About this Project

This project began as a course project at Michigan State University for WRA 420: Content Management for Professional Writers. The aim of the project is to build a compendium of threats to the sustainability of organizational content strategies by offering an analysis that comes from our own research, and also from reviewing literature in the field of technical communication on content management.

The intended audience for this project are fellow content strategists, students, teachers and research specialists who may find themselves in a position to make recommendations for improving the content strategy of organizations. We hope it can be a resource that these people find useful. If you are interested in adding to an entry or making a revision, please request access and we will add you to the list of editors! 

What is an Organizational Content Strategy?

This is a term to describe the information ecosystem of an organization: who writes, how they write, what they write, who reads/uses this material (also see the Rockley Group's definition). When we use the word 'strategy,' we are talking about the mostly explicit and intentional author, editor, and reader/user roles (who), processes (how), and genres (what) of information that an organization produces as they work to achieve their goals. In some cases producing content *is* the goal, as in publishing organizations. In other settings, a content strategy is employed in the service of some other overarching goal (such as maintaining a consistent curriculum in a school). Our term has some relationship to Spinuzzi & Zachry's concept of a "genre ecology" but it differs in one key way: a genre ecology includes all of those bits of communication - oral and written - that keep an organization going. Many, if not most of these are implicit. And a genre ecology is rarely designed. Content strategies, on the other hand, are usually the product of someone's conscious thought about who should be writing, to whom, in what forms, when, etc. They may not be carefully designed, and they may grow wild once they are set in place. It's these kinds of ideas that we wish to focus on in this project.

Why Focus on Sustainability?

We've all seen web pages that have gone stale, or that lay fallow from a lack of updates. When we do, we might assume that the whole organization is ailing or has ceased to exist. Content strategies sometimes work when they grow organically, or when one person is more or less holding them together through sheer force of will. But even (and perhaps especially) when they are successful for a while, they can quickly become unwieldy. When that happens, the organization has a kind of writers' block. It's not necessarily a lack of ideas that causes this. Rather, some other breakdown has occurred that interrupts the organization's ability to communicate. The list below is meant to identify common causes of organizational writers' block. We call these 'threats to sustainability' because they may not be acute problems, but over time they could disrupt an otherwise well intentioned approach to producing information.

The List of Threats

Content Silos

Expertise Turnover  

A Sudden Change in Financial Overhead

The Invisible Workflow

When Everyone's a Content Manager

Creating TOO MUCH content

Ignoring the Interpersonal Communication and Human Interaction

The Content Funnel

Preservation of digital media

White Bread Content

Lone Wolf Problem

Committee Syndrome  

A Social Organization

The Human Operator

Corporate Puberty: Growing Pains as a Small Business Expands

Reuse as Threat: Good Content Management Strategies Gone Bad

Managing Unruly Artifacts

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