What structured content means for your messaging

Issue 11

If you’re stuck creating content, structured content can help.

Content creation is an issue most nonprofits face. Time and again, we see nonprofits spinning their wheels creating new content that’s used just once and then never seen from again.

This is especially true for website content. During our website strategy process, we guide clients on how to simplify and structure content to create a better experience for audiences.?

Two principles to simplify and structure content

1. Reduce, reuse and recycle your key messaging.

• Break apart your mission statement, your organizational, programs and services statements, and reuse elements of them across your messaging. It may feel repetitive but using similar language across platforms creates consistency—and consistency leads to memorability.
• This isn’t to say that you don’t need to adjust messaging to fit a specific medium—you do—but you should keep it similar at its core across your communications (i.e. website, e-news, social media).

2. Implement structured content on your website.

• If you’re worried about it being limiting, rest assured that structured content actually provides?more?flexibility. It allows you to update and add content to your site quickly and efficiently because you only have to upload the content once and it populates across multiple pages.?
• In WordPress structured content can be organized as custom post types.?Think: blogs; events; resources; program pages. You identify the common types of content you need for your site, or for a specific page, and the post types are built to fit that content.

"Structured content results in less duplicate content. A single source of content delivered to multiple places means changing it once. That means there is little chance a user will find outdated or incorrect information."

- CARRIE HANE

We may have lost a few of you at custom post types. Don’t worry; for now, start by breaking down your key messaging, and consider how you could recycle it across your site. Then, focus on the content that you keep having to recreate—for events, programs, blogs, etc.—and consider how that content can be cross posted across your site and repurposed for other communication channels.

If you want to take a deeper dive into the subject, this article by Gather Content is a great resource!

The process can be messy, so don’t hesitate to reach out with questions.

Keep changing the world.

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