Maximizing your association's digital content: Strategies for auditing, leveraging, and optimizing assets

Content is the lifeblood of an association’s communications. As a major means to keep members informed, engaged and knowledgeable, content can nurture and grow a community. It comes in various flavors and formats – articles, blogs, videos, whitepapers, case studies, podcasts, just to name a few — and it’s constantly produced throughout an organization.

The hidden costs of disorganized content

These assets are often created and managed by individuals and teams that lack the time or tools to easily share resources with each other. They’re stored on personal Google drives and servers haphazardly, or in software platforms that aren’t connected to one another. This makes it challenging to maintain organization-wide awareness of what content exists, and to leverage those assets to meet the needs of members and key stakeholders. 

Step 1: Conduct a comprehensive content audit

A lot of time and money is wasted recreating content that already exists. When information is replicated and there is no single source of truth, messaging across platforms, websites, and digital channels can become inconsistent and dated. It’s also difficult to repurpose and repackage valuable content for different channels, such as web, email, social, online learning, as well as various formats.  

That said, many enterprises are sitting on content assets that should be working for them. The first step to getting more out of your content is taking stock of what you have. Begin by conducting a content audit to determine what content is already in place and being used. Identify what’s missing, what is of high value and what’s no longer relevant. From there, you can start to leverage these elements into a more unified member and stakeholder experience.

Step 2: Evaluate your tech stack

A lack of visibility and sharing between business systems can lead to further inefficiencies and inaccuracies. With this in mind, leaders should ensure key platforms like systems for association management (AMS), learning management (LMS), digital asset (DAM) and content management (CMS) integrate seamlessly for a better editor and user experience.

DAMs handle rich media, permissions and rights. A CMS empowers users to create, edit and publish their own digital content. Newer Content-as-a-Service (CaaS) platforms allow creation and management in a centralized, channel-agnostic fashion and in various formats. Integrating these systems allows assets to be saved and tagged in one place, so they can be easily found by members and stored and reused by the organization. 

Step 3: Establish a single source of truth for your content

Modern content platforms provide organizations with a single source of truth from which all content creators and publishers can draw. This ensures message continuity, currency of information and seamless syndication of content to multiple channels.

Step 4: Enhance content discoverability and accessibility

Optimize to get more eyes: Improve member experiences by making content more discoverable and consumable. Developing taxonomies, tagging and schema will drive search engine optimization (SEO), and dramatically improve the useability of your intranet, websites and member portals. Present it online so it’s accessible to the broadest audience possible, including people with disabilities.

Step 5: Implement strong governance practices

If you haven’t already invested in bolstering your content governance practices, be sure there is clear accountability, guidelines and processes in place to guide development, publishing, maintenance and quality. 

“If you build it, they will come” doesn’t apply here. You could have tremendous content with the potential to truly shape member decision-making and operations, but it’s all for naught if they can’t find it. When associations clean their libraries and optimize assets, they’ll be more effective and get greater returns on content investments.

Need expert help to optimize your content?

Need a content reset or plan to manage it all? Reason One can help audit content, choose and implement the right CMS and AMS, integrate tooling with your MarTech and back office. Get in touch and transform your operations!