What to ask your agency about content governance

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on content governance, these questions are worth asking early.

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Someone must own each page or it rots. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Removing outdated content is maintenance, not loss. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

How to tell if yours is fine

Content is the part of a project most likely to be underestimated and most likely to delay a launch. Three things worth confirming about content governance before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Removing outdated content is maintenance, not loss — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.