Why We Love Content Governance (and Why You Should, Too)

What is governance?

In digital experience projects, from website redesigns to CMS migrations, there’s an invisible layer of connective tissue that is often overlooked, and can be the difference between success and failure for a project – both at launch and thereafter.

This layer is called “governance,” and it refers to the people, policies, and processes that govern the creation and maintenance of content. Governance can include documentation that establishes standards for any of the following: 

• Who will be responsible for content creation, review, and approval?
• Where should content planning be centralized?
• What should the workflow look like for making new content requests?
• How will content be evaluated and archived over time?
• How will brand messaging be kept consistent across digital touchpoints?

Governance comes in many forms, and its exact shape will differ based on the nature of each team and project. It may be rigorously developed, documented, and followed, or it may not even be a conscious thought – but governance to any extent is critical for success. Even if you aren’t familiar with exactly how governance “works,” you’ve probably implemented it to some extent under a different name. 

Unfortunately, governance tends to get a “bad rap”... it may sound like it’s all about being heavy-handed with team members, but it doesn’t have to be. You can also think of it as enablement, stewardship, lifecycle management, and a collaborative framework. At the end of the day, governance is all about helping content teams work together optimally.

Ignore governance at your own risk!

Here are a few common challenges that clients run into without a digital governance plan in place:

• Content requests are not tracked in a central repository
• Content admins are bombarded by stakeholders who all want top billing on the website, etc.  
• Outdated content is not updated or archived
• A newly launched site quickly becomes overrun with ad-hoc additions and exceptions that compromise that brand-new-website smell (and look/feel) 

On the flip side, we’ve seen proactive governance planning save clients plenty of time and resources:

• Content admins feel empowered to set and enforce guidelines around content submissions, reviews, and approvals
• Content workflows become centralized so all the right people have the right visibility and access
• Content teams get time back in their week because they don’t have to constantly chase down assets or revisions living in different systems

How to make the most out of governance.

To realize the benefits of content governance, the most important thing you as a leader can do is enable your people to adopt and use the tools you've built together. For instance, whenever we build a solution for a client, we always provide a CMS authoring guide as a way to make sure the users of the tool understand how it’s intended to be used. As a standard, we also host and run trainings to accompany the written documentation. Paired with training sessions, standard documentation is a great way to set a baseline understanding of a new system. Finally, make sure to socialize all the governance tools that exist so that distributed teams across offices know what they are and where they live, and don’t end up reinventing the wheel because they assume they need to.

Two final tips for success in your own website governance planning: 

1. Develop both short-term & long-term governance plans. Strategic governance plans need to be grounded in the current circumstances of the organization in which they will be used. We recently did just that for a regional health system, identifying how they could best roll out their governance plan in stages: from the immediate term, to a vision for later in the year, and finally towards their ultimate vision. Working within the constraints imposed by personnel and organizational structures means that you need to be realistic with what changes can be implemented immediately, and what needs to be placed on a roadmap. 
    
2. Think broader and more multichannel when you have the opportunity. Once the details of a content governance plan have been finalized, we like to think more broadly about how we can contribute to our partners' larger initiatives. This can include recommendations and strategic plans around anything from marketing campaigns and socialization measures, to digital transformations and personnel casting. When we partnered with a cybersecurity firm to get their SaaS product content on their website to align with a new brand story, we helped them also establish how that story should translate to an omnichannel marketing campaign, microsite, and key landing pages. 

There’s a whole lot to love about content governance, but we also know better than anyone how intimidating it can be. Reach out to us if you’d like to chat with Aileen and learn more about how we can help you get stronger content governance in place for your brand.