Playbooks and workshops: a powerful content pair
Level up your content strategy practice
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March 13, 2025
👋🏻 Hi, Scott here.
I’ve been working on the curriculum for our upcoming course The Practice of Content Strategy (scroll on for full details!), which has me returning to two of my favorite topics in this space, two things that are at the absolute core of content strategy work.
Inventories and audits? Hardly.
Voice and tone? Bzzt, try again!
Nope, it’s two things that don’t have to be about content at all: playbooks and workshops.
🏈 Playbooks
Playbook is a sports metaphor, and I think it’s a good one. Teams that run plays—soccer, football…uh, basketball? not a sports guy here—will benefit from an overall strategy to beat their opponent. But during the game, when the team is no longer planning, but playing, they won’t be able to cooperatively devise and execute tactics that support that strategy. What they need is a reliable set of options the team is already familiar with and trained on: in other words, they need a playbook.
That’s what a playbook is in content strategy, too: a reliable set of plays—methods, tools, checklists, and tactical guidance—that help your team carry out your content strategy. Content playbooks adapt general content strategy principles, tools, and methods into actionable stuff that’s specific to your organization. It turns those good ideas from the conferences, books, and courses into things you and your colleagues will actually use.
Effective playbooks can include:
- Reusable tools and templates for anything from developing key messages to auditing entire digital channels
- Content strategy principles
- Principles and definitions of good/quality content
- Guidelines for tone and creating clear context
- Practical tips for writing digital content
- Editorial standards
But where does all of that stuff come from? Great question! Many of the decisions represented in content strategy playbooks are often developed in, you guessed it: workshops.
🪚 Workshops
Workshop is a craft metaphor. For a maker or artist, a workshop (or studio) is a space that facilitates quality work by reducing distractions, putting necessary tools and materials at hand, and providing ample space to work—often on multiple stages or iterations at once across a series of stands, surfaces, or workstations.
In content strategy—and most design and strategy work overall—workshops are facilitated conversations where teams make decisions, build alignment, generate ideas, and solve problems. Workshops are how you get from “We should...” to “We will...”.
Successful workshops emulate the benefits of a craftperson's workshop by reducing distractions; organizing tools and materials through research, prep work, and agendas; and carving out space to work—literally if we’re talking lots whiteboards and walls, or figuratively if it’s more about time on the calendar.
Effective workshop types include:
- Voice architecture
- Content prioritization
- Ecosystem mapping
- Research synthesis
- Editorial planning
- Workflow mapping
- User journey alignment
All good stuff, but not necessarily valuable on their own. Good ideas will be left to rot on those big 3M paper pads unless the decisions are documented, socialized, and acted upon. That’s where the playbook comes in.
Playbook peanut butter, meet workshop jelly
You don’t want to put peanut butter on your knife one day and jelly another only to discover that you’re out of bread. You need to plan these things together:
- Don’t schedule a workshop if you’re not sure what you’re going to do with the outputs (documents and designs) and outcomes (decisions and momentum).
- Don’t start creating a playbook if you’re not sure how you’ll get people to agree on the guidance and actually use it in their work.
Together, workshops and playbooks activate your strategy; they turn good ideas and approaches into repeatable actions and methods. Learning how to develop and apply each of them successfully can form the foundation of your personal content strategy practice.
Take the lead on your content strategy playbook.
A wealth of information is available on the design and facilitation of successful workshops (like here, here, and here). You don’t have to find guidance specific to content strategy, though it will certainly help.
Playbooks don’t have to be complicated: pick a tool (here's a few) that vibes well with your organizational culture, embed some of your own thinking into it, and put it on a metaphorical shelf where everyone can access it.
But if you’d like a little help, our upcoming course The Practice of Content Strategy: Principles, Tools, & Methods will empower you to create your own playbooks, facilitate your own content strategy workshops, and take the lead on a major content project in your organization.
As always, let me know if I can help with anything; just hit reply!
- Scott
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The Practice of Content Strategy: Principles, Tools, and Methods
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