A plan for Plan
Plan International UK wanted to improve the user experience of their content. They needed clarity on what content they had, what was working well, where improvements were needed and what needed to change.
Contentious
A content-led strategy practice for mission-driven organisations
Others see content as an afterthought. We see it as the strategic foundation of your essence and experience, your effectiveness and efficiency.
Content is vital. Words and pictures are how you communicate, persuade and inform. They're the connective tissue between you and your users. They define who you are.
Making and maintaining useful, beautiful, interesting content is important but complex. We transform content chaos into strategic advantage.
Sometimes we make really good things too.
How we can help
We help pin down exactly who you are. We work out what to do. And where and when and how to do it. We make content ecosystems work better, for you and for your users. We create content structures, processes and tools. We help you create the most effective content in the most efficient way. We improve your relationships with the people that matter.
Essence
Distilling organisational identity using purpose, expression and relationships
Strategy
Building solid strategic foundations for efficient, effective content
System
Building the smoothest system and the best structures to give you the ultimate in sustainable content efficiency
Product
Crafting great (useful, beautiful and interesting) content experiences on solid strategic and technical foundations
Know-how
Distilling, preserving and improving knowledge and skills via mentoring, documentation and training
“Groundbreaking, strategic, and forward-thinking… a reference for anyone with a vision who recognises the power of content to change a business from the inside out.”
James Wood, former Head of Content, Internet Society
Latest projects
Things we've been working on recently.
Audit, strategy, structure and governance for Global Witness
Global Witness had some great content but their website had been added to organically over time and was structured around internal ways of thinking.
Enabling Greenpeace to track digital maturity around the world
Greenpeace International wanted to assess and improve the digital maturity of all of their national and regional offices and staff around the world. But they lacked a framework or a way of measuring and reporting.
Latest resources
Useful things we've created recently.
How and why to move from WordPress to Astro
A journey from a monolithic content management system to a modern tech stack. And how AI can help create a smooth path to get there.
How to use AI for better content
Artificial intelligence can be used to improve the quality of content, and content systems, and not just to produce faster content slop. This resource shows how.
Commas, colons and capitalisation
Consistency and clarity of language are as important in a world of AI as they were in the time of Gutenberg. Nothing beats having your own style guide, but if you're still saving up for one of those, there are some good ones online that you can use.
Latest thoughts
Things we've been pondering on recently.
Content and pace layers
Different layers of an organisation move at different speeds, just as different parts of a society evolve slower or faster. Content is crucial at all of them.
How to be human
In an AI-infused world, organisations' content can feel more like a relentless stream than the basis for a mutually supportive relationship. There are many ways in which organisations can get off the automated content conveyor belt and become more human.
Content transformation, not digital transformation
Digital transformation has fundamentally changed many things. But content-led change could be the way to create more human, more effective purpose-driven organisations.
Content Health Check
Our Content Health Check tool gives you AI-powered rolling content audits and analysis to get extraordinary detail and an invaluable overview of your content health and fitness. It’s designed for consultants, agencies and organisations who believe in quality.
Measuring your content (individual pages or entire websites) against our framework will give you a set of scores and analysis that will pinpoint exactly what you can do to improve.
Content Maturity
Many organisations struggle with content overwhelm. The tools and systems don’t add up. There’s always too much to do, and it’s not always the right stuff. New content is created at pace while vital older content is neglected. Teams work in silos, processes are not always clear, and leadership questions the value of content investments.
The fundamental issue isn’t just about creating better individual pieces of content – it’s about building the organisational capabilities needed to consistently create, manage, and improve effective content at scale. Our Content Maturity tool helps you do exactly that.
Clients
We work with brilliant people who are striving to make the world a better place. Here are some of them.
Subscribe
Our monthlyish emails feature content-related things we've found/created/thought that are useful, beautiful or interesting. Or even all three.
Useful, beautiful, interesting
We combine dazzling examples of content brilliance and invaluable content tools with innovative ideas for a better content future. And occasionally we throw in content frustrations, just to get things off our chests.
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