Making Content Governance Work for You

How up to date is the content in your content library? Is it approved for use? Is it accurate? Do you know who is accountable if it’s wrong? 

Perhaps the hardest part of owning a content library is keeping track of its contents. Without this critical step, however, you cannot be confident that the copy that you have safely stored away is accurate or up-to-date. There is another important aspect though; you don’t know what you don’t know. Communicating with your colleagues in other departments and sharing with them what you have may well yield insights into valuable information that you had not previously known about. 

Following on from my previous article on content sourcing, here I will explore how to work collaboratively, to maintain the accuracy of your content library and improve it over time. Follow these steps and you will have access to more information and be able to use it with confidence in your bids and proposals. 

Bringing Copy Out into the Light

When governing a content library there are two extremes of thinking:

• Publish nothing to the library until approval has been received from the relevant department or Subject Matter Expert (SME). This ensures the accuracy of the available copy but slows the rate of release of new copy greatly. Bidding is undertaken using the limited information that has been published, possibly supplemented with uncontrolled copy that has been sourced from other locations.
• Publish everything that is available, warts and all, prior to any confirmation from SMEs with regard to its accuracy. This publishes copy far more quickly, but runs the risk of errors in the published copy that might leak through to your draft proposals. 

The former approach is common in organisations that bid within regulated markets, where the penalties for errors could be corporate fines or even worse. Where this is not the case I would suggest that you consider using the latter approach. Errors within proposals that result from poor library copy can be caught later, within the proposal review process, and fed back into the library in spare moments.

The power of exposing poor, under-developed copy to an organisation is that it yields opinions. So long as the mechanisms for capturing, collating and actioning that feedback are in place, it leverages the breadth of the whole organisation to help make your library content better. Producing that governance process is a shorter exercise than producing a complete, pristine library. A governance process is also your defence against those that might otherwise take issue with out-of-date or inaccurate copy being available for use, so long as:

• Those inaccuracies, once drawn to your attention, are corrected in a timely manner
• Your bid review process is sufficiently robust that any errors do not leak through into the final client document.

Clarify Lines of Communication

Having defined lines of communication to/from other departments and SMEs is important if your content library isn’t perfect, as this means that any issues that might arise can be resolved quickly. 

It is worthwhile agreeing in advance a point of contact within each department who is responsible for dealing with any queries, and it is worthwhile nominating someone for your own team too who is the conduit for all queries relating to department X or topic Y. This should minimise the chances of any question being asked multiple times, or a query being raised for which there is already an approved answer in the library. 

Agree Timescales for Response and Review

It is also worthwhile agreeing and documenting how queries should be communicated and what is a reasonable timeframe for responding to them. Whilst having this discussion this you should also agree a timetable for reviews and updates that is reasonable from the SME’s perspective and also sensible based on the topic at hand. Health and Safety statistics may need frequent updates whereas HR policies may remain the same for several years at a time. Your review timetable should reflect these differences. It should also, as much as possible, spread the work out throughout the year, to avoid having too much content being "in review" at once and also to ensure that it doesn't then accidentally clash with a peak in bidding workload. 

Finally, you should track versions and have audit trails for major revisions (conceptual changes rather than typos) just in case opinions change later. Most database solutions have this functionality in some form. If yours doesn’t, consider having an “old versions” subfolder so that these can be retained whilst it also remaining clear which is the current version. 

Having a clearly defined governance process for your content library ensures the accuracy of your content. Leveraging the knowledge and experience of your organisation means that your content improves more quickly too. Supporting this with an agreed review cycle drives continuous improvement in your content library, so ensuring better bids produced with less consumption of resources on administrative tasks, instead focussing copywriting on adding value by producing new, bespoke content from an earlier stage in the bid process. 

In the final article of this series, I will explore the topic of gaining value from bids immediately after they are issued to the client. Look out for that in a week's time. 

Copyright ? Alpha Lima Limited 2019