Are you delegating content creation for your internal communications?

The best way to engage with your workforce is to produce great content that is highly relevant, timely and of course frequent. Unfortunately, internal communicators are being asked to do more with less these days. The communication teams have shrunk during the pandemic even though the role has increased in importance.

The watercooler area is empty, our offices are locked, physical distancing (I never liked the term social distancing) is the norm, and the casual conversations that connected us are rare and by video at best awkward. Your workforce is thirsty for content that is varied and engaging. From CEO messages, to reopening plans, to strategic changes, to something as simple as an interview with one of your coworkers, the content is there to be sourced. It does not have to feel like it is you against the world, with a boatful of stakeholders, mountains of requests, and so very little time. Content delegation can significantly improve your productivity and turn your audience into content contributors.

Delegation is the assignment of authority to another person to carry out specific activities. In the case of Content Delegation, it is the process of distributing and entrusting content creation to someone else in your organization. The process involves deciding which content you should do, and which content is better to be delegated to others. There are a number of reasons you may decide to delegate. These include:

• To free yourself up to do other tasks.
• To have the most qualified person creating the content. This is especially important if the content is technical in nature, or if it is from a department leader about what’s happening in their department.
• To develop someone else’s ability to handle the content creation assignments judiciously and successfully.
• You are communicating in multiple languages that you are not familiar with

At the end of the day, having one person in charge of sending all the information to your employees can lead to bottlenecks and dry up the well of ideas. However, if the latter’s happening, we do have a post with some ideas for you (Content Ideas and Fun ideas to spice up your communication).

There are three key features that your modern communication platform needs to support effective delegation:

• Publishing calendar
• Content Delegation
• Content Approval

Publishing calendar

If you are consistently working out of at least 20 browser tabs, couple journals, and a myriad of Post-it notes stuck around your computer monitor and desk, then a publishing calendar is for you. A publishing calendar is a visual workflow that helps a team of content creators schedule their work on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Publishing calendars can help you track different types of content, communication channels, authors, and most importantly, due/publish dates.

There are several questions you should ask yourself to determine what your publishing calendar should look like. These include:

• What is your content approval workflow? The complexity of your content pipeline is important. Your calendar should distinguish between the different stages of creation/approval.
• How frequently are you publishing content? Is it daily? weekly? Several times a day? Finding out how often you publish can tell you how best to visualize your editorial calendar on a regular basis.
• Do you use more than one type of content? You content calendar should be able to distinguish between the two.
• How many content authors will use the calendar? The more authors the busier the calendar will be and the higher the need for filtered views.

If you would like a content calendar template, please contact us here and we would gladly send you one.

Content Delegation

Content is the foundation of communication. Modern communication platforms allow you to delegate content creation responsibility to various employees in your organization, increasing the pool of authors and diversifying the types of content. For example, each department can have their own content publishing administrator responsible for the department’s content or get ‘a day in the life’ from those in the field.

With delegation comes responsibility as well as enablement. From an enablement point of view, you need a simple way to ensure your co-workers do not deviate from your brand identity. You also need to be able to analyze the sentiment, length, grade level and other characteristics that affect content consumption. The easier this is to do the higher your chances of success are.

The Sparrow platform allows you easily manage delegated publishing and from multiple sources. Whether from your SharePoint intranet, or from inside Microsoft Teams, Sparrow allows you to restrict the types of posts, the topics and audiences that can be used, even whether or not the attributed author name and email address can be changed. You can even decide what topics will publish and which ones will be sent as submitted drafts for approval.

With refined scope and privileges, you can get selected contributors helping carry the load.

Content Approval

With content approval, you want to make it easy to delegate the responsibility, while still maintaining an element of control, ensuring the content created aligns with your strategy, follows your brand identity including colors but more importantly tone, and sentiment. This is not about micromanagement, where you provide too much input, direction, and review of delegated content. You are empowering your colleagues to create the content but most of the content likely needs to be reviewed prior to publishing.

Sparrow provides a range of states to help you stay organized and help make sure that every piece of content is shepherded through the process properly.

Summary

Sharing some of the burden of content creation can do more than simply give you more content to send out, it can help bring an organization to life in a new way. It can be empowering and can be done without forfeiting comms’ ability and need to keep a handle on things.

As we all know from Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility… and great communication platforms help with both.

And now that you have more time – here are some creative content ideas – (Content Ideas and Fun ideas to spice up your communication).

If you are ready for a modern, vibrant communication platform, we’d like to introduce you to Sparrow.

If you’re looking for a platform to help make your life easier and connecting you with all of your workforce, give Sparrow a look. We’ve lived the pain, we understand the hopes, and we built a platform for communication professionals that delivers. From Intranets, to Microsoft Teams, to newsletters, and mobile, we know how important corporate communications is. Sparrow – Built for Communicators. Book a conversation with us today.