From pixels to people: creating a collaborative digital content community in higher education
Sarah Vickers & Scott Hood
Head of Digital Content & Senior Content Designer, University of Liverpool
The University of Liverpool has recently launched a new digital content community designed to bring together everyone who creates content across our digital channels. Its goals include:
Having awareness and control over who’s creating content
Reducing silos and encouraging collaboration
Improving communication and visibility of projects
Defining workflows and processes, as well as regulations, roles and responsibilities
Providing guidelines and (in the future) training to ensure quality and consistency
Allowing the community to support each other.
This project started in late 2023 with a Teams channel for everyone working in content and comms. This was used to update colleagues across departments on projects and how they could help progress them.
We also surveyed and audited users of our CMS to define new rules around access.
We have since developed a content governance model, the Content Design Framework, which we rolled out in 2024 with rules, roles, responsibilities, workflows and processes clearly defined.
We also improved training materials and plan to roll out regular workshops based on community needs.
In this presentation, we will discuss why universities need a joined-up approach to content, share how we’ve tackled the challenge to provide insights and tips, and (hopefully) some of the results we’ll have seen by then, as well as how we’ll expand and build on this start.
Key takeaways
Why universities need to take a joined-up approach to digital content
How to develop an effective approach to content governance
How to build a community of content creators and foster togetherness.
About your speakers
Sarah Vickers (She/her) is Senior Content Designer in the central Digital Communications team at the University of Liverpool. Working on projects across all audiences, managing a team of content designers and the support service desk. She has worked in digital in HE for 9 years, managing the content team for 2 years.
Scott Hood (He/him) has worked in content marketing for over 12 years, with a background in content and SEO across a wide range of industries. He joined the University of Liverpool in 2023 as Head of Digital Content, managing the digital content team, along with leading on content governance and other strategic content projects.