In-depth Content Strategy for Higher Education: Where to Start?

Multiple schools, multiple departments, multiple voices, multiple opinions, and a whole heap of content. Sound familiar? Your higher education (HE) institution is suffering from a case of decentralised content strategy; while not terminal, the disease requires painful treatment and lengthy rehabilitation.

The role of content strategy is to define how you can use content to meet users’ needs and achieve your institution’s objectives. Within any given business, there are various business objectives: HR wants to hire the best staff, procurement wants the best ROI, marketing wants more clicks. The unique problem with universities and HE colleges is they have a huge number of business objectives: undergraduate enrolment, postgraduate enrolment, access and participation, research, league table, TEF, NSS, student experience, student outcomes. Everyone wants to keep their part of the body happy and healthy. 

It’s a similar story for users; undergrads, prospective mature students, international students, postgrads, researchers, journalists, OfS officials, career advisors, secondary school teachers, parents… 

So, how can one strategy solve the comms issue of speaking to all users while achieving all goals from within the institution? Is it even possible?

Over the next few months, I’m going be working my way through all of the steps needed to design an institution-wide content strategy that unites goals and users. In the end, you’ll have a valuable, flexible resource that improves the content your institution is publishing. 

To decide if you need to continue coming back, ask yourself:

• Is there a central content team that includes colleagues from departments/schools across the uni that decides on uni-wide content goals, practices etc.?

• Is there a central guide for messaging tone, voice etc. that shapes all content published from various schools/departments?

• Are events from various departments that would serve content communicated?

• Is the quality of content produced across schools/departments equal? Does it support users’ needs and business objectives? 

• Is there a publication approval team for content? Is there a central guide for content goals? 

• Is content regularly maintained or updated? Is each department/school responsible for maintaining its content? 

• Is there consistent channel distribution for all content?

• Is there a guide for UX and information architecture that informs the publishing of content?

• Is the success of content measured across all departments/schools? Is this information relayed to a central team? What actions are taken to improve the performance of content?

• Do all departments have equal access to the resources needed to produce content at the required level?

• Who makes key decisions about content policy? Is this centralised and distributed, or is each school department responsible for its own content governance? 

• What quality control is in place for the sources of content published? 

• Do frameworks exist for grouping and tagging content across different departments/schools? 

• Are there bottlenecks for content production? If so, where and why?

If you’ve answered honestly, you should have an idea of the health of your HE institution’s content. If the diagnosis is grim, don’t worry; an effective content strategy comes from tapping into the abundance of talent at your uni, so you won’t be alone. 

Join me next time for a look at identifying the team that will transform this walking cadaver.