Adventures in Content Strategy
"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." Benjamin Franklin
Everything from content strategy best practices to microcopy examples and UX writing samples, to error messages, content development, and accessibility standards.
Over the years I’ve worked with many content management systems (CMSs) and seen many lists of CMS requirements. I’ve read Deane Barker‘s (phenomenal) book Things You Should Know, as well as numerous blog posts, and even helped a few organizations migrate from one CMS to another. Yet when my team began discussing the ideal CMS…
Stories dictate our lives. For proof, I offer this: it’s a well-known fact that medical students in their residences spend more time in the hospital than out. A 100hr week is normal, even though the lack of sleep is very dangerous. But why? The short term answer, which I found from the book Why We…
How do you create organizational change? Does it have to come from the C-suite, or can it happen organically? Last week at the LavaCon conference, I was lucky enough to listen to a panel discussion titled “Achieving Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in Content Teams.” During the panel I heard David Dylan Thomas, Kiana Minkie,…
Wellbeing may just be the 2021 Word of the Year. In January we thought we were about to get vaccinated and get back to normal (for better and worse), recovering from our time in pandemic. Instead, 2021 has brought with it a lot of reflection and questions: How do you take a break when your…
How does a health mindset affect health behaviors? This was the question asked at Mindset 2021, where Dr. Alia Crum spoke on Harnessing Mindset in 21st Century Healthcare. In Dr. Crum’s talk, she explained: A mindset is a core assumption about a domain or category that orients us to a particular set of expectations, attributions,…
What can content strategists do to address racism and place-ism in healthcare? In J. Nwando Olayiwola’s TEDx talk Combating Racism and Place-ism in Medicine, she speaks to the serious problem of racism in medicine. Racism leads to higher mortality rates and poorer care for black men and women. For example, health professionals assume black patients…
By 2025 we’re expected to have a billion new internet users. Many of these NBUs (Next Billion Users) will have low literacy. What will this mean for UX writers and content strategists? How can we best communicate with NBUs with low literacy? Why will NBUs have low literacy? The last billion users of the internet…
Yesterday the New York Times daily newsletter The Morning shared their perspective on vaccine communication. The long and the short of it: when health experts spread mixed messages, they lose trust. It sounds obvious when you put it that way. But of course no health expert intended to give mixed messages. The real issue is…
I sometimes hear a content strategist joke about being a “content therapist”. But it’s not so far off! Most of content strategy isn’t about writing. It’s about listening. In a way, we are (unlicensed) therapists. Content therapists! In other words, we need to understand how people feel in order to communicate with them. How we…
As we approach the end of the year, many organizations are having their annual conversation around design freezes and technical debt. This year I found myself wondering: why don’t we have end-of-year freezes to spend time on content debt? What is “Debt”? Technical debt typically refers to work that piles up and never has a…
