Define a content strategy

[kytrinyx]

The whole idea of a content strategy blew my mind when I first learned about it. Without a content strategy, each post is a unique snowflake that you have to invent from scratch. With a content strategy you define high level categories of similar content, and it becomes much easier to come up with ideas within a category.

Tiffani mentioned a bunch of different types of content that is relevant already. This could be a place to start writing these down.

E.g. the human stories behind the bills that get paid, how policy affects things, interacting with government, interacting with the utility companies, ...

Also, for each idea for a blog post or story, it could be worth considering what larger category of content this story belongs to, as that might represent a whole new rich stream of ideas.

[aitchabee]

@kytrinyx have you got any good 1 or 2 pagers that go over content strategy?

@tiffani have you thought more about the types of content you might like? If we get a chance to work on templates during our hack day, are you confident with us at a minimum creating a "short post", a "long post", and a "profile" template?

[kytrinyx]

This article by Kristina Halvorson seems good: https://alistapart.com/article/thedisciplineofcontentstrategy

[tiffani]

@aitchabee I've got a range of different content types that I eventually want to publish. But, in the spirit of starting small and putting things together as we need them, the three kinds of templates you listed sound like a great start!

Future things I'm thinking about are ways to share data visualizations and API documentation (we've got some data we want to share a la https://wiredcraft.com/blog/static-rest-apis-on-github-pages/).

But those are for the far future. Our hack day will be a success with just creating short, long, and profile templates. 😎