The last mile: getting approval for your content strategy

You’ve thought about your content strategy. You have a business case. You have a plan. What you don’t have is a budget and approval to proceed. What can you do?

First, recognize your accomplishment. A solid strategy, business case, and plan already put you in the top 25 percent or so. But how do you get over this new hurdle and actually get a funded project with a green light to proceed?

At this point, it’s important to understand that the game has changed. Until now, all of your plotting planning has been inside your content world. To get funding, you need executive approval, and executives by definition work on a broader scale.

To get funding, you have to show the value of your project (with a business case, and yours is beautiful). But that’s not enough. Organizations have limited budgets and lots of different projects are competing for scarce funding. You have to prove that your project is more deserving than the other projects. Otherwise, it’s a shiny nice-to-have that gets cut in the first round of budget negotiations.

Can you prove that your project is in fact mission-critical? Here are some factors to look at.

Return on investment

Can you show that the investment will yield increased revenue or cost savings? How long will it take for the organization to recoup the proposed investment? Are you arguing for efficiency and therefore lower cost, or are you arguing for an investment that will result in more revenue?

Another way to show return on investment is by accelerating time to market. If your proposal can speed up delivery of content in a global market, you have a compelling argument. Can you reduce a localization delay currently measured in months down to weeks?

Time

Why are you asking for funding now? What happens if this project doesn’t happen until the next budget cycle? If the answer is “not much,” you can expect delays.

Perhaps you have a window of opportunity in which to make changes and think strategically before your next major product? Or perhaps your products are being redesigned in a way that makes the current strategy unsustainable? If you are increasing the number of required languages every year, the cost of inefficient content development is increasing quickly.

Keep in mind that implementing any sort of major change in content strategy is going to take at least six months. When your executives tell you that “oh, we don’t need that until January 2017” that means you need to get started absolutely no later than June 2016.

Timing is everything. Successful managers learn how the budget cycle and the project allocations really work, and figure out how to work the system. For example, you may have a CFO who responds well to efficiency and isn’t interested in innovation. Your CTO, on the other hand, may want to engage in a detailed discussion of nifty technology. Understand their priorities and work with them.

Customer journey

Technical writers are allergic to buzzwords. But tying your strategy into the current Next Big Thing is smart. With attention focused on the customer journey and the customer experience, your pitch for content strategy should include a focus on these concepts. How will your strategy support them?

Getting approval for your content strategy project requires you to understand how decisions are made in your organization, and then work within that process to get what you want. Some technical communicators feel that the quality of their work should speak for itself, and that these types of games are beneath them. We call them People Who Don’t Get Budget for their Projects.