What is Content Strategy and why should museums care?
In 2020 museums had to exist for many months with no physical presence. The only means of access was virtually.
Since then, doors have reopened, but — in almost all cases — finances and visitor numbers are not back to pre COVID levels. Current estimates suggest that the number of overseas tourist visits to the UK dropped by 73 percent, going from nearly 40.9 million in 2019 to 11.1 million in 2020. The number of overseas visits to the UK is predicted to have declined further to 7.4 million in 2021 (source: Statista). That’s going to have a significant impact to visitor numbers and spending in most museums.
If the capacity and accessibility of the physical site is more limited than before, and can reach less audiences, it stands to reason that improving the virtual / remote offer must be part of the solution. That means digital content.
To get a sense of how this change was affecting museum policy, I took at look at the published priorities on the websites of the 47 Arts Council England (ACE) National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs) that are museums. They boiled down to:
Increasing audience engagement
Improving understanding of our collections in context
Developing sector partnerships and or recognition
Becoming more financially sustainable
Improving and diversify learning reach and outcomes
Norfolk Museums’ Mission and Vision is quite a representative example in this regard.
Annotated version of Norfolk Museums’ Vision
To achieve any of these five aims without using digital content would be a huge misstep.
In the words of content strategist Sarah Winters:
Source: Content Design London
And what makes ‘smarter content’? Content strategy.
What is content strategy?
This isn’t well understood, partly because there’s a certain amount of woolliness around how we use both ‘content’ and ‘strategy’. In this section I’ll look at:
What is content?
What is strategy?
A few different definitions of content strategy
What museums mean when they approach us for content strategy
The final word on what content strategy is
1. What is content?
One of the biggest misconceptions I come across is that content is ‘just words’. Firstly, if you strip out every bit of wording from a museum website, the importance of words becomes quite apparent:
The British Museum homepage sans content
But also content isn’t necessarily just words. It might be “pictures, diagrams, charts, links, calendars, a series of questions and answers, videos, addresses, maps, calculators, spreadsheets, printable documents, and many more besides.” (Source: Content Design by Sarah Winters).
In a museum context, almost everyone is already creating some kind of content around temporary events and exhibitions. But the numbers creating content around the evergreen and unique reasons to visit your institution are much more limited.
It’s even more rare, if those pages exist, for them to effectively use SEO principles to effectively to tell Google what is significant and particular to the institution about those unique reasons (be that a key collections piece, a local story or the expertise of your experts).
It’s easy and simple for an institution to think how it was performing last year is the competition. But in the eyes of a cultural institution’s audience, Netflix is your competition - what have you got that’s more interesting than a night on the sofa with a film? Does your website and social media articulate that? And is it the same group of people reading that content as were five years ago?
These questions help answer what content is (and the aspects of it that tend to get forgotten about).
2. What is Strategy?
There is nothing like a crisis to clarify the mind. In suddenly volatile and different times, you must have a strategy. I don’t mean most of the things people call strategy — mission statements, audacious goals, three- to five-year budget plans. I mean a real strategy…
By strategy, I mean a cohesive response to a challenge. A real strategy is neither a document nor a forecast but rather an overall approach based on a diagnosis of a challenge. The most important element of a strategy is a coherent viewpoint about the forces at work, not a plan.
Richard Rumelt, author of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, 2008, wrote
Rumelt was writing this in response to the 2008 financial crisis, but COVID is a similar example of ‘suddenly volatile and different times’. What Rumelt is saying is that organisations are good at creating documents which essentially say ‘here are some things we’re all working towards and thinking about right now’ or ‘here are some wonderful things we did with your funding and support, thank you’, rather than an actual strategy. (We’ll look some more at evidence of this in the museum sector in section heading below ‘There are lots of examples of organisational plans….’)
One of the important differences between these documents and a strategy is that a strategy must look at what’s not working. It must be clear eyed and objective about the ways in which the organisation is not keeping step with a changing landscape and identify drivers to change that trajectory. Strategies also have positive elements of course; identifying the unique strengths of an organisations and the opportunities that a particular moment/ set of circumstances afford. But it can’t be just this.
A strategy must also be outward looking; it must understand the landscape in which the organisation operates. For a museum digital content strategy, this is likely to be around both cultural consumers predilections and changing behaviours, and changes in how audiences access digital content. It can’t simply be an internally facing document that just compares itself this year with itself last year.
3. A few different definitions of Content Strategy
It’s easy to talk about a Content Strategy like it’s a recognised format, but it’s not.
One of the knottiest difficulties around content strategy is that there are lots of different definitions out there. Kristina Halvorson was the earliest figure to dominate the field and her book Content Strategy for the Web is still widely referenced. She states that content strategy:
Defines how you’re going to use content to meet your business (or project) goals and satisfy your users’ needs
Guides decisions about content throughout its lifecycle, from discovery to deletion
Sets benchmarks against which to measure the success of your content
In summary: Content strategy guides your plans for the creation, delivery, and governance of content.
This last sentence has since been picked up by Wikipedia and Usability.gov, so that the most likely answer you’ll get if you google ‘what is content strategy’ is ‘Content strategy focuses on the planning, creation, delivery, and governance of content.’
This is not a definition. A strategy might focus on how to win a battle, or it might focus on how to dominate in search for a new brand of cereal. What it focuses on does not tell us what strategy is. I’ll look at this more in section D (below; Final word on what content strategy is) — but here’s a teaser: simply, Content Strategy describes a strategy where effective content is used to meet the organisational challenge.
4. What museums mean when they approach us for content strategy
At One Further we win or are approached for projects called ‘content strategy’. These can arise from specific scenarios. For example:
We’ve got funding for a new website, help us design a strategy and implementation plan for our governance and content to make it as good as possible
We want to work out how to use digital to more effectively meet our business aims around, for example, income generation, expanding audiences, fundraising, converting our existing audience into deeper levels of engagement
We want to work out how to use digital to more effectively meet our philanthropic aims around supporting marginalised audiences in the community and delivering our learning projects, working collaboratively with audience groups we know we haven’t reached historically, realising our founding vision in formats appropriate for a post-2020 audience.
We tried a bunch of stuff online in 2020, now we’ve also got to run a museum again. What should we do to optimise both (with 0 increase in net resource)?
Similar to the above, we spend loads of time and effort on digital tasks, but we’re never sure if we can’t do everything and we’re not sure if we’re spending our energies in the most effective ways. Help.
What’s interesting here is that there is a slight difference between what Kristina Halvorson, Sarah Winters and the broader content discipline mean when they talk about ‘content strategy’, and how the culture sector often uses the term.
Both Kristina Halvorson’s (Brain Traffic) and Sarah Winters’ (Content Design London) background is in websites. Brain Traffic’s work largely looks at large corporate websites in the private sector and higher ed. Sarah’s work is derived from her creation of gov.uk — so informed by user needs around getting the right information quickly and efficiently.
These are slightly different from the user needs and questions cultural organisations are often asking when they talk about ‘content strategy’. Sometimes, it’s true, cultural organisations do have a specific project which purely wants to work out how best to make their website content, or part of it, more effective. But often the questions are broader, and are less certain or fixed that the best strategy for them will be purely website content related (but perhaps also encapsulating social media, online events, email etc). Most likely the most effective solution in these scenarios will be a combination of smarter website content in conjunction with other online platforms and organisational change.
5. Final word on what content strategy is
If we follow Richard Rumelt on strategy (“A good strategy is a coherent mix of policy and action designed to surmount a high-stakes challenge”)… Content strategy is using content as the solution to the challenge. This may seem an oxymoron; if strategy is working out the answer to a challenge, doesn’t it pre-empt things to stick ‘content’ in front of it? And why is content strategy such a large and growing field if it’s essentially a contradiction in terms?
The reason content strategy as a discipline has taken off is that it’s very likely that doing your digital content better will help answer wider organisational challenges. And, post 2020, it would be pretty surprising if an organisation didn’t feel that using digital differently to how they did in 2019 was part of the recovery solution.
For most museums today, a good content strategy will define policies and actions in the realm of digital content to recover and progress post COVID.
Got a content question you’d like to talk through?
Throughout November and December you can book a free 30 minute slot in One Further’s Content Strategist (Georgina Brooke)’s calendar.
