It’s easy to fall into a habit of a reactive content governance: One that responds to stakeholder requests, either publishing or unpublishing, when they ask.
But a proactive content governance means your team oversees the content all the time:
You review your content’s quality in a cycle
Pull in subject matter experts, other web writers, or stakeholders to review the content and make updates to it before it goes stale or is incorrect.
The best way to start a content governance model for your agency is with a RACI chart.
RACI stands for:
- Responsible
- Accountable
- Consulted
- Informed
From small teams to large, a RACI model helps team members know where their responsibility lies, and helps ensure the content is being tended for quality.
Example:
Content author | Content editor | Publisher | Stakeholder | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Create new content | R | A | C | A |
Edit content | A | R | C | I |
Publish content | C | C | R | I |
Common content workflows
Content workflows follow these stages:
- Strategy: planning content
- Creation: writing, designing, filming, content
- Review: editing and fact-checking content
- Publication/Distribution: publishing and sharing content
Among your team, some people may wear more than one hat, and that’s understandable. It’s important, however, that your team identify who’s responsible for some of these tasks so each piece of content can follow a similar workflow before and after publication.
Content governance policies
Your content governance process can also include a set of content governance policies. These can be a simple document that your team agrees to and reviews every year, such as:
- How often content is reviewed
- Who’s responsible for reviewing it
- Author tools in the website CMS that help manage governance (e.g. a writer and create a page, but can’t publish a page. Publishing is handled by managers.)
- What content will be reviewed first, such as foundational or core content.
- When content is pulled down, and how it’s handled.
- The life of news releases (e.g. news releases will be archived after three years)