Meghan Casey: Author of The Content Strategy Toolkit – Episode 126

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Meghan Casey literally wrote the book on content strategy practice.

Her book, “The Content Strategy Toolkit: Methods, Guidelines, and Templates for Getting Content Right,” has helped innumerable content strategists do better content work.

Meghan is updating the book now to bring it into line with modern practices and to account for the many changes in the field since the book was first published.

We talked about:

• her work as the principal consultant at Do Better Content Consulting
• the upcoming revised edition of her book, “The Content Strategy Toolkit,” including:
  • new coverage of cross-discipline collaboration
  • expansion of the coverage of content design
  • new coverage of change management
  • a new section on building your content playbook
  • new coverage of process optimization
• the hazards of using research to validate our own thinking
• how lessons from failed experiments are not “lost work”
• her task-based approach to content testing
• how to structure and model content for multiple uses
• her nascent efforts to help content authors think differently when they’re creating content for multiple uses
• the importance in general of structured content and content modeling
• her approach to facilitating effective cross-team collaboration
• how to manage boundaries in collaborative relationships
• how her independent practice lets her focus on decolonizing our work and prevent the replication of oppressive practices
• the importance of doing all of this work in community

Meghan’s bio

Meghan Casey owns Do Better Content Consulting, a content strategy consultancy that helps organizations do good with better content, and author of the seminal book The Content Strategy Toolkit: Methods, Guidelines, and Templates for Getting Content Right. She was also one of the first content strategists at Brain Traffic, the world’s leading agency devoted exclusively to content.

Meghan has worked with a wide variety of clients – startups, nonprofits, colleges and universities, Fortune 50 companies, and everything in between — to solve the messy content problems. She holds a master’s degree in nonprofit administration and is committed to social justice personally and professionally. With roles on the boards of directors for Voices for Racial Justice, Until We All Are Free, Done for DiDi, and Stop Online Violence Against Women and a multitude of abolition-focused volunteer posts, Meghan is invested in leading from the back and working behind the scenes in solidarity with the people most affected by social and racial justice issues.

Connect with Meghan online

• Do Better Content Consulting
• Twitter

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 126. My main goal in producing this podcast is to help content strategists of all types share their practices with each other. It’s hard to imagine anyone better equipped to help content practitioners do content better than Meghan Casey. With “The Content Strategy Toolkit,” Meghan literally wrote the book on content strategy practice. We talk about her book, its forthcoming revision, and the importance of collaboration and community in any kind of modern content work.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode number 126 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really happy today to have with us Meghan Casey. Meghan is the owner and the primary consultant at Do Better Content Consulting. She’s also really well known as the author of, “The Content Strategy Toolkit,” a book that came out, God, almost I think seven years ago now. That’s one of the bibles in our profession. So, welcome Meghan. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.

Meghan:
Hi there. I’m so happy to be here. We talked about this way back at Confab and here we are. So what am I up to? As Larry said, I’m an independent consultant now. I had been at Brain Traffic for a long time over the years. Most everyone knows Brain Traffic, and of course Kristina Halvorson, the Queen of Content, or whatever we’ve been calling her. So yeah, I’ve been on my own now for four years, and do all kinds of things still. So I work with Fortune 500 companies down to more startup/people trying to fill a need in the marketplace, and I also do a fair amount of work that’s more justice minded. So for instance, right now I’m working with Montana Law Help, which helps to provide self help of support for people that traditionally lack access to legal resources, or couldn’t afford to hire an attorney, but need to get some stuff done in the legal system.

Larry:
Yeah, that’s great. I love the span of your consultancy. From that’s probably a scrappy little nonprofit, executive director and five people or something, and all the way up to Fortune 500. Which is perfect, though, because your book, it’s really like a practice guide, and that’s why I was so excited to get you on this show, is that this podcast is all about sharing our practices, and how we all do stuff, and helping each other do it better. And you are arguably the best person at that, at least in having articulated it in a book. Anyhow, I heard a rumor that you might be working on a second edition of this book somewhere down the road, which makes sense because we’re few years into it, but that would all be based in practice stuff. Things have changed, so you’d want to update the book. What has changed that makes you want to think about the daunting task of revising a book?

Meghan:
Sure. Yeah. That’s a really good question. And a few years ago my publisher asked if I wanted to do a second edition, and I was like, “I don’t know if I have enough new to say to warrant somebody buying another version of it,” but over the last few years especially, I wouldn’t say that the challenges have changed, but I’ve maybe gotten some more experience in some of those challenges over the years. So yeah, I would say we’re still dealing with a lot of the same kinds of problems, and a few of those things that have come up that I’m like, “You know what? I think I have enough to say on this, or I can call on other people who have important things to say about this.” Because my book, it’s my thoughts on how I approach content strategy, but then a lot of the tools and templates, some of them come from me, some of them come from other places, so it’s really a curated playbook for how to do content strategy.

Meghan:
And a couple things that have really popped up for me over the last couple years is, one, and this is the age old challenge, I think, in our field with user experience and design and content strategy is that cross discipline collaboration. That is really important. And not forgetting the developers in that cross discipline collaboration. So I think everyone in our field feels like, “Oh, people just go make decisions and then they lob it over to me,” well who’s at the end of that line? It’s usually the developers who then are like, “I don’t know what the strategy is,” and, “Can you explain why you’re doing things this way?” And what I’ve found to be the most helpful over the last few years is just really being able to get in there and collaborate with people so nobody feels like you’re just dumping the basket over the fence and then somebody else takes it and runs the rest of the relay.

Meghan:
So I really want to do some special work on collaboration and cross discipline collaboration, and helping us see that our collaborators or the people that we should be collaborating with are not our enemies. Sometimes we just want to hand it over and then be like, “All right. You take it from here,” and I think we should do less of that and more collaborating. So that’s one big piece. And the other one that I think is super important is the idea of change management. There’s so much of what we do in content strategy and just content work that really changes the way that organizations, people need to think about content, about messaging, about all kinds of things. So that change management piece, I think, is really important, and I’m going to delve into that a little bit more.

Meghan:
And then the other thing that I’m really building out in this edition is getting way more detailed into the components of content design the way that I framed it up in the first book, which is first year prioritizing what content you need based on user data, user research, user needs, then you’re organizing it for way finding and being able to access it from different ways, navigation, search, those kinds of things. Then we’re figuring out how does it look on the front end to the people who are… “Look” isn’t maybe the right word, because I don’t design. But how does it come together on the front end for the people who are going to be interacting with the content?

Meghan:
And then finally, what’s the structure and the specifications that help ensure that it’s related in the right ways, and it’s showing up the right way on the front end, and we know what messages we want to communicate about what specific things. So last time I think content design was a chapter, and this time it’s a section with four chapters in it going through each of those key areas, and also including some user testing approaches along the way, because there’s testing that can be done at every single one of those phases. And testing that’s really focused on the content, not just the look and the feel. So super excited about that. And then the last thing I’ll say about what’s different in the book is a section about building your content playbook so that everybody in your organization is following the same plays, for sports metaphor, to make sure that we’re all thinking about content the same way and we have consistent tools and processes in order to make it all happen.

Meghan:
Oh, and one other thing I’m really excited about is thinking about what does it mean to have optimized content processes and operations? And I came up with, about a year ago, four criteria, and I don’t know if I’m going to give them all away yet, but four criteria for what makes processes optimized. And I’m building out a little assessment worksheet or something to help people make that assessment.

Larry:
I love that. That’s so interesting, and I’m totally intrigued, but I will honor your desire to hold that for the book. But I am curious, is that like there’s various content maturity models in Jared Spools, like UX, and other folks have. Is it like an operational maturity model?

Meghan:
I don’t know that I would necessarily call it a maturity model, but there’s elements of that, for sure. It’s more like if you’re realizing that process, which is often what’s holding us back from doing the great work, it’s like we’re all really smart people and we can write well and we can do that stuff well, but do we have the enablement set up to allow us to do it in a way that helps us adhere to the strategy over time, and that kind of thing?

Meghan:
So, I mean, I’ll give an example. So one of them is just do we have the right people with the right skills, and are there any gaps that we need to fill in order to be able to do this work well? So that’s one of them. And okay, I’ll give away another one. Collaboration is another one that we have figured out, or at least started to figure out, how do we collaborate to do this work well versus the waterfall handoff approach. Yeah.

Meghan:
And that’s what I’m finding is a lot of people aren’t collaborating. People are collaborating when it’s, I would say, product has maybe gotten a little bit better at that, because you’re trying to ship things really quickly. Sometimes, then, though, I do think you lose some of the strategic remembrance when it’s like what’s that balance between being able to move fast and ship quick and making sure that what we’re shipping is still in line with our vision and strategy?

Larry:
That’s so interesting. Chelsea Larsson just shared a Twitter thread about that the last couple days that we’re recording this, and that balance between… Because we all face that situation of we’re strategists at heart and we stay true to our hearts, but we have organizations that expect things on a quick basis. Can you help people manage that? Are there principles or techniques or things that you do that help you manage that?

Meghan:
Yeah, I mean sometimes I don’t get a chance to because it’s like, “Okay, well you’re doing this,” which is usually not my favorite. I will say find that thread from Chelsea, because I responded, “This is brilliant.”

Larry:
I’ll make sure to link to it in the show notes, yeah.

Meghan:
Yeah. Because it’s a really great thread. The other thread from recently that I encourage everyone to read is one from Erika Hall about research and how we’re manipulating research in a weird way to over validate, maybe? I’m not exactly sure what the right… Anyway, so Erika talks about that and it’s also another brilliant thread. I mean, basically everything Erika and Chelsea say are brilliant, but these particular ones are recent examples.

Meghan:
But yeah, I think one of the things that I do is I almost always will have some sort of something from a discovery phase that’s like, “This is what we’re trying to do here. This is the business goal we’re trying to affect. These are the people that we’re prioritizing in order to affect that business goal, and here are the content objectives, or what these people need from us and why.” And I think a lot of times it’s just going back to that. This just happened on another client. It’s like, “Oh, well, we don’t think we want to do this.” And it’s like, “Okay, well let’s look back at our strategy.” That’s literally the point, so let’s do that.

Meghan:
So continuing to bring it back, but also I think sometimes allowing… Failure isn’t quite the right word, but allowing yourselves to go do something that maybe wasn’t the right thing based on the strategy, but you have to learn by doing and figuring stuff out. And we can still learn from, in the shipping features and things, we do tend to do, I think, from what I’ve experienced anyway, more testing. We’re doing more validation. So sometimes when you do that ship quick kind of thing, or get on that process, then if you’re doing the testing then you’re still learning from it. So it’s not lost work, even if it’s something that maybe didn’t end up being the right thing in the long run.

Larry:
Right. Yeah, you’ve mentioned a couple times now the testing, and I think we’re getting into more situations where content is standing on its own. You see this a lot in product content but other places as well, that you don’t want to measure it necessarily at a page conversion level, or whatever the things are. In you’re your testing, what are you testing exactly? Are you testing page level conversion or engagement, or are you looking at task accomplishment… Tell me more about that.

Meghan:
Yeah, so typically when I’m thinking about doing testing with users, it’s more task based, typically is the way that I approach it, definitely analytics wise, looking at conversions and those things. And that probably helps to determine, too, we definitely want to be doing create the content once and have it be available wherever we need it. But what we can learn from testing and analytics together I think is does this snippet of content that we wrote that we thought could be used everywhere, is it always the right snippet of content depending on the context? Which can make things really complicated. So it’s one of those nuanced conversations. But, yeah, a lot of what I’m doing when I do testing is task based. So we know that people want to be able to do these things, and we want people to be able to do these things, so just testing in whatever experience I’m working on, because I’m typically working in a specific context most of the time, but then I’m trying to think about how do we make the content that we create for this specific context work in other places as well.

Larry:
Because that’s the holy grail of the modern era. Well, I mean, what’s interesting… I was looking the other day, that NPR create once, publish everywhere thing. It’s 12 or 15 years old now. It’s not like we haven’t had parts of it figured out anyway for a while. And I think you almost said those exact words, create once and use it in multiple places. Have you had success in comparing task accomplishment across channels or something like that? Have you done that kind of stuff?

Meghan:
I have not done that. I would love to see if we get to that point. It’s in your CMS if you’re going to put in, let’s say, your share text for Facebook versus Twitter, do different things, make more sense. So you can still tailor the same idea of the content for different contexts, potentially, and that’s something that I’ve been really excited about lately, and I don’t know all of the back end and how to set it up, but this idea that, in a CMS for instance, a product wouldn’t be a page. It’s an entity within the CMS that has all kinds of details that then can go to a page, or could go to a tweet, or could go to a Facebook post.

Meghan:
And that’s the kind of stuff that’s really exciting to me that I never thought I would be excited about, but I’ve learned to be excited from people like Eileen Webb and Jeff Eaton and my friend Kevin, he died a couple months ago, but Kevin Walsh. Yeah. It’s exciting to me. I never thought I would be that excited about modeling content, and the author experience, and how all of that works, and I actually love it.

Larry:
I mean, content modeling is the necessary foundation for that kind of content we use, and it has all the implications. The typical way this rolls out is like, “Oh, and now we have to write differently,” and that’s where the authoring is done. Is that how it’s manifested for you as well?

Meghan:
Yeah, definitely. Thinking about writing differently, breaking stuff up in different ways. And I will say most of the people I’ve worked with, what we start with, because not everybody’s ready for that yet, most people probably aren’t, but at least just starting to help people think about content in a different way. So one of the things that I’ll do, even if they’re not going to be entering it into the CMS this way yet because of whatever projects they’ve got, but building out Word document templates or Google document templates that structure the content the way we would like to see it structured at some point in the CMS, so that we can start thinking about, “Okay, so I’m going to write this page intro. What are the other contexts this might get used? So do I want to think about it a little bit more broadly than just the intro to the page?”

Meghan:
At OmnichannelX, Noz Urbina’s conference, I did a content model talk, basically content modeling for dummies or for collaboration is really what it was, and how doing that content modeling work together with developers and designers and other subject matter experts is a really great way to… Everybody starts to understand why structured content is important and how it can be used in different ways. And I really love that workshop. I want to hopefully do it in person sometime, I just did a recorded version for OmnichannelX, but really, again, about that collaboration and bringing everyone along.

Larry:
I’m still catching up on my OmnichannelX recordings. I don’t think I’ve seen that one. I can’t believe I haven’t watched that one yet. I’ll have to-

Meghan:
Oh well you’ll have to go look and tell me what you think.

Larry:
Going to the top of the queue right now.

Meghan:
Yeah, because I know just enough to be dangerous, and enough to know that collaboration is the key to this happening. I had a project last year where I just sat on Zoom with the devs, and we went through line by line my content requirements documents and talked about what kind of field should this be, and would we want this to be this kind of entry? Is it a reference or is it original to the page, and all of those things. And it’s fun, dare I say.

Larry:
Yeah. And you’ve mentioned collaboration a lot, which I appreciate. And you’ve talked about engineers, SMEs, designers, fellow content people. Do you have any generic tips for how to collaborate better?

Meghan:
I was just actually thinking about this, because next up soon-ish in my book is going to be how do we set up this cross-cultural team, and I think one of the things is… Jodi Leo from Nava is somebody I had the privilege of working with a few times, and she always likes to think about get the people together and set up team norms, so how do we want to work together, how do we want to collaborate, and then even at the individual level, how do you like to receive feedback? And so I think just getting a lot of that stuff set up in the beginning so you have some guidelines for how you work together.

Meghan:
And then I was actually just thinking about this, I haven’t tried this specifically before, I’ve had it more generic conversation, but the other thing I thought would be really helpful is to have everybody that would be collaborating outline their typical process, and then together be like, “Okay, so you’re doing this here. Here’s where I fit into that, or should fit into that.” So having people make their own connections between where they fit into the rest of the work. And then also I think it’s really important for content people, UX designers, even backend content strategists and developers to go over those areas where there could be overlap, like where maybe you’re used to doing this thing, but maybe on this project somebody else is going to be doing this thing, to make sure you’re not stepping on each other’s toes and then understanding, “Oh, you like to do this too? I like to do this. Let’s do this together. Let’s work on it together.”

Larry:
As you described that, I was thinking lately about boundary issues around professional boundaries about just who does what, and collaboration is obviously the ideal tool for setting that out. Do you think about it that way? Boundaries can be like walls, or it could be a like semi-permeable membrane. I don’t know. Do you have models that you think about around that?

Meghan:
I don’t know that I would say a model, but I feel like having the ability to be fluid with the boundaries, but having conversations is the most important thing. So you might have a boundary or a guideline like, “I always do these things in my process,” and then you might realize, “Oh okay, well if I’m collaborating truly, someone else might be doing some of this work that then I can just benefit from or I can listen in on,” so having things that are almost ultimatums for the way that you work, but also being able to flex them as needed. So I think it’s a lot about just letting things flow a little bit, but then also knowing when it’s like, “I got to say something about this because this isn’t going to get me what I need,” or those kinds of things. I saw a tweet, sorry, and kind of going off on a tangent, but I saw a tweet not that long ago about how somebody was complaining, a product person, that developers don’t understand the strategy. So it was kind of poo-pooing on developers for not getting it.

Meghan:
And I’m like, well, getting it is all of our jobs. They weren’t on the team. It was like the developers were these separate little group of zombies over here or something. And it was like, no. Everyone’s on the product team. Everybody who touches the product is on the product team. So how do we think about not having that adversarial approach to it? And people don’t get it? I’m like, well if somebody doesn’t get what I’m doing, more often than not there’s something I could have done differently to explain. And sometimes it’s really maybe people had questions and they never asked. We all have to have our own responsibility and agency to get what we need, ask the questions we need to ask, but I’m really trying hard to not go down that, “Well, they just don’t get it,” road, because it’s not productive.

Larry:
That’s kind of the opposite of collaboration, that sounds like. Yeah. No, that makes sense. Yeah, and do you workshop around that idea? I love the ideas you just said. Jodi Leo, I think you said, was the…

Meghan:
Yeah. Yep.

Larry:
That sounds like a fantastic approach. But something you said just now reminded me to ask, do you see any fine tuning of this in project based short-term teams versus long term team building? Do you see any differences there?

Meghan:
Yeah, I mean I think that the idea of it makes sense at all levels. I think maybe it makes sense to do it at the micro level a little bit, like project teams, and then maybe some of the… Let’s say you’re in a role where you’re able to have purview into different teams working together or whatever. Maybe then you can extract common things that keep coming up across those smaller teams that then can roll up to, let’s say you’re a big company, as a content operations team or a content team, whatever it is. These are the guiding principles with how we work together that is based on stuff that’s happened at a more micro level perhaps, or something along those lines.

Meghan:
And I do think there needs to be, again, flexibility. So you might have something that’s very up here and it’s lovely, and then you get down to a project, but let’s say it’s one of those rapid response kinds of projects where it’s just like, “Okay, we have to fix this because of a regulation that changed,” or something like that. Then you still have that kind of stuff to help ground you, but it might not function exactly the same way. Something like that. The war room projects, when you just get locked in a room for two weeks.

Larry:
I haven’t done one of those in years, but I remember that it’s always horrible folding chairs or something too. But hey, I can’t believe what we’re coming up close to time, Meghan. I always like to make sure though. Yeah, a half hour goes quick. But I had David Dylan Thomas and Day Kibilds on a while back talking about cognitive overload. So I don’t like to overload my people. But anyhow, this has been great. But also want to make sure is there anything last, anything that’s just on your mind about content practice or anything else these days that you want to make sure we share before we wrap up?

Meghan:
Yeah, I mean the one thing I’ll say that I am continuing to learn all the time and really trying to make sure I’m thinking about it, and it’s actually one of the reasons that I started Do Better Content Consulting, decided I wanted to go off on my own and have more flexibility in my day so I could do mostly social justice abolitionist community type work. So with that in mind, just really thinking about all of the things that have been ingrained in us and really thinking about how do we decolonize the stuff that we’re doing. I think collaboration is a great way to decolonize, because then we’re not hoarding power, for instance. But also just in the way we write things. My friend Eddie just wrote this really amazing blog post about writing for content for disability and how we think about those things and how we talk about those things. So I just feel like I’m always trying to learn how do I not replicate oppressive practices in what I do, and I screw it up all the time, I’m sure. But yeah, super important to me to continually learn on that front.

Larry:
Yeah, I’m wondering, as you talk about that, I’m curious now. We talked a lot about collaboration today, and there’s also this notion that’s I think really taken hold in the design community of designing with, not for. So I’m wondering how do you rope in, when you’re doing specifically justice oriented work or just any kind of inclusive work, and you talked a lot about learning too, so I’m wondering how much back and forth learning there is between different kinds of collaborations?

Meghan:
Oh yeah, for sure. I’m not doing much content work in the more social justice abolitionist space, it’s just a lot of community relationships and contacts. And I continually am learning. I’m like the auntie age of most of the people that I’m collaborating with on the ground in Minneapolis around court support and jail support and some of those kinds of things, and I continually learn from these younger people just about language. And people are just calling in when people are doing something that might be oppressive, and we don’t even always know. So I think, yeah, building relationships I think is the key to all of it really.

Meghan:
There sometimes I think is this separatism that still happens when people aren’t really willing to maybe cognitively we get that there’s issues with racial justice and transphobia and all of these kinds of things, but we’re too afraid to build relationships with people. And what I’ve found over the years is that we do our best work when we’re in community, and not being separate. That white savior mentality doesn’t really get anyone free, because you’re already operating from a sense of, “I somehow am better,” and not even in the way that you might think, but it’s like, “I’m helping this poor person,” versus, “No, we’re in community together, and we’re going to all get free together.”

Larry:
I love that. Community collaboration all over the place and learning back and forth. That’s fantastic. Hey, one very last thing, Meghan. What’s the best place for folks to stay in touch with you? I assume Do Better Content is a good destination?

Meghan:
Yep. Meghan@dobettercontent.com, or there’s a form on my website. I am on Twitter, @meghscase, M-E-G-H-S-C-A-S-E. But my Twitter most of the time lately seems to be a little more police and prison abolition minded stuff. So for content strategy, maybe, maybe not. Yeah. And then you can always find me at Confab and/or Button, because I like to go play with my friends.

Larry:
Right. I’ll be there too. I’m looking forward to seeing you in person there. Cool. Well, thanks so much, Meghan. This was really fun.

Meghan:
Yes, it was super fun. Thank you.