Why all communications people should understand content design

This guest blog post is written by Rachel Machin. She is a senior content and communications specialist with experience in retail, housing, media, sport and IT.

I thought I knew a lot about creating content. Until I did the Foundation in Content Design course.

I’ve had many job titles: journalist, editor, copy editor, copywriter, communications manager. But never content designer. I was intrigued.

I was the only person without this job title on the course. But it didn’t matter.

The main things I learnt

• How to really (I mean really) understand the journey your audience (or user) makes before they get to your content.
• How to convince stakeholders not to pick holes in your content for no good reason – by using/sharing data and collaborative ways of working.
• The science behind how we read digital content.
• How to give constructive feedback.

How I’ve used what I learnt

I applied so much of what I learnt as soon as I got back to my day job as a communications manager. So far we’ve:

• changed the way we create content for our blog based on content design principles,
• run a course for all communications people in our business covering the science of reading on the web, creating content for digital channels, and giving constructive feedback,
• been able to convince stakeholders more easily that we are in fact the experts – by using data and taking them on the journey with us.

I’d encourage anyone with a job title that has the words ‘communications’ or ‘content’ in it to see what content design is all about.

We all face the same challenges. The main one being that every other person thinks they know how to do our job better than we do.

CDL's content design course will help you convince them that’s just not true.