Meet the Teachers Series: The Content Strategy Practice Blueprint

work·shop /ˈwərkˌSHäp/ noun: a meeting at which a group of people engage in intensive discussion and activity on a particular subject or project.

Instructor: Natalie Dunbar, Senior Manager, Design – UX Content Strategy, Walmart  [bio]

Natalie will be leading this workshop, The Content Strategy Practice Blueprint: Building from the Ground Up, starting Monday, September 14, 2022.  She is also the author of the recently-published book, From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice.  We asked Natalie to tell us a bit more about the curriculum beyond the standard website blurb (full description below).  Here’s what she told us.

In a nutshell, what problem are you helping people solve at your workshop? 

Using the five components that comprise what I call “The Content Strategy Practice Blueprint”, my workshop will help guide attendees through building a successful user-experience-focused content strategy practice from the ground up—one that brings great value to agency or in-house UX teams.

Who are those people, and why is it so important to them to solve it? 

Content strategy is clearly critical to brands and organizations, but it can be difficult to know where to start, or how to grow it into a successful and scalable practice. My workshop will be useful for those who may be the only content person in an organization, leaders of small content teams that are looking to grow, or UX or DesignOps leaders.

Does your approach represent a departure from previous approaches to addressing the challenge? 

Many great books have been written on the “how to” of content strategy. As well, there are just as many great resources that address specializations within the discipline, such as content design and content modeling. There are even a few resources that address the types of content professionals that are important to hire. But there really isn’t a resource that teaches how to build a practice. My workshop—and the book it’s based upon—fills that void.

Can you provide a brief anecdote/story about the problem/topic that illustrates it, and, ideally, your approach to solving it? 

After being hired at a small agency as the first-ever content strategist on a single client project and demonstrating the value of the discipline, I was given an opportunity to build a small practice to meet demand as more and more clients came to understand that content can make or break a user’s experience with a brand, product, or service.

A few years later, I moved to a larger organization and ended up leading an in-house team. Suddenly I was faced with figuring out how to approach the painstaking work of integrating our processes with other disciplines in the company’s sizeable experience design team, with the ultimate goal of building a content strategy practice that was both scalable and sustainable.

All I had to go on was my experience building that small practice at the ad agency and the rough practice-building blueprint and process framework I’d sketched out with the help of my agency colleagues. The big question was: Could I scale it?

Using and refining the approach I developed while at the agency, called the Content Strategy Practice Blueprint, we were able to establish, grow, and sustain a larger user experience-focused content strategy practice at the healthcare company.

Workshop Description

The Content Strategy Practice Blueprint: Building from the Ground Up

3 day virtual workshop

September 14-16, 2022, 12-3:30pm PT

Whether you’re the only content person in your organization, the leader of a small content team that you’re looking to grow, or a UX or DesignOps leader, if you’ve been tasked with creating a content strategy practice, Natalie Dunbar’s workshop will help guide you through building a successful content strategy practice from the ground up that brings great value to your agency or in-house projects.

You’ll learn the five components to the practice building process that comprise the Content Strategy Practice Blueprint, detailed in Natalie’s new Rosenfeld Media book, From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice:

• Making the business case for a content strategy practice
• Building strong relationships with cross-functional teams
• Creating a foundation of frameworks and tools
• Rightsizing the practice to meet client or project demand
• Establishing meaningful success measures

Learn to use this blueprint to create a practice that’s both sustainable and scalable, either as a part of, or as a service to, a digital or user experience focused department or team.

Learn more and register here>>