Explain your content project to editors and authors: the Project Start Worksheet
When you put us to work, we'll want to know what your task is. Here's how to spell it out better.
Content editing and authoring are collaborative processes. Your content partner needs to understand your situation – so that they can ensure the content does the job it’s supposed to do, and do it as well as possible.
And understanding your situation is a real challenge for any advisor. As a client, you can help them by going through what might be called "the Spice Girls process": tell them what you want, what you really, really want.
At Shorewalker DMS, we send clients our Project Start Worksheet at the start of most jobs. The worksheet is designed to elicit the information we most need to know about their situation. If your editorial advisor isn't us, they'll probably benefit from knowing this information anyway.
Core to this process are three questions:
- Who is your target audience?
- What is the goal of your content?
- Who are your closest competitors, and what are they doing right and wrong?
If you can't entirely answer these questions or the fuller list below, don't worry too much. Talk to your editorial consultant; editorial content is a collaboration. Your consultant will probably know that clients often start a project with their editorial aims and challenges still hard to describe. Many of the problems that come to us are ambiguous, complex and kind of hard to even see clearly, let alone solve. Indeed, these are all signs that an editorial consultant may be helpful to you.)
Answers to all these questions can quickly build a shared understanding of where we need to finish up.
Project basics
What are we calling this project?
A working title is fine - anything that lets us all refer to this project.
Who will own the project at your end?
Include phone numbers and email addresses. (Whoever helps you with your content will benefit from having a single main point of contact within your organisation. This person should understand what the business needs, and why.)
At what times can we contact them?
This will help us annoy you less.
Existing draft
How many words are in the existing draft, if it exists? (The word count helps us estimate how much work your project will need.)
How many more words do you want to add before completion?
Do we have a deadline – a date by whichyou need the content in final form?
This will help the editing firm to assemble the resources needed to make sure the project gets done on time.
Do we have other set parameters?
Are there any definite other requirements for maximum word count, key dates, run time, format, aspect ratio or anything else?
Project aims
The organisation’s mission
Your website's About Us page – and your published annual report, if you have one – will tell us much of what we need to know about you. We will aim to summarise this for you. If you can be more specific about any particular aspect of the organisation's mission that this content addresses, that will help too.
Drivers
What factors are most driving the project at a high level? What are the strategies, goals and objectives behind it?
Project brief
A document setting out what you need will help us quickly understand the project.
Primary objective for this content
If there’s one thing we want audiences to believe or understand after reading this – just one thing – what is it?
Secondary objective
What if we could have another one or two things they’d believe or understand after reading this?
Model documents
Do we have any models for the desired final documents? (These model documents can be previous work that you have done, or some other document that shows what you would like to do.)
Do we have a model for the work that needs doing?
Here we want to know the sort of completed documents you want to have. This will serve as a teaching tool and benchmark for the new project.
This completed product may be content that you yourself produced last month. It may be content used by another organisation on the far side of the world. Or it may be something in between these two extremes. But we will be better able to assess your project when we can see what success looks like.
Who are our competitors?
From what other sources will our audiences be getting information in this area? What are those sources' strengths and weaknesses?
Audience(s)
In this section we specify the important groups that will look at your content – we call them "audiences" – and what they might get from the material.
Do we have any definitions of (or data about) the audience groups you want to reach?
Your content suppliers will be able to provide much better material when they know exactly which people they are writing for.
What actions do we want different audiences to take after reading/skimming browsing the document?
Your content suppliers will be able to provide much better material when they know exactly what effect the material is designed to achieve.
What are the key reasons why the target audiences might look at this material?
When we understand what our audience wants, we can do much better at giving it to them.
How many people are accessing current material on this subject, and how are they accessing it?
If you have any information about content people are already looking at, we'd like to hear about it.
Brand
Describers
Use a few adjectives to describe how users should perceive the material. (Examples include prestigious, friendly, corporate, fun, forward thinking, innovative, and cutting edge.) Does this differ from the current perception?
Emotional message
What’s the single message you most want to send at an emotional level? I.e. how do you want people to fell when they’re read/skimmed/browsed the document?
Brand vocabulary
Do you have a brand vocabulary of words and phrases you want associated with your brand?
Perceptions
How is the organisation currently perceived?
Do you want these perceptions reinforced or changed in this material – and if changed, how?
Differentiation
How does your organisation differentiate itself from competitors?
Readability and style
Reading ease level
What reading ease are you targeting, if any?
Style guide(s)
Do you use one or more existing documents to define editorial style for your documents? If so, what are they?
Note: If no style guide exists, we recommend following the Australian Government Style Manual, with any required exceptions documented.
Style issues
What style issues do we need to look out for, for whatever reason?
Document practices
Do references exist in a database?
The most common reference databases are Endnote, Zotero and Mendeley. But a list in an Excel spreasheet or in plain text will qualify too.
Do the references in the report need to be checked to ensure they say what they are represented as saying?
Managing the project
How and where should the content be filed?
Include details of who should receive the content, with email address.
Who will sign off on your project when it's complete?
Whoever provides your content will need to get sign-off for payments. It's best to establish up-front who this will be.