19 Best Practices for Content Curation

As the volume of knowledge available online grows exponentially, each of us needs a smarter way to sift through all of that content to continuously find the best articles, videos, podcasts, interactive websites, and other learning solutions that will teach us how to be better at and make a bigger impact in whatever we put our minds to.

You could set up Google alerts. Sign up for digital newsletters. Subscribe to RSS feeds. Those options will narrow down the deluge of new content to a steady stream of the topics or sources that you're most interested in, but you'll still need to invest a lot of time and energy in consuming -- or at least skimming -- all of that filtered content to benefit from the few gems that are most relevant to your learning needs. This is where combining technology with a human touch produces a better solution.

In the coming year, more people will benefit from relying on a tech-enabled team that serves up the most valuable content to help them succeed in their careers. These lucky individuals work for companies that are creating their own Learning & Development curation function, composed of professional tastemakers who scour the world for the most compelling and relevant content to meet their workforce's business needs while amplifying their company's unique culture and values. I joined PwC 2.5 years ago to help launch our Content Curation team as our leadership-development and relationship-skills subject-matter expert. (Our inaugural team also included a global-acumen curator and a business-acumen curator.) Over the past year, I've been sharing our insights and lessons learned at conferences and networking events with industry colleagues who are about to embark on the curation journey and in 1-on-1 coaching calls with new teammates who are expanding our capabilities.

Here are my team's 19 best practices addressing the three biggest challenges that curation functions encounter in organizations of any size (and these secrets will sound familiar -- but will share additional details -- if you attended the conference session that we led at Masie's Learning 2017 in October):

How can you incentivize learners to consume your curated content?

1. Wrap it as a gift: Package the content with tips on how to apply the insights on the job and how to use the key takeaways to achieve career goals.
2. Hook into existing habits: Embed content in learners' daily work habits (such as team meetings or feedback discussions). That tie-in makes the content both prioritized and accessible.
3. Link to performance reviews: Evaluate how learners leveraged your content's knowledge and skills to be more effective in their jobs.
4. Invite content submissions: Give learners a personal stake in your content library's quality and its broader adoption by allowing them to help determine what content you include.
5. Reveal trending topics: Create a companywide leaderboard highlighting the most popular content or the must-consume content. This appeals to people's desire to be in the know.
6. Launch viral contest: Challenge learners to find and share your content with coworkers; then reward the learners who catapulted specific pieces of content to viral fame.

How can you measure the effectiveness of your curated content?

1. Trade traditional Learning & Development metrics for digital-marketing metrics: Report the views and shares for individual pieces of content and the time spent in and repeat visitors to your content library.
2. Integrate to improve insights: Get more meaningful metrics by opting for vendor xAPI integration with your platform. You'll find out not only if a learner launched a video, but also at what point the learner stopped watching the video; that kind of data can help you make additional decisions to experiment with content of a certain length or a particular style.
3. Champion a greater good: Align your metrics with larger organizational initiatives or your company's purpose (at PwC, that includes our "Be well, work well" well-being initiative and our Employee Rewards & Recognition campaign).
4. Package informal learning with Kirkpatrick Level 2 evaluations: Incorporate pre- and post-assessments into the content that you serve to learners. That could be as simple as creating a Google form with the learning content embedded as a link between the self-assessment questions.
5. Count namechecks in your firm's ultimate assessment: Track the frequency of your learning content getting listed in annual performance reviews to address employees' development areas.
6. Track increasing sophistication in consumption of a topic: See if learners consume progressively more advanced content on the topic as a signal that they are acquiring additional knowledge or skill.
7. Solicit Rotten-Tomatoes ratings: Crowdsource ratings from learners to capture each piece of content's on-the-job usefulness. Use that applicability data to fine tune what you look for in the content that you curate.

How can you curate informal-learning content with speed & quality?

1. Share your secrets: Tell the vendors whose content you use what your parameters are for picking high-quality content (such as which modalities you are interested in and which aspects of diversity you prize beyond the standard ones) so they can take the first pass at identifying the best-fit content for your organization.
2. Deputize the experts closest to you: Incentivize your learners to use their expertise to curate content for their own needs and their team's needs.
3. Remember the 80/20 rule: Use well-known sources for most of your content and focus your time on finding hidden gems elsewhere.
4. Don’t mistake a source for one-hit wonder: Once you find one good piece of content, immediately look for more content to curate from that source. This is an especially savvy approach if you've set a high bar for the content's style and as a result would pass on lots of other content that doesn't carry the right look, feel, tone, format, or philosophical nuances.
5. Get technology to do the grunt work: See the latest, relevant content by using a source that aggregates RSS feeds.
6. Tap into the best minds: Follow on social media more people whose professional expertise you respect so you can curate from the content that they share. My personal favorites -- due to the quality, diversity, relevance, uniqueness, and volume of what they curate -- include Erin Meyer, Daniel Pink, and Brene Brown.

Which of these best practices are you interested in experimenting with? And what are your best practices for cutting through the clutter to find the most valuable pieces of content to nourishing your own growth mindset or to upskill your entire organization? Comment below to keep our conversation going!