be listed, that offer free-to-use images that come with copyright permissions. We need to stop people going to Google for images, generally, so providing some decent sources can help. Ask me if you want my list.
- WEDGE I think the intranet manager should regularly blog about the intranet’s development. Especially important if revamping or replacing your intranet. Just don’t call it blogging. ‘Blogging’ makes some people imagine that the content will be overly personal or that it has to be weekly on the dot. All I mean, is that the digital team should share the progress with their improvement roadmap, and share tips and good practices to help the publisher community create a consistent user experience. Over the months, the news articles that the intranet manager or digital team publish will become valuable reference material for the small audience of the intranet publisher community. The ‘blog, as I’m calling it, could be private and only for the publisher community, or could be published somewhere alongside the Internal Comms team’s work in the open, for anyone to find. When I did this myself at a large multinational many years ago, I published some good stuff but I failed to gain an audience as we didn’t have a community space – I could only communicate with publishers via email – the dark ages of the digital workplace! SUZIE – to ask about bottom up questions and answering.
- Suzie Gov guides shouldn’t be mighty tomes filled with thou shall or thou shall not, but important for guiding an intranet Create a one-page version for your community to encourage people to absorb the key points, as they are unlikely to read a full governance guide That being said, the document should be digestible – consider breaking into pieces and think about alternative formats As people are unlikely to read it cover-to-cover, guide them through the relevant points – in reply to questions or part of training Make sure the guide covers situations like ‘what to do when someone asks for a new intranet section’ and use that guidance yourself (then guide people through it as you’re following the guidance) Keep updating the governance guide as things change and you find processes need to be improved
- SUZIE Onboarding a new publisher may well be a process that’s documented in your governance guide More generally, hope there’s a process in place to introduce a brand new starter to the intranet as a whole (HR to guide them, dedicated section for them to visit, LMS course) Then if the new person is a publisher, or if someone new needs permission we would recommend these five steps: Will the request go to IT, or the intranet team, or elsewhere? Whoever that is they need to know and follow the next four steps to onboard a publisher properly. How you train them is up to you, will the intranet team do it or will there be an LMS course to prove completion and a certain skill level? Making sure they know intranet context (governance, the architecture, premise of metadata) as well as what buttons to press is an important part of this step. Introduce them to the community and show them where reference materials live should they need help Only then grant them permissions, so that you know they know what they’re doing Update your records (hopefully the intranet will have an overview but we know that’s not always the case) so that you can include them in top-up training WEDGE – so thinking about new starters, it sounds like you’re saying that some people should be prepared to be responsible for the intranet officially. Do you think HR is ready to add comms / intranet to general role descriptions? SUZIE – argument been around for years, I think it’s worthwhile so that people understand the implication of the permissions etc they’ve been granted. The reality of whether HR would do this is questionable. Get senior manager on side who can influence those decisions and you’ll have a good starting point. Next slide is new and last section.
- SUZIE – we’re onto the third section now about how to develop the intranet and keep the community engaged longer term
- SUZIE We helped a client introduce quarterly meetings to their publishing community recently and it went very well, as it brings three main benefits It is a great way to keep the community engaged with the intranet beyond launch, and invested in its success These meetings help with getting feedback from not just the publishing community, but also their colleagues who may speak more candidly with your publisher than with you Help you develop the intranet in relevant ways, because you’ve had that feedback and can adjust your plans accordingly We’ve shared some tips on how to make the meeting a success: Even if senior person present make it informal / fun in tone – you want to encourage people to talk to you so make them comfortable to do so Ask for comments and feedback in advance, even if just one topic – takes pressure off them in the meeting and gives you something to talk about Give yourself plenty of time to dedicate to feedback gathering activities, this is the main purpose of the meeting and will be invaluable If you’re meeting before the launch of the intranet then share project plans and showcase the work in progress Even if the meeting is only an hour, break it into sections to give yourself a defined start/end time for certain topics (and communicate in advance) – don’t interrupt if a conversation is going well though! Take actions away and work on them, then report back – show their feedback matters and what improvements have been made over time WEDGE – Would these quarterly publisher meetings be at all linked to the quarterly Steering Group meetings in some way? Y’know, the Steering Group that represents all departments at a senior level. SUZIE – I think they should be. You may have one person from the Steering Group as a participant, but it’s better to focus on your community and have more of them attend. Then the output of this meeting should be included in the agenda for the Steering Group – as plans may have to change based on feedback.
- WEDGE As publishers publish more, they’ll likely have some feelings about the site structure and the navigation menus. They may feel like the structures you’ve set up are too restrictive, or maybe one category is filling up, and could need splitting into subcategories. I counsel caution. First, let me ask you the purpose of intranet structure. Is it to manage content, or manager publisher permissions? Your answer should influence your approach to developing info architecture principles and intranet structures. My first principle is that wide and shallow is better than deep. A lot of people won’t notice structure though, unless they get lost in the depths of it. It’s the intranet menus everyone has opinions about. The publisher community is a great place to get feedback and discuss options, but I suggest you’ll need to share your user research results to prove that the menus are appropriate the way you’ve designed them. To make changes, we should perform fresh user research, basically tree tests, to discover people’s navigation expectations. We want our publisher community to feel confident that the menus are based in evidence, even if they have strong opinions. If you’ve never tree tested your intranet navigation, please get in touch, we’ll be happy to help.
- WEDGE Your publisher community members will come from across the organisation, and so you might think that they can’t help each other with content reviews, because reviewing is a departmental matter. And that’s true for the facts laid out in any page of course. But how we communicate those facts and how we lay out the details on the page can be reviewed by colleagues who care about the reading experience and the end-user experience. How often do we ourselves write something that we love, only to need a second pair of eyes to tell us that the opening paragraph is too long and woolly? That we’ve failed to communicate the purpose of the page as we’ve made too many assumptions about the reader’s knowledge? Our actual teammates and managers probably know our topics quite well, so they’re not always in a good position to critique our work, if our work is supposed to be for the wider audience across the organisation. The publisher community can be that second pair of eyes, to sense check our content and page layouts to ensure what we publish is easy to understand and looks consistent with the reast of the intranet. Additionally, the publisher community can help the whole organisation adopt better ways of reviewing content, but developing nice ways of working – in other words, using one single document and not emailing it around as an attachment, which creates out-of-date copies. I’ve been saying this for 15 years so I hope it doesn’t happen in your org by now. SUZIE – what about reviewing older content? E.g. an aging H&S section that wants to be redone.
- DUMMY Q1: SUZIE – you’ve been delivering training, what have you seen as common thread. Wedge – honestly, different levels of care and competence. The publisher community is not homogenous, so there’s a challenge in creating a consistent intranet with a consistent end user experience.
- WEDGE I’ve been repeatedly delivering these training modules virtually, over the last year. I can and do customise them to clients’ needs, and so if you’d like to help your content authors and page publishers create a more consistent and cohesive intranet, drop us a line on hello @ clearbox .co .uk
- SUZIE expert consultant will conduct a hands-on review of your intranet and report back to you with a calendar of 25 practical tasks for the year to come.