Build Your Nonprofit’s Capacity to Create and Manage Digital Content
If your nonprofit organization needs a content strategy—a plan to guide how you create and maintain your online content—consider applying for a service-learning partnership offered by Professor Lisa Dush of DePaul University. This partnership will connect you with a team of graduate students in a Content Strategy course offered by DePaul’s Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse, with whom you will develop a content strategy for your organization.
The partnership will run from mid-January to mid-March 2021. One organization will be selected to partner with the course’s 7-8 graduate students. Interested organizations must submit a Partnership Interest Form by 5 pm on Friday, December 20, 2024.
Is Your Organization Right for this Partnership?
Over the years, the course has partnered with nonprofit organizations with various missions and budgets. However, there are some basic requirements for participation.
First, because content strategy is a practice that requires ongoing attention to content, the partnership is best for organizations that have time and personnel to devote to publishing and updating their online content. Additionally, because devising a content strategy involves activities with staff and content audiences/users, including a group activity with staff to define the desired messages and tone of your content and interviews with representatives of your content’s key audiences to discuss their experience of your current content, our partner organization will need the time and bandwidth to engage in these activities and connect us with stakeholders for interviews.
What Will Our Organization Get From this Partnership?
The primary benefits of the partnership are the feedback, strategy materials, and energy you’ll get from having a group of bright students focus on your digital content for two months.
Your team of students, with your input, will complete tasks such as the following:
- Audit your organization’s website, social media accounts, and other digital content to determine the consistency and relevance of this content, given your key audiences and organizational goals
- Conduct a peer/competitor analysis to determine content norms and best practices among organizations with missions similar to yours
- Run user testing and interview users of your content to learn better how they experience your content
- Create personas of key content audiences to guide future content development
- Lead a group activity with a small group of your organization’s key stakeholders to determine messaging language to guide future content development
- Create an annual communication calendar that helps you to plan content development
- Codify recommended forms of content and their specifications into templates and editorial guidelines
- Identify metrics and design reasonable measurement routines to assess the effectiveness of your content
Your team’s work will be collated into a report to guide your organization’s future content strategy. We can also often connect partner organizations with a DePaul intern after the course to continue the work that has begun.
What is the Time Commitment?
Your organization should assign 1-3 people to this partnership, each familiar with the organization’s communication and marketing efforts (more than one participant is ideal, to the end of building capacity). In prior partnerships, participants have included staff members and, occasionally, board members.
From mid-January through mid-March, partner organizations should plan to devote an average of 1-3 hours per week to the partnership.
The total time commitment and key dates for participating organizations are as follows:
- By Dec. 20: Submit a Partnership Interest Form. After receiving the form, Prof. Dush will connect to schedule a phone call to discuss whether your organization is a good fit for this partnership.
- Tu Jan. 21, 6:30–7:30 pm: Attend Prof. Dush’s class (via Zoom) to meet the students and discuss content priorities and plan of work.
- W Jan. 22–Tu Feb. 4: Connect each student in the course with a stakeholder (e.g., staff or board member, client, or community member) who has a role in producing your content or who is an audience for your content, for 1-hour interviews.
- Tu Feb. 11–Tu Feb. 18: Convene a small group of your organizational stakeholders (e.g., staff and board members) for a 1.5-hour message-architecture workshop led by a small group of students at a location of your choosing.
- Tu Feb. 25 or Tu Mar. 4, 6:30–7:30 pm: Attend Prof. Dush’s class, in person or via Zoom, to hear the team’s progress report and plan final deliverables.
- Tu Mar. 18, 30 minutes between 6:00-8:00 pm: Attend a Zoom meeting where students share final materials.
How Do We Learn More?
If you have questions, please email Prof. Lisa Dush at ldush@depaul.edu.
Additional details about past nonprofit partnership courses are available online at https://lisadush.com/nonprofit-projects/