The Challenge of Creating Content

"The only real way to optimize for social spread is in the nature of the content itself. There's no way to game email or people's instant messages. There's no power users you can contact. There's no algorithms to understand. This is pure social, uncut."

Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong - ALEXIS C. MADRIGAL

I discovered this article yesterday, probably through Facebook or Twitter, and is the epitome of this blog post. It's the creation of informative, meaningful, or entertaining content will always be more important than your communication strategy designed to distribute it. This post is less about reflecting on the fact that "content is king," as it is often called, but a post on how difficult it is for a small, non-profit to create it. 

Creating content takes time and creating good content takes even more time. Even more importantly is being good at creating content, which not everyone is. I believe everyone can create content and that's where you have to start, but not everyone is going to be a great writer or storyteller. Not everyone can pick up the camera and create a moving video. 

It's true that time and money are often synonymous with each other in nearly every instance of life and business.  Time to create content during my tenure at NeighborLink has faded away as we've been more and more successful at our mission. Time to create content has been replaced with time to manage administrative and organizational things. Being the "solo" employee makes it nearly impossible to give all areas of operational leadership the due they need. 

I've learned the fact that content is in fact the fuel that has fed the fire at NeighborLink in the past six years. We have meaningful stories happening every day and when we get the time to document that story, we do it through pictures, writing, and we've even been able to explore the role video plays in storytelling. We know that the story drives volunteers and resources towards us, but we also know that in order to be successful at a communication strategy, it's going to cost some money/time to do so, which is the hardest thing to find these days. 

For small organizations like NeighborLink, finding donors that want to fund communication related positions or freelance budgets vs funding projects is nearly impossible. The conversation of adding a content creator as a second or third employee seems crazy for a small volunteer focused organization dealing in human services issues. $5000 to put a roof on a house vs $5000 for a couple of videos seems kind of crazy on paper, at least for those we've interacted with. Also, $5000 only gives you enough to create a small series of content and not enough to actually have a strategy  You could suggest that we just need to figure out the value proposition in order to sell it, which is correct. For the projects we've tied videos directly to, we've raised over $10,000 for and brought in new donors. 

The frustration for me is personal because I'm a communicator at heart and in training. I love marketing strategy and feel good about what I've been able to do at NL, but my mind gets stuck on all the potential that is possible. It feels like I can see the starting line in the distance, but just can't get there. I want to be able to hire my own content creation department because I'm convinced that NL will explode around the country when folks finally see that there is a tool designed to help them connect to the marginalized in their communities in meaningful ways. 

So, if you're a big donor that loves marketing & communication, contact me. I could cast vision for days about this.