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Natalie DunbarNatalie Dunbar can help you build your content strategy practice, whether you’re running a one-person content show, building a content department, or incorporating a content team into a design operation.
Drawing on experiences from her long and eclectic content strategy career and adding the insights of several other industry veterans, Natalie’s new book is a must-read for anyone building or managing a content strategy program.
We talked about:
- the origins of her new book From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice
- the differences between building a team, a department, or a practice
- her early content strategy work in agencies, where she quickly grew teams for a variety of clients
- how she learned many of her content strategy skills before she was called a “content strategist”
- her realization after working with a variety of types of clients in her agency work that she needed a structure for her content strategy work, and her subsequent development of the process framework she sets out in her book
- how early conversations with fellow UX practitioners, her prior career in building management, and one of her favorite books (“Why Buildings Stand Up”) led to the building metaphor that suffuses her book
- how she developed the book with her publisher, Rosenfeld Media, and the generous community of fellow authors there
- the need to add her middle initial to her social media and other profiles to avoid confusion with a romance novelist also named Natalie Dunbar
- the audience for her book: not just content strategists, but also UX managers, design ops leaders, and others tasked with building a content strategy practice
- the need that arose to measure practice performance distinct from other content success metrics
- the combination of her own experiences and expert input that inform the book
- her appreciation of the amazingly gracious, welcoming, and talented content strategy community
Natalie’s bio
Natalie Marie Dunbar is a UX-focused content strategist with a unique blend of skills as a journalist, content writer, and user researcher. Taken together with her curiosity for technology and her passion for engaging consumers, Natalie excels in balancing the creation of delightful user experiences with strategic content that supports the needs of a business or organization.
Natalie has worked in various roles as a content writer and strategist for brands that include Anthem, Farmers Insurance, Kaiser Permanente, Walmart, and YP.com. She’s also produced original content for federal agencies that include the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), Centers for Tobacco Prevention (CTP), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Veteran’s Administration (VA).
When she’s not herding content or writing books, Natalie teaches private yoga, sharing the benefits of Hatha Yoga as a peaceful yet powerful way to reconnect mind, body, and spirit. Her first book, From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice, will be published by Rosenfeld Media later this year.
Connect with Natalie online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 118. You never know when you might have to build a content strategy practice. You might be running an actual content department, a design operation, or some other business unit that creates and manages content. Regardless of your role, when the time comes to build a practice, Natalie Dunbar’s new book is a must-read. “From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice” can help you wherever you are in your practice-building journey.
Interview transcript
Natalie:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode #118 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Natalie Dunbar. Natalie is an author, speaker, really accomplished content strategy practitioner for a long time, and the reason I had her on the show is she just wrote a book. It’s coming out soon. We’ll talk more about the details about that. But welcome, Natalie. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.
Natalie:
Thank you. Thank you for having me, I really appreciate being here. What have I been up to? Oh my goodness. Well, I wrote this book. Wasn’t my plan to write a book during the pandemic, but here we are. It’s been quite a process, quite an honor to be invited to do so, and as we get into questions and answers, I can give you kind of a picture of how this all came about, but-
Larry:
So I love that instead of perfecting your sourdough starter, you wrote a book during the pandemic. So I appreciate that. But that’s the first thing I’ve got to say, just on behalf of the whole profession, I want to thank you in advance because I read an advanced copy of the book and it’s alongside… If you took Kristina Halvorson’s book and your book, and it’s like, “Boy, you’re good to go.” You’re ready to get up to build a practice. I think it –
Natalie:
Wow, thank you.
Larry:
…preparation. Well, no, and I think, but you’re… Let’s talk a little bit about that because it really is a good book. I mean, I’m not just saying that because you’re on the show. And I love a lot of things about it. I love the building metaphor that sort of is the scaffolding. I’m going meta on the metaphor, sorry about that.
Natalie:
That’s all right.
Larry:
…but it’s kind of the organization scheme for the book. But tell the folks a little bit about how you came to write the book.
Natalie:
Yeah. So I am a part of Women Talk Design. I get, a lot of my public speaking stuff has come through that organization. It’s a group for women and non-binary folk to have a platform to be able to share any talks that they’ve done, writing that they do, that kind of thing. And the CEO, Daniel Barnes, found me years ago on LinkedIn and randomly asked me to speak about speaking, which was… Talk about meta, right? And through that, I started, I listed myself within the website, and then anytime I would write an article, a freelance piece about content strategy, or do a talk, or even some of my work projects, I would put some of that on the Women Talk Design on my speaker page.
Natalie:
I’m not really sure how it happens, but Lou Rosenfeld from Rosenfeld Media contacted Danielle to get my contact information. I honestly thought, and I’ve said this to him before, I thought, “Well they do workshops and they do conferences.” So I was thinking, “Oh, he wants me to speak.” And he’s like, “Let’s talk about a book.”
Natalie:
Now, I was the person during your pandemic, when things first started and everybody was like, “What do you mean we’re going to be inside for indefinitely?” You saw all these things online about, “If you have a side hustle and you’re not making it happen during this pandemic, you’re not really about it,” and I was like, “Whoa, everybody take it easy. We don’t have an instruction manual for what to do during a pandemic when you’re locked in for what’s now been over a couple years.”
Natalie:
And then all of a sudden I’m like, “I guess I have a side hustle, and it’s writing a book.” So, that’s kind of my take on the origin story of how it came to be. I still don’t know what the conversation was between Lou and Danielle, I haven’t been on a call with the two of them, but whatever it was, I’m really thankful, and here we are.
Larry:
Well, and he must have inferred somewhere along the line, because the details and the authority that you bring to that book, it just jumps out right away. I don’t know that conversation either, but I’m not surprised that they found you and asked to do this. Your background, you’ve done a lot of different kinds of content strategy, and… Oh yeah, we should just say the name of the book, it’s called Solo to Scaled. What’s the subtitle again?
Natalie:
Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice.
Larry:
Yeah. And it really is, not exactly, well, pretty much a how-to manual of how to build a sustainable content strategy practice. I mean, it’s really all there. All the things that you need to do that. And you’ve done that in a number of different contexts. Can you just talk about maybe some of the more illustrative places you’ve worked or projects you’ve done that guide the book?
Natalie:
Yeah. I mean, I don’t name company names in the book, but I will say that… Well, even before I get to that, something that came to mind is, one of the things that Lou asked me was, “What are some of the conversations that you’ve been having around content strategy? When I did do talks and that kind of thing. I’ve been doing some kind of low key mentoring, and if people hit me up on LinkedIn, I’m more than willing to talk about the discipline, right? Give me a soapbox and I’m really happy to talk about it.
Natalie:
But one of the questions that I would get, which is something that I wrote about in the book, is, “How do we find more people like you?” And that would usually be from you other UX practitioners. Or, “How do we build a team?” And I make the distinction in the book about a team versus a department versus a practice because I really think applying the practice label or metaphor to this process really cements the importance of the content strategy practice and an agency or organization. So I just wanted to kind of give that little bit.
Natalie:
As far as where I’ve worked, I built my first practice at a multicultural advertising agency in downtown Los Angeles, near where I live. They had never had a content strategist before. I was called in to work on a specific client project and was a contractor, but while I was working on that one, another client seemed to be articulating that they needed content strategy, not just… I think they were doing a migration from one CMS to whatever CMS they had, to Drupal.
Natalie:
So there was that element of it that we were helping them with, but then there was also this need to address content for a primary audience. It was a utility company, so there was a primary, the utility customers. Secondary audience was commercial building owners and operators. Then there were contractors, and then there was a, what would that be, quaternary audience of installers who would install the actual pipes and pipelines for natural gas, because it was a gas company. And, How do we make information relevant for these audiences? How do we organize it? How do we make it findable, all the best practices, right?
Natalie:
And so I’m working on the one original project, and that’s when I asked the question, “How do we find more people like you?” And I’m like, “Well, I cover a lot of demographics, so could you be more specific?” And then, even though I was a contractor, they had me look through resumes and bring in another contractor to help with the second job, the client that ended up taking on. And it was interesting because all of a sudden…
Natalie:
I’m still kind of in learning mode. I had a very temporary work relationship with another agency a couple of years before, maybe a year or so before, where literally I was handed Kristina’s book, the Web Content Strategist’s Bible, and I forget what the other one was, but the agency director didn’t even know how to articulate what it was that he needed. He just knew that he needed something that was in those books, and he handed them to me and said, “I need you to do this.”
Natalie:
So I figured out it was a migration, but I also figured out that there was some strategy work that needed to happen for this random digital client that they had taken on. That particular ad agency, they were all about doing commercials and all that kind of stuff, but they randomly were building their digital experience team.
Natalie:
So I’m a year in after taking in all this information from those books, and now I’m at this other agency. And now I’m teaching this person that we found, who thankfully was a quick study, how to do an inventory, how to do an audit, all these different things. And we just kept getting clients. And I ended up working with the FDA, I ended up working with the centers for tobacco prevention. We worked on so many different projects. Some of those were full blown out of home, all the full advertising with a digital experience as well. And then, our digital experience team within that agency was quite robust, so a lot of government work, a lot of clients in regulated spaces.
Natalie:
But yeah, that’s kind of how this practice-building thing happened. That was my first experience. And then I inter. . . Go ahead.
Larry:
Oh no, I was going to say that that’s really interesting because doing that in an agency, and you just mentioned a pretty wide variety of kinds of clients, did that jumpstart, do you think, your capabilities? Because you’re working with all these different kinds of clients?
Natalie:
Yeah. I think it did. I think, and I look back now, I had been practicing content strategy without knowing what it was called. In a previous role at a large directory company, directory and online search, they might have yellow in their logo. And I was learning on the job, literally, how to do content strategy, but when I was at the search company, weren’t calling it that.
Natalie:
We did, however, and I think I covered this in the book… We did bring in content strategists from a digital agency to help us with a web property that we had recently acquired. There were two people on our content team at that time, and we just didn’t have the bandwidth, nor did we necessarily have the vocabulary or the sophistication, or even the tools to know how to organize all the information in an inventory and audit at that time.
Natalie:
But it was a few months after that, that I found a deck that I created way back in, I think it was 2008 or 2007? And I looked at it and it said ‘Content Strategy’ on it. I wasn’t calling it myself that at the time, but I was like, “Well, dang, I did a content strategy, okay.””
Larry:
You’re a secret visionary.
Natalie:
Yeah. So I’m glad that stuff is still lurking out there on my hard drives, but yeah. So that experience, and then that first little short term agency experience, and then later, when I was at the second agency and we had all those government clients and we had some higher-ed clients as well… Like I said, a lot of regulated spaces.
Natalie:
It was during that time where it was just like, “Oh, okay. This requires us to build a structure within the agency to be able to do this content strategy work.” And so out of that came the process framework that I talk about in chapter three, where I come in with my laptop and I’m like, “We’re going to do content strategy,” and I’m suggesting all these things, and the UX lead is looking at me like, “You know we weren’t born yesterday, right?” I’m like, “Yeah, but it’s content strategy!” And they’re like, “Yeah, no.”
Natalie:
So kind of a little bit of back and forth, but out of that came this framework that we created. I call it the process framework. I’ve gone back to that document and modified it and customized it for different companies over the years. And that’s kind of one of the tent poles, I guess, of the book, as well. Just understanding all of those, how we impact as content strategists, how we are connectors, and how we influence everything from the visual design to development and all of those things. So just understanding how we work with those partners.
Larry:
One of the things I loved about the book is that you have that really well described framework of, that you hang everything on, and then you build the whole book around, and you just said a couple things a minute ago that allude to this, the kind of building metaphor. And I love it kind of, and the book, and it’s not… I’ve seen that done really gimmicky, but this was really authentic, and I think the way you just described how you ended up thinking about it from your early experiences is, was that the genesis of that organizing scheme for the book? Because you just said that very naturally, that you just kind of thought about it architecturally, it sounds like.
Natalie:
Yeah. I think when I was about to… So it was always framed as building a practice. When I was at the agency, I think that was the first time. “We needed to build a practice around content strategy,” someone said to me. And then later on, I would hear directors and others, leaders in UX, talk about standing up a team. And those things together kind of reminded me of building in construction, which I’m fascinated by. Totally as a lay person, though I did, in a whole other career, I worked in building management, and it was commercial structure, where we did like tenant improvement projects and different things like that, so I think I might have pulled from that. That, along with one of my favorite books that helped me to understand building in construction, which I talk about briefly in my book, is “‘”.””
Natalie:
I was fascinated by the title, and it’s by Mario Salvadori, I think is the author’s name. And it helped me to understand as a layperson more about this building and construction world that I was working in way back when. When I started talking to Lou and we started to create an outline for the book, I found some old notes about building, and I was like, “I think there’s a to make this work.” Because it was that content strategy practice blueprint that kind of pulled it all together. So I just, that’s a big giveaway there for what’s to come, but yeah, that-
Larry:
Yeah, I think that’s the first chapter, right, is the blueprint?
Natalie:
I lay out the blueprint in the first chapter.
Larry:
Yeah, and it works, I think. Yeah, really well.
Larry:
I’m curious now about your relationship with Lou. It sounds like it was a very, once he connected with you from the conversations with Danielle, then that starts a whole conversation that culminates in the book. How did you all… Was there a back and forth on that, or did it just unfold pretty naturally, or?
Natalie:
I felt like it was, I mean, I have nothing to go by other than my own experience, but I felt like it was very natural. It was not at all, when I think of writing a book and, you see things on TV or whatever… I was thinking it was going to be, you have to submit this proposal and they ‘yes’ or ‘no’ it, but at every step in the process, by the time we talked through some ideas, and then I came back with this five-part process that I ended up calling this blueprint, to the moment where it was, “All right, we have a book here, let’s get to writing it,” Lou was involved at every step of the way, guiding and really helping pull the book out of me.
Natalie:
So that when I sat down to write it, even though when I worked with my editor, we definitely rearranged some things, but, I mean, I had an idea. I knew what I was going to write and I just had to get out of my own way and write it. And that’s, I think, something that I found just working with Lou and other folks at Rosenfeld, it’s just been such an awesome process.
Natalie:
I also want to give a shout-out to the Rosenfeld author community, whether content strategy, content design, or any other discipline within UX. Everybody’s just so generous. Everybody’s just like, “Hey, when I wrote my book, this is how I made it work with my work schedule,” or, “If you need someone to be a technical reviewer, let me know,” and just so generous. I feel like maybe it was easier than I thought it would be? I’m not saying it was easy, but into terms of how I thought the book writing process was going to go, it was not the nightmare… I thought I was just going to be sitting in my kitchen or at my work desk, just holed up for however long it took. And it wasn’t like that, it was really a community process.
Larry:
Nice. It takes a village, it sounds like. Is this your first book?
Natalie:
This is my first book! Side story, real funny… I never thought, I always wondered what would happen if I had this problem. There is an author named Natalie Dunbar, who… She’s an African-American woman. She’s a civil engineer by day. She’s a romance writer by night. And I’ve had people actually say to me, that enjoy that genre, “Are you that Natalie Dunbar that wrote the books?” And I actually had an insurance agent say to me one time, “I read your books!” I’m like, “I haven’t written a book. What are you talking about?” So the good problem that I have is, how do I differentiate myself from that Natalie Dunbar, who I have been in touch with? We’ve kind of gone-
Larry:
Oh, no kidding.
Natalie:
Yeah. We were like, “Hey, we have a name. We both write. What’s up? How are you?
Larry:
That’s like a literary doppelganger. That’s great, I love that.
Natalie:
So that’s why my middle name is emblazoned on the cover of the book, because, and I’ve started to change all my social media to add at least my middle name or my middle initial, so that there’s no confusion. I am not a romance novelist of… Yeah, I, no… Not that I don’t like the genre, it’s just that’s not my style of writing. I come from journalism and I think marcom is where I get to be creative and flex a little bit. So yeah, that little backstory. It tickles me every time I look at the cover of the book, because it’s just I hadn’t planned on using my middle name, but here we are.
Larry:
You’ve never highlighted your middle name like this before. Is that?
Natalie:
Never.
Larry:
Okay. That’s interest-
Natalie:
Never.
Larry:
Yeah. Well-
Natalie:
Came in handy.
Larry:
Yeah, no kidding. That’s funny, I just recently changed my name to eliminate my middle name from… Anyhow, a whole new story, but…
Natalie:
I don’t want to, and we don’t really have time, but the book, I think it seems very comprehensive to me. I didn’t do a checklist against all the things I know about content strategy, but it seems really comprehensive that somebody who… Not to dis Kristina, but if you had just had to read one book to stand up a practice, that you could just grab this one and go. Was that sort of your intent, to be? But it doesn’t seem… It’s not a tone that you feel like you have to trudge through, it feels it’s not breezy either. I mean, it’s a good substantial book, but was your intent to be comprehensive with it?
Natalie:
Well yeah, I mean, but here’s the thing… So many great authors have written about how to do content strategy. I mean, I’m sure there’s room for more. Because the practice is changing, we’ve got conversational design, we’ve got all kinds of things that content strategists are, are becoming more specialized in. And then we’ve got all the splintered areas of, “Are we content strategists, content designers, UX writers, and so on, right?” Pull a little information architecture in there, and other stuff for good measure.
Natalie:
But what I wanted to make sure that I did from the outset was write a book that not only content strategists, so that solo strategist, but maybe you are a UX manager and you’ve been tasked with creating a content strategy team within your UX, or your design ops leader… And you may not know the how of content strategy. It’s safe to say that there’s probably some reading that’s going along… Somebody figured out kind of content strategists that they need in an organization, so it’s probably going to be they’ve read Kristina’s book or Writing is Designing or one of the other awesome books that are out there. But if they want to know how to build a practice, that was the void that I was trying to fill. And to give someone kind of an instruction manual or building plans, if you will, on how to create that practice.
Larry:
That’s how it feels. Like you said, build a practice, or… Everything you need is there. You have to do some work, but you can build it with the information in that book. Yeah. The other thing I wanted to call out… There was, again, I didn’t track it exactly, but it seemed like… I inferred, I think the second to last chapter, I think, was essentially about governance. But you didn’t call it governance, you had sort of an architectural metaphor kind of name for it. Did you kind of set out to make sure you covered… It sounds like you’ve covered all the things that you’ve encountered in your career. Did you have to do much research, I guess, to flesh in any… Were there any parts of the book you didn’t feel like you were 100% ready when you sat down?
Natalie:
I mean, I think one of the big areas where I felt that I needed to get some research on was, when we talk about measuring success, we think about KPIs and OKRs and all these different metrics, but that’s really at the project level, right? I needed to find information about, “How do we measure whether or not the practice, the whole of the practice, is performing against whatever metrics of success?” I think that was the big area for me was, “How do we know that our practice is, A), sustainable, and B), scalable, right? So we want to make sure that we’re nice and solid and healthy before we start to scale, right? So we want to be sustainable, and then scalable, and then be able to sustain the scaled practice, which sounds also better. But I think that was the big thing.
Natalie:
The other thing was articulating the importance and the value that content strategy brings. How you articulate that to leadership. And one thing, I was thinking of my experiences, where I kind of had to constantly sell certain leadership on, “This is why we need to bring it more people. This is why we need to do things this way or that way.” Whereas if you saw throughout the book, there are other voices besides mine because it does take a village. And I didn’t want it just to be me talking at people. So you’ve got some other voices in the book who bring their perspective into the conversation. We’ve got a UX leader from McAfee. We’ve got Andy Welfle from Adobe. Who else?
Larry:
Kristina makes an appearance.
Natalie:
Kristina makes an appearance, definitely. And it was a conversation with Kristina where she said something that stood out to me as I was then writing up that interview. And that was, “As a content strategist, you’re not likely the person that’s going to leadership. You need to get sponsors to go and have that conversation for you.”” Right? And that was one of those moments where I was like, “Okay, let me kind of shift gears here a little bit.” Because she was absolutely correct. The person that’s reading the book, if they’re a solo strategist, they may well be the one that’s going to have the conversation.
Natalie:
But once you start to get into an organization where maybe there’s content writers or other copywriters who either want to self organize, or they are being organized to provide that content strategy work and that point of view, then you’re going to find your allies and your sponsors that are then going to go talk to whatever level of management you need to talk to about resources and how you’re doing things and all that stuff. So that was something that I needed to kind of get different perspectives on.
Natalie:
But I would say that was the thing that was tricky about writing this book was I wrote it based on the experiences that I had. Tried over and over again. Sometimes it worked out, sometimes it did not. And as I moved through my career and started to see, some of the things that I ended up writing about were the things that I was fighting for in different places where we weren’t able to fully build out a team or a practice, but we got darn close. In an ideal world, you’ll be able to do all the things that are in the book, but if you can get even some of it done, your practice is going to be better for it.
Larry:
And I love that pragmatic approach that you just exemplified in what you just said, it totally comes out through the book. Hey Natalie, I can’t believe it. We’re already coming up close to time. Before we wrap up, one thing I want to make sure we get in, is what’s the publication date for the book? We’re recording this on April 26th, and it’ll come out next week, early May. When does the book come out?
Natalie:
So the book went to press on March 8th of this year. So what? So 5 weeks ago. And I have to say that date’s important because it was a year to the day that I signed the contract. I wasn’t supposed to be done until right around now, but I guess I’m kind of an overachiever and I got done a little early. It’s also my mama’s birthday, so that was special. And International Women’s Day. But usually it takes around seven to eight weeks, but I think it’s going to be closer to June because just everything that’s going on in the world. Supply chain issues, paper shortages, not to mention everything else that’s that’s happening. So I’m thinking from what I’m hearing, it’s going to be around June. Hopefully the beginning of June.
Larry:
We will link to the book page on the website, because he’s got to sign up where you can get a link.
Natalie:
Yeah. You can sign up and get notified when it’s available for purchase.
Larry:
Okay. Well we’ll definitely help. Definitely get that in there. And hey, is there anything last? Anything we didn’t get to in the conversation, or that’s just on your mind about content strategy practice that you want to make sure we talk about before we wrap up?
Natalie:
I mean, I think what I want to say, and I say this in the book, is our community of practitioners, the greater community, is amazingly gracious. Welcoming. There are so many talented people who have written so many great books. And so many of those people, once they heard I was writing a book, were so willing to just jump in and provide help, or another eye, or a testimonial, or whatever. So many that there’s so many more that I wished I could have included, but I think if this practice is new to you or you’re not a practitioner, but you’re looking at how to build up a practice, I think you’ll find that there’s a lot of great meetups out there. There are a lot of people who are more than willing to talk about how to get this work done and how to do it in a way that adds value. I think that’s just the thing that I want to say.
Larry:
Nice. I’ll share that. If you have any favorites, drop them in the email, I’ll add them to the show notes, but I definitely… Hey, one final, last thing, Natalie… What’s the best way for folks to stay in touch? You mentioned LinkedIn earlier, is that a good way to connect, or?
Natalie:
Yeah, I’m on LinkedIn. Natalie M Dunbar. M is for Marie. And I am on Twitter and Instagram. My handle is @theliterati. T-H-E-L-I-T-E-R-A-T-I. You’ll find me under that handle on both Twitter and IG. And I’m kind of active. I try to post as much as I can. Yeah.
Larry:
Nice. Well, thanks so much, Natalie. I really enjoyed the conversation, and good luck with the book.
Natalie:
Thank you so much, Larry. I sure appreciate it.
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