It takes a village: Doing content strategy in a large, Agile organisation

Join us for our last talk of the year, with pizza and beer thanks to Spark. This will be an in-person event held at Spark's head office in Auckland.

About Holly's talk
In July 2018, Spark New Zealand 'flipped' to an Agile way of working for the entire organisation. With this came a new opportunity to manage content in a way that could save time, reduce duplication of effort, allow cross-skilling and so much more.

For those of us at Spark, the reality of what we have achieved is fantastic, but it’s never perfect. We’ve realised our goal isn’t to look at our strategy and tick it off and say "done"! It will never simply be "done".

It's finding those moments of success that we ought to pause and appreciate, particularly in a place with many brands and projects on the go.

As a Content Design chapter, we are constantly learning, trying new things and seeing what works. In this talk you’ll learn:

• About the growth of our Content Design chapter and how we work in an Agile structure
• How we implement the four pillars of Content Strategy into our practice at Spark (ContentOps, Content Design, Content Marketing and Content Engineering)
• How we work across multiple craft areas including UX Writing, Technical Writing and Copywriting
• Examples of putting our strategy into practice, with guest speakers from Content Design
• Where we’re going next

Holly will be joined by two of her Content Design colleagues, Julie Miller and Ralph Watson. Both Julie and Ralph will be sharing their experiences and learnings of 'doing' content in a fast paced Agile environment.

About Holly, Julie and Ralph
Holly is the Chapter Lead for Content Design at Spark New Zealand, co-leading 18 awesome writers, editors and creators. Over the years, she's worked in digital marketing for a business foreign direct investment event, ran social media for Mobile World Congress, managed digital content for TV shows including The Block NZ, Sticky TV and FOUR Live, resized 500 images of clothes each week for EziBuy and tried to improved search rankings for builders at Yellow Pages! (This primarily involved ensuring people don’t get kennels as search results when they search “accommodation”.) 14 years later, she's still immersed in all things content and proud to be part of this fascinating industry as it continues to evolve.

Julie is a Content Designer at Spark New Zealand, supporting a fascinating mix of Agile squads to inform and inspire their customers. She has held a variety of different roles since her uni days, encompassing process improvement, data migration, change management and customer experience. In 2018 she finally found the One Role to Rule Them All, and her happy place, in Content Design.

Ralph is a Content Designer at Spark New Zealand. After studying languages and law and working in commercial finance, he worked for a while in Telecom/Spark doing IT support — however always being asked by colleagues to check that their written comms were “OK”. After doing the Whitireia Grad Cert in Editing, he stepped into a Content Design role in July 2018 (Spark’s Agile flip). This enabled him to combine tech and wordsmithing, to effectively deliver clear, usable and readable content to customers and colleagues via the web.