RTFM: Why People Don’t “R” Your “FM”
7 Tips to get people to read your manuals, guides, and policies If you work in IT or have manned a support desk, you have probably muttered – or at least thought to yourself – RTFM. If...
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Bryan Garner
Bryan Garner is our Director of Content Strategy & Technology, charged with helping our clients create, distribute, and manage their content more easily and effectively. In an age where content management is a standalone science, Bryan brings his years of large-scale web content management experience to the worlds of franchising and emergency response documentation.
Content Strategy – Frequency of Change
Your content strategy is affected greatly by your frequency of change. Static policies that only get updated once a year are pretty simple to maintain. But when you have a manual of, say, 100...
Content Strategy – Distributed Users
Business documentation — user manuals, employee handbooks, regulatory policies — is made more difficult when users are spread out geographically. It’s not just that they cannot clarify in...
Content Strategy – Multiple Authors
An operations manual is a large document, hundreds of pages, usually. So it’s pretty common to spread the work around, multiple people are responsible for smaller sections which are later...
A Rural Youth Ministry Delivers Their Training Content Nationally
Crossroads Farm is an outsourced co-operative youth ministry located in Reading, Michigan, a rural area near the southern border of the state. For nearly 20 years, Crossroads Farm has been training youth and student leaders with the goal of positively impacting their rural communities by providing social, educational, spiritual, and relational opportunities. They had created a four-year training curriculum broken into nine monthly sessions each year, but the format, structure, and visual elements were inconsistent month to month. The ministry was ready to expand into multiple locations but lacked a polished, cohesive training platform that was functional for both trainers and students. That’s when they made the call to Manual Makers based on a referral from a trusted advisor.
Content Strategy – Multiple Audiences
Content management is simple when everyone who reads your document is the same. A school policy that students wear uniforms, for example, is pretty simple to write: this is the rule, this how we...
How a Global I.T. Project Management Team Manages Change
Strategic content helped a project management team build credibility, reduce change, and deliver projects more quickly, with better results. Turns out, the key to managing change was to prevent it.
Six Analog Content Management Tips for a Digital World
Good content marketing starts with good content management. And that starts with good information architecture. If landing pages never change, if your company never grows, if you never re-use content...