What needed doing
The Internet Society works to keep the internet open, secure and there for everyone. After years of busy, committed work, it had built up the content estate to match: tens of thousands of pages, a tangle of email lists, and a constellation of sub-sites – all created with the best of intentions, but organised more around the organisation than the people it was for. Content was hard to find, hard to manage and too often not doing a real job. A rich archive had become something closer to a labyrinth.
This was never going to be a tidy-up. The Internet Society needed to change how it thought about, made and looked after content, right across the organisation – the kind of content transformation that changes an organisation from its core, rather than another technology project throwing software at an issue. It became the largest piece of work we have done: a multi-year programme, running from 2020 to 2023, made up of distinct but connected projects that all flowed from one foundational audit.
The audit: seeing the whole picture
You can’t set a direction until you can see what you’re dealing with. Over four months we audited and assessed the Internet Society’s entire content world – not just the website’s roughly 20,000 pages, but the email estate (we found more than 90 separate mailing lists), the key user journeys, search and a sprawl of many sub-sites.
Crucially, we didn’t just count things. We scored content against a consistent set of quality criteria – useful, usable, accurate, strategic, engaging, actionable, on-brand – so the judgements rested on evidence rather than opinion. The findings were sobering: the vast majority of content was scoring at the lowest level for strategy, very little was recognisably on-brand and a great deal was harder to read than it needed to be.
The real value wasn’t the list of problems. It was giving everyone, from the communications team to the leadership, the same evidence-based picture and a shared mandate for change. We turned it all into an action plan: what we found, what to do, how and why.
A strategy for a better content world
The action plan was built around seven areas:
- Strategy
- Audience
- Substance
- Structure
- Governance
- Workflow
- Ecosystem
At its heart was a shift in mindset. The single biggest issue wasn’t volume or tooling – it was that the content wasn’t centred on the people it was meant to serve. So we gave every piece of Internet Society content a clear job to do, defining five content purposes – practical, marketing, learning, stories and advocacy – under one guiding line for the whole strategy: to craft content that inspires, enables and equips people to advocate for an internet for everyone.
And we made the case for doing less, better: retiring content that had stopped earning its place rather than endlessly adding more.
Putting the audience first
The single most important shift in the whole programme was about audience. The Internet Society’s real strength is its relationship with people – yet that relationship wasn’t always valued or understood, and the content too often talked inwards, about the organisation and its projects, rather than to the people it wanted to reach.
So we wrote a dedicated audience report: the “for whom?” that any content strategy turns on. We framed the goal as content’s strategic sweet spot – the overlap between what the organisation needs to achieve and what its audiences actually want and need. We audited the evidence the organisation already held, looked at audiences through six different lenses, and developed five audience types based on people’s motivations and their relationship with the Internet Society, rather than their job titles or institutions.
The biggest idea was to rethink membership itself. The organisation had tended to split its world in two – members and non-members – but membership isn’t a segment; it’s one point on a spectrum of engagement. Picture a set of concentric, overlapping circles rather than an in-or-out binary, and the job of content becomes clear: to offer everyone something of value wherever they sit, and to widen “the community” from the Internet Society’s community to the whole internet community.
That thinking went on to shape a major, separate programme of engagement and participation work.
Principles, voice and a living style guide
A strategy only changes things if people can act on it, so we turned ours into practical tools.
We set out a clear set of content principles – including a favourite, “nothing about people, without people” – and a messaging framework built on three core messages, so the organisation could tell one consistent story. We defined a voice built on four pillars – bold, knowledgeable, optimistic and approachable – and, just as importantly, made it usable, with example-rich rules rather than vague adjectives.
All of it lived in a bespoke online style guide: not a PDF to be filed and forgotten, but a living content toolkit the whole organisation could work from. It’s full of genuinely useful, memorable devices – like the “by botnets” test for catching passive voice, and the discipline of writing for a smart 12-year-old.
A model built around people, not projects
Much of the old content was organised around the Internet Society’s internal structure – its projects and teams. But people come to understand the internet, not to navigate an org chart.
So we built a new content model around a thematic map of the issues the Internet Society works on, with a clearer, more deliberate set of content types – because not everything needs to be a blog post. We mapped the whole content ecosystem, including those orphaned sub-sites, so it could start to join up, and so a single piece of content could be created once and used in many places.
New ways of working
Good content doesn’t survive on good intentions; it needs a system around it. We mapped and redesigned the Internet Society’s content workflows, and built a governance framework to hold everything together: a clear set of instructions, enablement tools and reference material, with content roles and responsibilities defined across the organisation.
One of the most important shifts was moving from approval to validation – away from sign-off based on seniority, and towards checks based on risk, so the right people review the right things and good content stops getting stuck. We set out a workflow for each of the four content purposes, a rhythm of planning and maintenance across the year, and an archiving policy to keep the estate healthy rather than letting it sprawl again.
Content production
Strategy and structure matter, but someone has to make the content. For a sustained period we worked as the Internet Society’s embedded content studio, part of the team rather than an agency at arm’s length – a weekly editorial rhythm, a shared editorial space, and a flexible, credit-based way of working that flexed with what each month needed.
We produced on-strategy content across all four purposes and in several languages, and took on discrete challenges like untangling the email estate – turning that mess of more than 90 lists into a single, coherent, thematic newsletter.
Outcomes: a measurable difference
Two years on, we ran the audit again – the same criteria, a comparable sample – so we could measure progress rather than simply assert it. We turned the quality criteria into ten clear, trackable content-health measures the organisation could keep using for itself.
The direction was unambiguous: every quality measure we set out to move, moved. Content that had been mostly off-brand was now, in large part, recognisably Internet Society. Usability and engagement – two of the weakest scores at the outset – climbed sharply. And the estate itself was shrinking, as low-value content was archived rather than left to gather dust.
Most importantly, the Internet Society came away not just with better content, but with the strategy, the model, the tools and the measures to keep getting better long after we’d finished. The content-health approach we built here became a way of working we now bring to others.
The lesson worth learning
Most content problems aren’t a shortage of content. They’re a shortage of clarity – about what it’s for, who it’s for, and how it should be made. Fix that, give people the tools and the measures to hold themselves to, and the content starts to take care of itself.
