Your New Blueprint for Consistent, High-Impact Content

TL;DR: Demand is increasing on all sides for high-quality content, so creating intentional and relevant media for your community requires more than spur-of-the-moment posting. “The Content Factory” is the solution we developed to turn content chaos into a repeatable process that batches ideation and development. This results in more strategic, effective, and manageable content that connects with your audience.

In today’s hyperconnected world, we’re all swimming in content, but few messages actually connect. Organizations and communities need to cut through the noise with purposeful, relevant content, but with competing priorities (including the “tyranny of the urgent”), it’s easy to get reactive and overwhelmed.

The result? Rushed postings on social channels, cobwebs on blog pages, and long-forgotten email campaigns.

The Content Factory: A Blueprint for Results

As we’ve collaborated with our clients and on behalf of our own brand, we quickly recognized how much work is required for good content ideation and development. We needed a system that brought clarity, efficiency, predictability, and purpose to the entire content planning process…so we built “The Content Factory!”

The Content Factory isn’t just a tool or worksheet; it’s a proven framework that helps you batch and plan your content creation efforts, resulting in more powerful and consistent output.

To get started, you’ll want to schedule two collaborative sessions on your calendars: 

Part 1: The Ideation Session

Good content creation starts with the right ideas. The Content Factory process kicks off with an ideation session, bringing together your key stakeholders for a focused, distraction-free brainstorming workshop that’s typically 60–90 minutes long.

Tips for planning and conducting a content ideation session:

• Come prepared: Before the meeting, someone should prepare a spreadsheet or a document that’s ready to capture your ideas and notes. Attendees should also bring any notes on topics they’ve been thinking about since the last session. (We use a Google Sheet for this session.) 

  
  

• Keep things simple: Just focus on idea generation; this isn’t the time to discuss logistics or tactics.

  
  

• Variety is the spice of life: We use a 3-bucket paradigm — “who we are,” “what we do,” and “where we’re going” — to ensure we’re adding diversity to our ideas.

  
  

• Think multichannel: As you capture ideas, briefly indicate in the document how they might be repurposed across all the relevant platforms your brand utilizes … social media, blog, email, podcast, mailers, etc.

  
  

• Batch it: Host these ideation sessions every 1–3 months to batch your efforts, giving yourself more time and space (and sanity).

We’ve found that these sessions allow us to generate at least 60 content ideas at a time.

Part 2: The Development Session

Once you’ve generated all those strong ideas, it’s time to expand upon them! The development session takes your ideation list and sorts items into a more organized timeline, susses out the simple-and-quick from the heavy-lifting stuff, captures specific content notes for each item, and defines the next steps required to bring the plan to life. This meeting lasts about 60–90 minutes and can be hosted about a week after the ideation session.

Tips for planning and conducting a content development session:

• Come prepared: Before the meeting, someone should review the ideation document and clean it up if necessary. They can also prepare another document, if appropriate, that will allow you to take more detailed notes for each content item. (We use the same Google Sheet from before, plus a Google Doc to capture all our notes for blog posts.)

  
  

• Keep things simple: The goal of this session is to jot down just enough information on each item to help the next person build out the first draft. Write in bullet points, not prose. Also, keep in mind that not every bit of content requires a ton of complexity.

  
  

• Galvanize next steps: Someone attending the development session should be the point person who will ensure future tasks get built out and seen through on a reasonable timeline. For example, if you need to make a short video to highlight a volunteer’s story, this will likely need to be built and managed as a small project with multiple steps involved. Or, if what you need is a photo and description for social media, the point person will need to define who should locate/capture the image, who edits the photo, who writes the first draft of the text copy, who proofreads the copy, and who posts it online.

With those two sessions in the books, you’ll be operating from a cohesive plan that takes into account all your organization’s platforms, audience segments, and relevant messages.

What’s after that? Once the content has been fully built out, your Digital Presence Manager or Marketing Specialist will be able to publish/schedule it and measure its impact. The performance analytics can then be reviewed at the next ideation session to improve your content approach continually.

Regaining Sanity

The Content Factory empowers your team to batch, plan, and produce content with purpose so every message connects with your audience and moves the needle for your organization, instead of letting the “tyranny of the urgent” dictate your content. 

Ready to turn your chaos into content you can be proud of? Click here to download your Content Factory starter kit!

If you need some expert help to implement The Content Factory at your organization or act as your thought partner, consider GP Creative! We can facilitate strategic, intentional, and compelling content generation that equips your community and inspires people. Get started today.