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.
Content strategy and planning
Content is more than marketing; it's one of the key ways you achieve your organisational objectives. A content strategy defines exactly how, a content plan details the route, and both rest on evidence.
Getting content right is vital. Your content is the emergency guidance somebody reads at two in the morning, the report a government minister is handed, the training a nurse fits into a night shift, the policy your own staff work from. It’s the user experience and the brand experience, and it’s the relationship people have with what you know and what you believe. That’s as true of a gallery, a theatre or a retailer as it is of a charity, and it’s true inside the building as much as outside it. One client put it plainly: “The website is how we actually achieve our objectives.”
So knowing what content you should create, and why, is crucial, and it’s just as important that everyone agrees about it. Content that doesn’t help an organisation achieve its objectives is time and effort wasted, and content that could help and doesn’t is an objective missed. The moment to do this work often arrives with something else: a new website or product, a new organisational strategy, a rebrand, a question such as why first-year members don’t renew, or the plain discovery that nobody can say what content you have. But there’s no bad time to work on these crucial strategic underpinnings.
Or, if you have a bigger project in mind, get in touch and we’ll talk it through before anything is priced.
Clarity and alignment are the foundation of success
Trying to create great content without a great strategy leads to trouble. Different parts of the organisation pull in different directions, resulting in inefficiency, friction and an experience for users that isn’t very joined up. You’ll recognise the moment it bites:
- A website project, a rebrand or a new strategy is about to start, and nobody can say what content it needs, so the plan is to move everything across and tidy up later.
- A new organisational strategy has landed and content is nowhere in it, though content is how most of it will reach anyone.
- Every team has its own view of what content is for, nobody has the authority to end the argument, and to half the building “content” still means social posts.
Clarity changes all three. In one discovery programme we ran, the teams who described their website as part of how they deliver care, rather than as a communications channel, changed how every finding looked. The presentation back to the leadership team turned a communications problem into one the whole organisation owned.
What a content strategy has to settle
A strategy without a plan is like a bike without any wheels. Getting anywhere is hard. And a plan that doesn’t cascade from the strategy is almost worse than no plan at all.
These are the seven questions every piece of content answers, whether anyone decided them or not, with why at the centre. A strategy settles the rule for each of them once, so nobody has to relitigate it project by project; your operating model makes the call every day after that.
Why?
The strategy. Why is content created? What are the strategic aims of the organisation that content can help achieve? What’s the sweet spot where organisational strategy and users’ needs overlap? This is the strategic heart of your model.
For whom?
The audience. Who is it for? Who are the users, the readers, the champions, the amplifiers and influencers? Who cares about what you’re trying to do? Who cares about your success? What are their needs and wants? What’s their context?
What?
The substance. What words and pictures (and data and graphs etc) are needed? What words and pictures are best at communicating information? What content will be best at making people change their opinions, and laugh and cry? What content will make people most likely to spend their money?
Where?
The channels and structures. Where does all the content go? What channels? What part of the website? How does it relate to other content? How is it organised? How are the elements and components organised?
By whom?
The team. Which person and which agent does what? Who decides on what content is created? Who’s in charge of the operating model? Who decides what not to do? Who drafts? Who edits? Who checks? Who publishes? What team is needed?
When?
The plans. When does content get created? When does it get maintained? When does it get archived? What’s the chronology? What’s the prioritisation? Also what are the frameworks that decide when and how plans flex and adapt?
How?
The methodology and governance. How is content created? And edited? And maintained? What’s the process? What’s needed in order for that to be smooth? What guidelines? What systems? What tools? How does the operating model best support the content people and the AI to do a good job? That last one is the operating model’s question to answer, not a strategy’s: a strategy sets the rule once, the operating model makes the call every time.
Your purpose and your essence feed the answer to why. We work on that layer too, and we’ll say if it needs clarifying before the rest of this can be settled.
Stages and prices
We break this work into four projects and one standing arrangement. Each project leaves you with something you can use on its own, so you can stop or keep going after any of them, and they’re priced separately, so you only pay for the ones you take.
Audit
£2,500 for the entry audit of a section or a small site, three days over two weeks · from £5,000 for a mid-sized site, about six days over four weeks · a whole estate, or several languages, by conversation
Every page you have, scored, and what to do first.
A content audit tells you what you have, what’s working well, what would benefit from improvements and what can be safely archived. It combines detailed data about content scope, measures of performance, quantitative analysis of every page and a qualitative read against a bespoke set of criteria.
Our audits are powered by Content Health Check, our own product. That means rolling, repeatable measurement rather than a one-off snapshot that gathers dust. Most audits are one moment in time, and everything afterwards gets decided on that moment; ours runs the same measures again next month and next year, so you can see what moved. We also do a thorough read through of the pages that matter most ourselves and we don’t just cover web content: we’ll look at email, social media, PDFs and printed material too.
It can also be a good moment to do a competitor and comparator analysis, and see how your content stacks up against others’.
You get every page analysed and scored on 15 quality criteria. You get detailed reasons for each score, opportunities for improvements, an interactive dashboard you can filter by section, a report with the headlines and the priorities, a presentation to the people who need to hear it, and the Content Health Check account it all runs in. From your side we need one contact, and access to your analytics.
Strategy
From £4,000 with one workshop, four to five days over three weeks · from £8,500 with interviews and focus groups, eight to ten days over six weeks
The reason your content exists, made clear and graspable.
At the strategic core of all good content is the reason why the content is produced. Your core content strategy describes how content is vital to achieving your organisational aims, and it’s closely connected to your organisational strategy. It’s your guiding light, your north star.
We build it on the audit, on a careful reading of your organisational strategy and on a lot of listening: either interviews and focus groups with every team about what it’s trying to achieve and where content could help, or one workshop with a cross-section of the organisation from the most senior person to the most junior. Then we boil the whole thing down.
You get the strategy written up, including the core content strategy: one sentence, annotated so every phrase has its working meaning, agreed with the people who’ll live with it. The whole thing is presented back to whoever needs to see it so it’s understood and remembered by everyone. From your side we need the senior owner in the room, and eight to twelve people across the sessions.
Structure
From £3,500 · about four days over three weeks · larger estates, or several languages, by conversation
What kinds of content you make, what each is for, and where it all lives.
A content model names every type of content you publish, what it’s for, what it’s made of and what good looks like, so that a guide is recognisably a guide whichever team writes it. An information architecture organises the whole estate so that people can find their way through it and machines can read it, search engines and AI assistants included. Between them they give the strategy a shape before anyone starts building.
You hold the content model, with its types, purposes, components and formats and an exemplar of each, the information architecture for the site or the estate, and exemplar content your team writes the rest against. It applies to email, print and intranets as much as to websites. From your side we need the owner, and the people who’ll be writing to the model.
Plan
From £4,500 · five days over three weeks
Who does what, when, in a system your team runs.
A content plan tells you how to get from where you are to where you need to be. It details exactly who needs to do what, when. Whereas an audit describes the current status quo, a good content plan looks forward, starting from what has to be true at the next milestone and working back.
You hold the plan in Notion, page by page and linked back to the audit, with an overall view for whoever is managing the work and a personal view for everyone involved, plus the retirement schedule and the review dates. It’s both the project management system and the place the editing happens, and it stays in use long after launch.
Keeping score
Content Health Check from £20 a month · Tend £1,000 a month
The audit never goes stale.
Content Health Check on subscription is the gym membership: the same measures run every month, the score tracked over time, and newly failing pages turning up without anyone going looking. Tend is the personal trainer. Somebody works out with you what to do about the numbers, checks on progress, irons out the wrinkles, changes the exercises when they turn out to be the wrong ones, responds to injuries, and runs the annual review with you. We’ve written about why recurring beats one-off.
A full run of audit, strategy, structure and plan for a mid-sized organisation comes to around £17,000, over about three months if the stages run one after another so each can build on the last. You’ll find the rest of a website or transformation programme – the operations and the playbook – on the System and Know-how pages.
Working at scale, and starting from a question
We also work at scale: estates of ten thousand pages and more, several languages, and international federations. The audit was built for that size. A federation raises strategic questions of its own, of hierarchy and structure. What is the international organisation’s strategy, what is federated out to the national and local parts, and how does content made in one place serve the whole? We’ve worked through those questions with international clients such as ActionAid International and Greenpeace International. We’ll be happy to talk about costs for work at this sort of scale.
Sometimes the starting point isn’t a new website but a question: why first-year members don’t renew, how to involve members more, which audiences matter most. The same stages apply, with the emails, the renewal process and the data audited alongside the pages, a choice of directions rather than a single sentence, and a prioritised roadmap and a first module rather than a launch plan. That was the shape of our engagement and participation strategy for the Internet Society, and of our member experience and retention work for Art Fund, which were a little different from the others and all the more interesting for it. We price this kind of work by conversation too.
What changes
The website project starts from a universal understanding of user needs rather than a migration of aging blog posts. When two teams both want the top story on the homepage, the strategy decides, not the meeting. The board’s question about what content you have and whether it’s any good gets a number, and next year it gets a different number, so everyone can see what moved. The content that achieves your objectives gets the attention that used to go to the newest, latest thing.
Some content stops, and somebody senior has to own that, which is why the strategy names them. We’ve written about the slimmed-down, focused, maintained alternative to content-creep in Create less crud.
We measure, and we keep measuring
Content work is a loop, and strategy is the end of it where you find out what’s true and decide what to do. Two things set ours apart, and the first is that the instruments are our own: Content Health Check scores every page and runs again; Content Maturity scores the organisation that makes the content; both were built because our audits needed them. And the measurement recurs. The way we used to audit, and the way most people still do, is one moment in time. For the Internet Society we audited 12,000 pages twice on the same measures, two years apart, so the second report could say what had moved and why. That was such a useful process that we built a tool to do recurring audits.
For Global Witness the audit, strategy and structure became the model, architecture and governance their new site was built on. For Art Fund a strategic question about member retention became a roadmap and a first module. For Plan International, Brooke and many others, the audit found what it nearly always finds: the top hundred pages or so carry around 90 per cent of the traffic, and the strategies were in part about giving them the care they deserve.
“It’s one of the most credible, thoughtful things I’ve ever had the pleasure of building on.”
Jane Ruffino, on the engagement and participation strategy for the Internet Society
Start small
Content Health Check gives you ten checks a month for nothing, no credit card required. Run your ten most important pages this afternoon and you’ll see the criteria at work, with the reason behind every score. The entry audit picks up from there: every page rather than ten, quality assessed in forensic detail and our strategic, analytic reading of the whole estate, presented back to you. And because it runs on the same product, the measures keep running after we’ve gone.
Check ten pages, freeQuestions people ask
What does it cost?
The stages are priced separately. The entry audit is £2,500 and a mid-sized audit is from £5,000. Strategy is from £4,000 with one workshop or from £8,500 with interviews and focus groups, structure is from £3,500 and the plan is from £4,500. All four together come to around £17,000 for a mid-sized organisation. What moves a price above its floor is scope: pages, teams, channels and languages.
Can we just have the audit?
Yes, and many organisations do. It’s designed to stand on its own, with the priorities already in it, and the dashboard and the Content Health Check account are yours to keep working in.
Do we need an audit before the strategy?
We’d strongly recommend it. A strategy is a set of decisions, and decisions made without evidence are the ones that get relitigated the moment somebody objects.
We’re planning a new website. Where does this fit, and when?
Before design starts. The audit tells you and your agency what to migrate, the strategy tells them what the new site is for, the content model and architecture tell them what to build, and the plan is what the content team works from through the build (these two phases can run side by side). Starting six to twelve weeks before the design phase is comfortable.
Isn’t an audit just running our pages through Content Health Check?
Content Health Check does the page-level work, and it does it well: every page scored, with the reasons, and a first pass at the top opportunities. What we add is the strategic and human context, reading the patterns across the whole estate against what your teams told us, and the presentation back, which is often the moment a content issue becomes something the leadership team owns.
Who should own this, and who else is involved?
The person who can make the decisions it produces: usually a director of communications, digital or services, or the chief executive. For the audit, one contact and access to your analytics. For the strategy, that owner in the room and eight to twelve people across the sessions.
Can you handle ten thousand pages, or several languages?
Yes. That’s the scale the tooling was built for, and a large estate sometimes turns out to be a small one with a great deal more in the way.
Is this content marketing strategy?
No, though it covers your marketing content. Content strategy in our sense is the set of decisions about all of your content, the guidance, the reports, the training and the policies as much as the campaigns, and about why any of it exists. The seven questions in the diagram above are the shape of it, and the answers are what the marketing team, the service teams and everyone else then work from.
Clarity, direction, plan
If strategic clarity about your content would help, get in touch. We can design a project that combines a content audit, strategy, structures and plan, or we can start with the audit and take it from there. The case for doing less, better is in Create less crud, and the case for measuring by quality rather than traffic is on Content Health Check.
Or, if you have a bigger project in mind, get in touch and we’ll talk it through before anything is priced.
Related case studies
See strategy work in practice.
