Remember when an organization’s digital presence was just its website? Nowadays, even small organizations often manage a website, several social media accounts, an e-mail marketing platform, an e-commerce or fundraising platform, and a platform for managing relationships with customers or donors. Bigger organizations commonly manage a slew of additional, overlapping, or even competing digital properties.

In this post, I’ll share how my team at IREX mapped our digital ecosystem, closed more than 65 digital properties, and aligned existing properties to better meet users’ needs.

Digital technologies have reshaped how organizations of all sizes operate. But how can organizations govern their digital ecosystems in a safe, efficient, and effective manner?

In this post, I’ll share a definition of digital governance and then describe the main components. I’ll also give examples from my work.

Recently, my team at IREX worked with colleagues to create a content strategy and redesign our website. During the redesign, one of the most important steps was drafting a content model.

Our content model helped us save countless hours during and after the redesign. Months later, we’re still using our content model to improve results for the organization and our users.

As a content strategist, I often ask two questions: “What are we trying to achieve?” and “Who are the users?” The answers serve as a foundation for almost everything that comes next—from conducting research to designing and implementing a strategy.

But I’ve found that a third question is equally valuable: “Can we build and maintain our solutions in an efficient and effective way?” To address these issues out in the open, I’ve started developing guiding principles as part of my content strategy process.

Collaboration is an essential ingredient in any content strategy. But because IREX’s staff members are distributed across five continents, it’s all the more important for us to coordinate our work in an efficient and effective way.

To help solve this challenge, we created a digital service manual that outlines roles, processes, guidelines, a digital roadmap, and more. We launched the manual several months ago, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Employees from around the world have praised the manual’s usefulness, and digital projects have unfolded much more smoothly.

In July 2016, my team launched a redesigned website for our organization. David Hobbs, a digital consultant who helps organizations make big digital changes, contacted me to discuss our process. The following interview originally appeared on DavidHobbsConsulting.com.

International development organizations are full of smart, pragmatic people. But just as the rise of digital has disrupted public, private, and nonprofit organizations in other sectors, digital poses fundamental challenges to the international development community.

In response, development organizations have often tried to improve project implementation through ad hoc ICT4D initiatives. Meanwhile, many of these same organizations have built digital properties and communication initiatives in silos to meet short-term needs.

Fortunately, we do not need to invent a solution to these problems. Organizations in other sectors have experienced similar growing pains as they’ve become more digitally mature. It’s time for the international development community to take the next step as well by embracing content strategy.

In the fall, I joined an international development NGO in DC to lead digital strategy. We’re a midsized NGO, with offices in twenty countries. Before the organization created my position, the communications team had only two full-time employees and an intern.

Anyone who has worked at a nonprofit knows that it can be easy to feel overwhelmed by day-to-day demands. But in a few short months, we’ve managed to be much more strategic by steadily creating the components of a digital content strategy in collaboration with employees across the organization. Here’s how we did it.

Several people have asked how I conduct remote moderated usability testing for international nonprofits. I’d like to share my approach.

In this post, I’ll briefly describe the main aspects of remote moderated usability testing. I’ll suggest when to use this research method and which software to consider. I’ll also share my process for conducting the research and a few resources for further reading.

Nonprofits can do many things to make Google Analytics much more useful. In this post, I’ll describe how to get started with five powerful features:

1. Event tracking

2. Campaigns (with Google URL Builder)

3. Goals (with conversion funnels)

4. E-commerce tracking

5. Custom dashboards

As old funding models decline, nonprofits are anxiously searching for new models that might lead to more financial stability. Of course, nonprofits also wish to remain independent of private interests. This is particularly challenging because most nonprofits are expected to continue providing services and increase funds without investing in adequate infrastructure—even as demand for their services increases.

So how can nonprofits continue to fund their important work without compromising their mission or alienating their supporters? A report by Melody Kramer offers a number of promising ideas.

I haven’t been able to find a list of open-source platforms and tools for ICT4D (information and communication technologies for development). But a list could be valuable.

Let’s create the list together.

Content teams often think that the best way to create a content strategy is to follow a relatively linear process. Although there are advantages to using a traditional waterfall approach, I’ve found that applying agile and lean principles can improve the work.

In this post, I’d like to bring together some ideas from Corey Vilhauer on small content strategy, Melissa Breker and Kathy Wagner on content governance and workflow, Lisa Welchman on digital governance, and Dimagi on organizational readiness for technology systems.

I’ll also share some ideas from my own work, including a four-step process that uses agile and lean principles to improve governance and workflow.

Here’s the template that I’ve used for creating content types with teams. I hope it will serve as a useful starting point for your own content types.

To get started, fill out this form once for each content type that your organization wants to produce.

Organizations often use social media to broadcast their messages to the largest possible audience. It’s true that if even a few people share your content with their own networks, your number of “impressions,” “likes,” “friends,” and “followers” can add up fast.

This approach might be good enough if your objective is simply to “raise awareness” about your product, service, brand, or cause. But most organizations don’t fund their operations with Awareness Bucks. And who likes to be spammed by advertising-style social media messages?

Here are some books and other resources that have been indispensable to my work. I’ve grouped them into several broad categories:

• Content strategy, information architecture, and user experience

• Digital marketing, content marketing, and social media

• Design thinking, change management, and organizational development

• Marketing and communications

• Writing and editing

• Graphic design, layout, and production

Creating a journey map gives teams a way to identify customers’ pain points within services, processes, and systems. In this post, I’ll describe how to create a journey map and how it can help improve your content strategy. But first, let’s take a moment to discuss what journey maps can do and how they’re different from other tools.

The term editorial design has never been more relevant to our digital world:

• Do you publish content at regular intervals?

• Do you try to unify this content so it conveys a distinct editorial or creative vision?

• Do you have a strategy to share your content with readers?

If you answered yes to these questions, you already practice editorial design. But do you practice it well?

What challenges do content strategists face when working for the government? Three content strategists for government agencies shared stories and advice during a panel discussion on June 26. The panel was organized by Content Strategy: DC, hosted by Threespot, and moderated by Natalya Minkovsky.