How to get budget for content strategy

One common roadblock to content strategy is a lack of funding. This post describes how to get budget, even in lean years (and recently, they have all been lean years!).

1. Establish credibility

Well before you ask for anything, you need a good reputation in your organization. You need management to know that you are:

• Smart
• Reliable
• Productive
• Great at solving problems
• Not a complainer

Does your executive team occasionally ask for miracles? Make it happen, and be sure that they understand what you had to do to pull off the miracle.

Find ways to improve content that are inexpensive but have a real impact on cost and quality. For example, build out some decent templates that help people create content more efficiently and with higher quality even in your current, yucky system.

If you must complain about things, do so very far away from the Money People.

2. Identify a problem that the Money People care about

Your problems are the wrong problems. For example:

Content strategy needs budget // flickr: jakerust

• The content publishing process is inefficient and causes stress for the whole team during every release.
• I hate this authoring tool, and I want to work in that cool new authoring tool.
• Our content is not consistent from one writer to another.

These are all small potato, internal problems. If you want funding for content strategy work, you need to communicate with executive management in ways that they understand.

Hint: They understand M-O-N-E-Y.

So:

1. For each release, the content publishing process takes 40 hours, per document, per language. We have two releases per year, with 5 documents, and 20 languages. That means we are spending
   40 x 2 x 5 x 20 = 8000 hours = roughly $400,000 per year on content publishing.
2. Our organization has identified mobile-friendly content as a priority. Using our current authoring tools, we have to rework information to make it mobile friendly. If we switch to a different tool, we could deliver mobile friendly content immediately and automatically.
3. Customers must currently search the technical support articles and the technical content separately. As a result, 20% of support phone calls are for information that is available in the technical content, but is not being found by customers.

3. Show ROI

After identifying the problem, show a solution that makes financial sense:

1. An automated publishing workflow would eliminate that yearly recurring cost. The cost to implement it is roughly $150,000, so we come out ahead during the first automated release.
2. The cost of the rework is roughly $100,000 per year, and delays delivery by four weeks. Investing in NewAuthoringTool will cost $50,000 for licensing and $30,000 for training.
3. We want to improve the search facility to reduce the calls that can and should be solved by a search of technical content. Our technical support budget is $5M per year, so 20% is roughly $1M. We need $250,000 in funding to implement the new search, so we will break even in year 1 if we can reduce the not-found calls by 25%.

You will compete with other projects for limited funds, but a business-focused approach to content initiatives will ensure that your project is at least competitive with the other projects.