June Caldwell – senior UX writer and content designer

I was the first content designer in my organisation. Which meant I had to explain why content design matters, many times to many people. And what my role actually involves. Pleasantly, this meant I was able to shape and define my role to best suit the piece of work.

When content design is a new thing for people, it’s important to establish a foundation – a strategy. This was incredibly important as I knew more content designers were joining me soon.

Let me explain what I learned during this process, and cover the basics.

What is content strategy? It’s a holistic plan that explains how an organisation will use content to meet business goals and user needs.

What is content governance? It’s how the content gets managed throughout its lifecycle (from first draft to publishing to maintenance to archiving), to ensure consistency and quality. This is part of the strategy.

With content governance, I was focusing on:

• creating and iterating the content approval process
• understanding who is the SME for each piece of work
• creating content archiving policies
• creating and ensuring adherence to style guides
• creating frameworks for reviewing content
• creating and implementing frameworks to track KPIs and metrics for content success

I knew I had to create workflows for:

• the approval process
• how and when to archive content
• tracking metrics and KPIs
• analysing search engine optimisation

Ideas and thoughts I had

1. We need a platform to document processes, frameworks and guidelines that is accessible across the programme.
2. We need to link business goals to the content we produce.
3. For the approval and review process, if a reviewer is off, who do we go to? How do we get oversight of availability?
4. A sign off checklist would be handy for when a piece of content is going live. This will help with consistency and accuracy.
5. One area of content changing may have a ripple effect across screens. How do we keep track of this?
6. Have a set of documentation templates that we adhere to, and come together to discuss updating these when someone has an idea to improve ways of working.
7. Who owns each piece of content? Measures it? Maintains it? Do stakeholders think they own content, or that we do?
8. What style guides are we adhering to? Are we developing our own?

The realistic outcome

I first looked at the content strategy in March 2025, when I joined. A year has passed and very few content designers arrived. Which meant there was little room to create and implement a strategy, I was tied up in the content lifecycle with tight deadlines. While I covered the basics loosely, I was unable to flesh out our strategy and make it more concrete.

We now have three other content designers as well as myself. So I’m finally getting space to develop our content strategy – yay!

I’m working on five key areas:

1. Content strategy
2. Content documentation
3. Content frameworks
4. Style guide
5. Content lifecycle

I’m in the middle of creating our content strategy document. This covers:

• framework adherence
• distribution channels
• primary and secondary impact of content
• success metrics
• content lifecycle
• business objectives
• user requirements
• audience definition
• constraints

What I’m learning

I’m learning that this is not a one-person task. I need to have conversations with different disciplines to flesh out my thinking. Stakeholders and business analysts for all things business objectives. Clinicians and tech for constraints. Communication teams for distribution channels. Service designers for user requirements and audience definition. Content involves many people and the more brains, the better the outcome.

I’m also learning that while having a foundation for content from the beginning is best, it’s definitely not always realistic. When programmes are in their early days, everything is subject to change. Which can make defining a strategy tricky. Also (as was in my case) it depends on who you have to meet delivery needs set by the programme. Delivery deadlines beat strategy requirements in a stakeholders eyes, understandably.

Do your best with the resource you have, but when you can, flesh that strategy out.