Cultural Content – Stakeholder interviews

Part 2 of DIY web discovery

Hi there folks,

In an earlier post we looked at content audits and considered them as a blueprint of the data on web usage across your site.

Web transformation is not all about quantifiable data. Making effective changes to your content and your organisation is both an art and a science. The data can get you so far, but the ‘art’ is understanding how to interpret the human element; your users, your content editors and your stakeholders.

Stakeholders come in lots of shapes and sizes.

In this piece I’m really looking at a subtype of stakeholders: information owners (also known as Subject Matter Experts or SMEs) – i.e. people you need to work with to get the information out of their heads. They can also be people that you need or want to wrest control of web content over, particularly if they have produced content that doesn’t deliver against user needs in the past, and may be protective of it or want to create new content that doesn’t conform to best practice or the overall shape and tone of the new site.

In this piece, I present a way to structure initial conversations with these guys and present a template agenda. As always, you’ll want to review and modify this for the specifics of your organisation/ the information owner but the idea is it gives you a useful starter for ten.

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Start with the data

Coming to interviews with stakeholders/ information owners armed with a content audit is a good move.

It gives you the benefit of objective data to talk through some of the anomalies the audit has thrown up (e.g. great swathes of the section with low views / last updated historically)

• This allows you to build more context around the authorship, original rationale, current purpose and viability of sections.

• Often again there is some low-hanging fruit to be discovered here, in terms of taking offline out-of-date pages / pages that no longer have a purpose / answer a user need.

Understand more about where they’re coming from

It’s also a good opportunity to ask info owners:

• How happy they are with their section of the website.

• Any ambitions they’d like for the new website.

• Their understanding of who the audience is, and any research they have on that.

• What KPIs might be appropriate for it.

• How content planning, creation, review and evaluation happens in their department – and whether this has changed within the time they’ve been at the organisations.

• How workflow/governance works in their section (can they publish to live?)

From here you can get a bit of a feel for how they see the role of digital; is digital seen as someone to solve their technical issues (like IT support) or do they think of digital as consultants who can use their expertise to realise their public engagement ambitions online? This will help inform the process and internal comms documents you shape for the project as a whole.

Example agenda for initial meetings with info owners

Introductions

Particularly important if you don’t know each other well / haven’t worked together before

Introduce the web project and the extent to which digital is leading the project, how much and what type of input is needed from info owners. An outline of timelines and when info owner participation is anticipated is useful. 

This is also a nice opportunity to find out more about them and their department, who is responsible for what, how long the team have been in post and how involved they’ve been with the website historically.

Understanding the history of the web content

• How involved have you/your team been with creating/evaluating web content both today and in the past?

• How happy are you with the content there to date?

• Are there any particular ambitions you have with the new website?

Understanding workflow/governance

• What permissions does your team have; can you publish to live?

• How does content planning, creation, review and evaluation happen in your department – has this changed within the time they’ve been at the organisations?

Looking at the content audit

By looking at the content audit together you can ask specific questions about high and low performing pages:

• What’s this page/section (indicate low performing page/section) - do you know much about it/ who created it? As far as you’re aware, does it still need to be? 

• Do you know much about this section (section w lots of content updated years ago)?

User research

• Is there any demographic data that already exists about who does and doesn’t engage with this part of the museum; either in person or online?

• Is there any research around those audiences, for example their motivations?

Evaluating success

• What KPIs might be appropriate for this new site section?

Staff availability

• Are there any months / long periods of unavailability in your team in the next 6 months [[whatever the duration of the project is]]?

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That’s it for this week. As always, please do get in touch if you i) have thoughts/ questions ii) would like to propose a cultural content post iii) fancy a natter on content matters —> georgina@onefurther.com