Content Migration Doesn’t Have to be a Nightmare: Best Practices for a Smoother Transition

For most people, the thought of migrating thousands of pages to a new website is overwhelming.

Even if the project involves only a website redesign, it can feel like an impossible task.

While content migration could never be labeled as “easy,” it is entirely doable if you start with a defined goal and think of it as a series of strategic steps instead of looking at it as a whole. Tweet this

The task is made more difficult for large organizations that have multiple departments, each having ownership in the content. For example, a large university or corporation may have 20 departments that have uploaded content to the website over the years, and all 20 of them need to be involved in the process.

Unless you create a communication and implementation plan before beginning, the process can quickly spin out of control.

If you’ve been tasked with this daunting project, read on as we discuss the best practices for conducting large content migrations.

Image by Andrzej Rembowski from Pixabay

But First, Some Useful Definitions

Before we begin talking about the steps involved in a successful content migration, let’s define some terms that will help you better understand the process.

  • Content Inventory

    This is the first step in a content migration and it involves taking a comprehensive inventory of all the content listed on the website. Content can include articles, blogs, videos, audio, offline presentations, and more. Depending on your goal, you will need to determine which types of content to inventory.
  • Content Audit

    Once your content inventory is complete, you should conduct a content audit. In this part of the process, you will import or transfer the data you collected onto a spreadsheet and categorize it. This data includes things like the URL, bounce rate, usability, word count, number of social shares, conversion data, and page visits. The type of data you collect will depend on your goal.
  • Content Analysis

    Now that you’ve taken a complete inventory of your content and organized the data on a spreadsheet, you’ll use that data to conduct an analysis of the current content and determine which content needs to be updated or removed. In addition, you’ll uncover content gaps that will help you determine what new content needs to be added.

The Project Manager's Role

As the project manager (PM), you play an essential role in the success of the migration.

And in order to ensure that success, you have to take the lead and implement certain policies and procedures to be followed by all stakeholders in the process.

Your first step in organizing your team is to identify all content owners

Over the years, various departments have added content to the website, and each of these “owners” will need to play a role in determining whether the existing content is deleted, updated, or moved exactly as is.

Once you pinpoint the participating business units, you’ll need to identify key team members from each department who will take the lead role in the process.

Next, you'll need to set up a communication system to ensure that everyone involved stays in the loop

No key member can be isolated in this process because success comes from working as a coordinated team.

Implement a communications system that works best for your company. Depending on your organization, you could use Skype, in-person meetings, team lunches, an internal newsletter, memos, email, video simulcasts, or any other number of methods.

Use this free communication plan template from BrightHub.

As the project manager, you’ll need to establish a set of rules and standards across all departments

For example, if you assign a rating system for old content to determine whether or not it will be migrated to the new website or CMS, all team members will need to work from that system.

By creating these standards, it will make it easy for team members to understand their role—and for you to track their progress.

Next, set up the team members for success

Content migration is a difficult process, and team members may feel overwhelmed if they’re simply assigned the task as a whole.

Set them up for success by assigning each team member roles, individual tasks, milestones, and a timeline for all the work. This will give them a roadmap and help them understand your expectations.

But remember, assigning them unrealistic timelines will only hurt the process.

Be meticulous in your assumptions, even if you have to go through the process yourself to understand how long a process takes. For instance, if you assign team members the job of updating old content, do it yourself or assign it to someone else and log the amount of time it takes and then use that as the basis for your timelines.

Finally, track the progress of all team members and address any issues that arise

Staying on task is important to the overall success of the project, and the best way to do that is to track the progress of each team member.

This will allow you add more members if one is lagging behind, or identify areas where you may need to pivot.

It’s important to remember that you need more than IT people to conduct a successful content migration. Don’t forget to involve members of the content team because, more than anyone, they know what content exists, what content is duplicated, which articles are similar but necessary, and what type of content needs to be added.

For example, the authors who write content for a specific department or the editors who create the content plan for it have a deeper understanding of the existing content and why it’s there. Involving them in the content audit would help ensure that the right content gets migrated and nothing important is left behind.

Helpful Tip:



When asked about a tip for working with multiple business units, Andrew Dean, Senior Solution Architect at Open Professional Group had this to say;

“Interestingly, the tip I would offer is not technical.  If a PM is working with multiple business units, the organization and communication about the needs and requirements of each business unit are critical early in the process.  For example, if a PM is working with many units, the most important question to know, as early as it can be known, is what data MUST be moved and what data is nice to have.  It never hurts to also define what data we are leaving behind.”

He says knowing this information helps the project manager organize and coordinate across the units. He also says it’s important for the tech team to focus on developing a migration solution that is based on the answers to these questions instead of trying to determine the business logic as they code.

All of the business logic details that need to be “coded” should be considered and planned before this is handed off to the developers for action,” he says.  “What you don’t want is a developer trying to figure out what a given set of business requirements may be in the middle of the coding process.  That leads to mistakes, refactoring and blown budgets and timelines.”
“Above all,” he says, “the migration should ensure that no critical data is left behind.  This is where the organization and communication is so critical.  A PM can then look across the business units to find overlaps, deltas or alignment to ultimately produce a business level migration plan to be handed to the tech team for implementation.”


Define Your Goal

No two content migrations are the same, and in order to determine how to proceed, you’ll first need to determine your goal for the process. Remember, every step you take from here on out should be based on your goals, so put some thought into this.

Some of the goals that are common in content migration are:

  • Improve your site's SEO or site traffic

    In order to improve the SEO on your site, you’ll need to first determine its current effectiveness.
  • Get the big picture

    You may need to understand the scope of your content across all content types to plan for future projects.
  • Eliminate ROT

    ROT stands for redundant, outdated, or trivial content, and it should have no place on your website.
  • Evaluate content for consistency and message

    In order to maintain a uniform branding experience for site visitors, all your content should be consistent in its message.
  • Identify content gaps

    If one target audience has an abundance of content while another has little to no content, you’ll need to identify those gaps and fill them.
  • Analyze the metadata

    Look at the metadata across all content to determine whether it’s been used properly and consistently. For example, if you don’t utilize a metadata model consistently across all content, such as a standardized vocabulary for descriptive items, the search and distribution aspects of the site will be affected.

Metadata is used to categorize and organize your content so end users can easily find it. For example, in the above Excel worksheet, the metadata collected for the content is date, short title, publisher, and type.
  • Organize for findability

    If visitors or employees have a difficult time finding the content, it will need to be organized more strategically.

Identify Content Parameters

Once your team is organized and you have a solid goal in mind, you’ll need to identify which types of content to include in your inventory. Content is more than just blog posts and articles. Some of the other content types are videos, audio files, infographics, photos, tables and charts. In short, you’ll need to determine whether to conduct a partial content inventory or a full content inventory. A full inventory is just like it sounds: an inventory of every piece of content on the site.

If you’re doing an inventory for a large corporation or organization, this is probably what you need to do. It will give you a glimpse into how the pages on the site relate to one another and expose any hidden data, which could result in duplicate content or broken links.

On the other hand, a partial inventory gives you information about subsets of the content. For example, you may need to know what content has been added to the site in the past 3 months, or need to analyze only the top levels of the hierarchical structure.

How to Conduct a Content Inventory

In times past, it was necessary to conduct content inventories manually, which could take months to accomplish. Now, automation allows you to do it in seconds. And in addition to the time savings, it helps eliminate human errors and the necessity for coding skills.

But according to expert opinions, whether you should do a manual or automated migration varies depending on whom you ask. For example, Doug Plant, a partner at Mugo Web says, “Very large migrations have to be mechanical, just on the basis of scale. It is too expensive to do it manually, even with something like Mechanical Turk, the migration would cost too much.” (Mechanical Turk is an online marketplace that allows project managers to access global workers at affordable rates.)

Dean’s answer was slightly different. “The overall answer with anything related to content migrations is “it depends.”  In the 21 years working in this space, I have never found two migrations that are alike.  They all have similarities, but they all have key differences as well.” He explains that the source and target systems are always variable, and more often than not, most content migration is done by machines and automation with manual actions on only selected or necessary elements. He goes on to say that with proper scripting during the automation, the migration is “much easier, faster, and more accurate.”

And Plant agrees. “Even though code is going to be one-time-use, it has to be written with full best practices.” He says this includes complete testing cycles, debugging hooks, good logging, and it has to be properly written and documented.”

As you can imagine, there are a lot of automated programs to choose from.  Some of the most popular are:

Content Analysis Tool (CAT). This tool will crawl your website and bring back a full inventory of your content, as well as provide the key data you need

  • Screaming Frog. This tool will crawl your entire website and give you instant results. While it’s mainly used for SEO analysis, it is also a website audit tool that gives insight into 30 parameters.
  • This migration tool is right for large corporations and other websites with extremely large amounts of data. Many Fortune 500 companies as well as governmental organizations use it to migrate data.
  • DeepCrawl. This tool not only does content inventory, but also allows you to see a live comparison of both the old and new site.

The automated tools not only provide you a list of the content on your site, but will also allow you to capture specific data for each piece of content. For example, it will provide you with the URL or path, file type, links, keywords, date of creation, times viewed, last date accessed and more. You will use this data in the next step in the process.

Use the Data to Conduct a Content Audit

Now that you have a list of every piece of content on the website, it’s time to move on the next step in the process: conducting a content audit. You will work from a spreadsheet in this step of the process. The tools listed above will automatically export the data into one with the exception of DeepCrawl. This system will provide you with an extraction report that you will use to create your own spreadsheet. You should organize the spreadsheet in a way that makes it possible to analyze the data in order to determine what to do with it.

But before you begin that, you should first clean up the spreadsheet to make the process easier. You can either use tools like OpenRefine or DataCleaner, or if you’re using Excel, do it yourself with this handy guide.

Once the data is cleaned, it’s time to organize it in order to move on to the next step of analyzing it.

Depending on your goal, you can organize the content into content types, themes, content owner, author, departments, audience, or any other way that makes sense to you. For example, if you organize the content by audience, you should start by creating a column for each type of audience you strive to reach and then place the content into those categories.

Once you complete the audit, you will be able to determine whether the content distribution for each audience is equally divided or if you need to add more content to some categories. You can continue the process and add subcategories to each column. For instance, if you’re categorizing by audience, you can add subcategories like existing and potential customers to gain even more insight. For each piece of content, you should create columns and add, at the minimum, the following data to them:

  • Headline
  • URL or path
  • Content summary
  • Intended audience
  • Supplements such as audio or visual files

This is a long and tedious process, especially if you have thousands of pages of content to audit, and you should employ your key team members in the various business units to help.

Just be sure to give them clear guidelines and timelines to keep the project on track.

Important Tip:



Some people try to migrate content without first conducting a content inventory and audit, but that can lead to disaster.

Matthew Hesser, CEO of finduslocal.com, an online local business directory that is currently adding millions of pages to the site, weighs in. “Doing a content migration without first doing an inventory and audit is not a wise choice unless your goal is to begin the process from scratch again after it fails.”

It's Time to Analyze the Data

You’ve created a list of the content, organized it into whatever structure is suitable for your goal, and now it’s time to analyze the data.

To rank all that content, you will need a scale to help team members determine the fate of the content. Every piece of content should fall into 1 of these 3 categories:

  • Content needs to updated or revised
  • Content can be ported over as-is
  • Content needs to be deleted

Ideally, the team members for each department will conduct the analysis for their content, but in order to make it successful, you should provide them with example content pieces for each of the 3 categories of existing content.

In addition, supply them with parameters so they’ll understand how to determine where new content is needed.

Because this is a time-consuming process, it’s important to give team members milestones and timelines to keep the process flowing. And when someone fails to meet a deadline, you can step in to determine if they don’t understand the process or if there is another issue that needs to be addressed.

Helpful Tip:


Because not all pages have a URL, or have more than one piece of content, you should assign an index number to every piece of content. And to make things easier, group those index numbers into categories. For example, assign an index number beginning with the number 1 for all documents, number 2 for all videos, and so on. This will make the auditing process easier in 2 ways.

First, if 2 pieces of content from different departments reside on the same page, you can assign each department the index number of their content rather than the URL, which includes another department’s content.

In addition, if some team members are auditing certain types of content such as video, you will know exactly which index numbers to assign them. This will help streamline the process and make the analytics easier.


Migrate Your Content

Now that each department has audited, updated, and added new content to fill in the gaps, it’s time to migrate the content to your new site. This is the scariest part of the process for many people because if it’s done wrong, it can cause big problems. For example, a bad content migration can cause an organization to lose the SEO rankings they’ve worked so hard to achieve, result in a loss of workflow, or the new site could be filled with broken links.

But again, automated software has made the process easier—and safer. Programs like the ones we mentioned above automatically transfer the files from your old website to the new one. In addition, you can migrate your content from an existing CMS to a new one with CMS2CMS, or use Migration Center, an out-of-the-box software program that guarantees large scale migrations with no interruption to workflow.

Helpful Tip:

If new content was added to the site, or old content was revised and updated before the migration, it will automatically migrate along with everything else. But if the content owners didn’t complete the updates or new copy before the migration occurred, you will have to add it to the new site manually. Just be sure to keep all new or updated documents together in a folder so you don’t leave out any important content.


A Word About Testing

According to both Plant and Dean, ongoing testing early is key.

Dean says that his group believes that “strong requirements early on, backed with aggressive multi-round testing ahead of the production release leads to a far less risky production release.” He goes on to say “To that end, we would suggest that the more that can be done to confirm the quality and accuracy of the migration data in the test migrations, before the production release, the better.” He says it’s important to include all stakeholders in the testing because doing so will increase the likelihood of issues being spotted in the staging environment.

Plant also talks about the importance of testing before the migration is complete. “Post migration testing takes a lot of time and effort. Content owners have to sift through a lot of instances of the migrated content looking for problems. This process invariably requires answering questions like “How many pieces of content have this problem?” “What did the original piece of content look like? Was it originally broken or did the migration break it? Do we try to fix it automatically?” This is especially true where there are complex discussions between all the stake holders.”

Dean sums up the process nicely:


There is a lot of application of the old saying “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” when it comes to data migration. The short version is test early, test often and be sure that all stakeholders have a role in the process including the go/no go decision for production release.  If this process is utilized, the post migration testing should be more topical and more of a “confirmation” that the data that was seen in the testing phases has successfully reached production. Of course, each migration plan has its own unique nuances, but if proper testing ahead of production release is performed, post-production release testing should be considerably smaller in terms of effort.

-Andrew Dean


The 1,000+ Page Website Overhaul…How to Undertake a Massive Website Rewrite

Much has been written about crumbling infrastructure throughout the United States.

If it’s not roads and bridges, then it’s internet networks and dated telecommunications infrastructure.

But not so much has been written on the effects of aging on internet content.

The internet has been around long enough that many sites have compiled years of content and supplemental pages.

How do companies and universities manage updating and creating content for huge, often unwieldy sites?

A large content production or migration project can appear daunting at first.

Anyone who’s worked on one of these projects for the first time inevitably has come out the other side with a laundry list of learnings.

From architecting new structures to staffing a writing team large enough to complete the project in a timely fashion to hand-holding subject matter experts and ensuring an efficient workflow, large content project managers will have had to work through the bottlenecks common to such large-scale projects.

Preparation

A proverbial analogy for today’s large-scale content production projects might be different takes on “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

If we consider the content as the “baby” and the platform as the “bathwater,” you can see how the various iterations of these projects might look:

  • If you chuck the baby, then the scope of the project involves producing all new content to populate your current platform.
  • If you chuck the bathwater, then you’re looking at a content migration project where the biggest challenges become identifying content you want migrated to a new platform and new content you want produced (an example being your company’s desire to migrate your content and data to the cloud).
  • If you’ve chucked it all, or perhaps have no baby or bathwater to begin with, then your challenges multiply.

Obviously, there are subtle variations to each of these scenarios.

And while there are plenty of marketing firms that can handle large-scale content management, when it comes to actually producing the living, breathing content that your users will consume, the task of creating compelling and cohesive content on a large scale can prove challenging without a well-honed writing team in place.

Assembling Your Team

Even if your company employs a third-party marketing firm to handle content production and management, many marketing firms don’t staff a large enough writing team for such large-scale projects.

So, the first issue that needs tackling is ensuring coverage of the sheer manhours required to produce large amounts of high-quality content while maintaining an attentive focus on cohesion.

It’s not enough to simply hire 10 or 15 writers and divide up the work.

Those writers need to form a fluid team that works well together, understands the broad scope of the project, and can converge to meet a common goal.

Project managers will be the critical hub for these types of large-scale projects.

Not only will they be involved with staffing a cohesive writing team, but they will also be instrumental in attaining consensus for the style guides that need to be produced, in drafting training materials and process documentation, and in assisting through the decision on what to repurpose and what to scrap.

Project managers are also key to keeping a project on budget and on schedule.

Wintress Odom, Owner of Houston-based The Writers for Hire, says “To ensure the project stays within scope, each individual writer needs to understand how much time they have allotted per writing task, else ‘small’ overages on individual tasks can add up to hundreds of extra work hours.”

Extra works hours can equate to budget overruns and missed deadlines.

Oh. And, of course, you need an editor.

At the risk of going over the top with the proverbs, when it comes to editors, you might consider that too many cooks spoil the soup.

Odom says, “For large projects with multiple writers on a team, it’s important to have a single editor.”

She qualifies this by explaining that a single editor will have the entire vision of the project within their scope, and by introducing multiple editors, there’s a good chance the rate of inconsistencies in tone, content, and style grows exponentially.

Together, the project manager and editor will oversee the writing team and ensure stuff gets done on time.

Ramp Up

At project inception, one essential key Odom identifies is in ensuring the initial architecture takes into account not only the form the project is to take, but also in preemptively constructing a chain of command that will streamline the decision-making process and save time and headaches down the road.

For such a large-scale project, everyone involved has to be on the same page.

This is done by documenting workflow and review processes before a single word gets written.

Process documentation can range from the bare minimum to quite extensive.

On a large project, you might find the need for some or all of the following:

  • Project workflow guides
  • Content guide
  • Chain of review roadmap
  • Stakeholder responsibility definitions
  • Writer and stakeholder training on project-specific software

Odom stresses the need to have most of this in place before starting a project. “You are bound to tweak processes as you go along, but starting a major website overhaul without key procedural documents is a costly mistake.”

The one exception?  Surprisingly, the style guide.

“If a company doesn’t already have one,” says Odom, “trying to create one before the project is somewhat ridiculous.  You can’t possibly anticipate all of the nuances you’ll run into, from capitalization preferences on company trademarks to oxford commas.”

Odom suggests recording preferences – building a living style guide – as the project progresses.  Then, completing a front-to-back edit just to implement style guide decisions right before launch.

One last invaluable tool for allowing the writing process to flow much smoother is the key messaging platform.

Most larger companies have this valuable marketing tool already.

It’s a master marketing message document, covering the company’s branding as a whole as well as each individual product and service the company offers.

The key messaging platform provides cohesion across all marketing mediums and ensures not only consistency in branding and style, but also a roadmap to avoid multiple content producers from having to reinvent the wheel.

Thankfully, the internet makes available a wealth of prompts and tools for creating effective key messaging.

Workflow

Throughout her career, Erin Hanson, Content Marketing Manager at Autodesk in Northern California, has had to learn many lessons through trial and error.

Earlier in her career, Hanson was charged with the daunting task of overhauling content for the entire University of California at Berkeley extension course catalog, a project which ended up taking over two years.

To give you a sense of what one of these large-scale projects looks like, consider just a handful of the tasks Hanson had to manage for the university’s site overhaul:

  • Drafting and distributing requests for proposal for third-parties
  • Gap analysis for requirement gathering from student information and records
  • Gathering information on each field of study’s course descriptions and certificate programs
  • Creating and managing content hubs for each of those fields of study
  • Conducting student interviews—one in each field

“The bottlenecks,” Hanson describes, “were everywhere. To begin with, there was a lot of data, old systems that needed to be shut down, migration to plan out and the need to get sign off from academic stakeholders.”

For Hanson, now at Autodesk, the reliance upon technology to manage large scale content cannot be understated.

She uses a wealth of technological trappings such as digital asset management software and other browser-based search tools to manage an immense workflow.

Odom agrees on the use of technology in workflow management and recommends using a task-based workflow process to track the current status of each website page.

This type of system means that a stakeholder can see any page’s progress at-a-glance.

The system also makes it easy to see where pages might be held up – scheduled for a subject matter expert interview, waiting on technical content review, or stalled due to an unanswered question.

A proper workflow management system will also allow for per-task conversations, feedback, and communication.

The alternative is corresponding and trading files through email or a less sophisticated file-sharing system which Odom dismisses as “a total mess.”

Working With Subject Matter Experts

Photo by RF._.studio from Pexels

High-level subject matter experts aren’t always in great supply.

Realistically, the ones in your company likely have some of the best and most relevant insight into the content you’re producing.

However, relying on in-house subject matter experts to produce content may represent a general misalignment of goals.

Consider:

  • SMEs don’t have time. A subject matter expert is likely fully immersed in their job responsibilities and may not prioritize their assigned content production duty.
  • SMEs are not always good writers. These folks may be the best at what they do, but when it comes to articulating that for the rest of us, they may not be good enough writers.
  • SMEs have different goals. Marketing department and corporate bonuses are often built on key performance indicators, many of which are deadline driven. SMEs, on the other hand, may have an entirely different set of KPIs, in which case they’re not incentivized to work within the timeframes your content production project demands.

As an alternative to relying upon in-house subject matter experts to produce well-written content, try using those SMEs as mini-editors.

It takes far less time for an SME to make themselves available for a brief interview, and to review and comment on content created by someone else than it would take for them to sit down and craft new content from scratch.

When interviewing SMEs, Odom recommends modifying communication styles and setting clear expectations.

The discourse style of an enterprise developer is bound to be markedly different than a financial advisor, for example.

When working with SMEs, Odom has found that “Some people just don’t do well with pre-call preparation. They need to react to your questions off-the-cuff.  Others want prep questions and campaign briefs to feel comfortable.”

Finally, one of the most important elements of creating large amounts of content quickly lies in being able to shepherd those SMEs through the writing and editing process.

Relationship building becomes paramount as there will inevitably be the occasions when a SME is dragging his feet in getting back to you.

Conclusion

Whether you’re migrating and repurposing large amounts of content or you’re charged with scaling a new project which might feature tens of thousands of pages, you’ll want a clearly defined plan of attack and a staff of qualified writers. Tweet this

But perhaps the greatest dividend to having completed a large-scale project is that you now have a team in place that’s fluent in your culture, your subject matter, and your goals.

Odom agrees.

After working on a large project, “We now know how all those departments work, we know all their key messaging. We just happen to be offsite.”

Auditory, Visual or Kinesthetic? Why You Should Tell Your Writer Your Learning Style

When starting a project with a writer – be it a book brochure, website or whitepaper – it’s common to focus on the end goal.  How will it read when it’s done?

Less focused on, but equally important, are the mechanics of creating the document.

That is, a smooth journey from blank page to finished manuscript, can not only directly impact the quality of the final product, it can mean the difference between a fun and positive experience and a tortuous and inefficient disaster.

So how does one ensure this smooth journey?

Turns out, when working with a writer, there is no “one size fits all”.

Some writing teams use outlines and project management systems.  Others rely on meetings, or texts, or campaign briefs, or process maps.

But do these tools work for you?

It’s not unreasonable to ask your writer or writing team to adjust their process to fit your style of working.

But before you start giving them pointers on their writing process, you may want to walk through this quick exercise to determine…
 

What type of learner are you?

Turns out, understanding your individual learning style can go a long way towards picking the right tools for getting your writing job successfully to the finish line.

Mariaemma Willis is an expert on learning styles. Based in California at Reflective Educational Perspectives, Mariaemma is often called upon to help companies, students, and juries learn how to exchange information.

Mariemma advises, “Each person will bring their own style of writing and writing management to a project – but using your learning style to set expectations as the project manager – you can set best practices that work specifically for you. Use those traits to find the best way to communicate what you need to have a successful end product.”

Preparing the team

Besides the obvious (disseminating relative project information), take the time to discuss process during your initial kick-off meeting.

Mariaemma suggests reviewing past projects for guidance. Ask the contract team for similar project briefs, examples of prior work, and outlines/roadmaps. Asking for this information will help shed light on the way projects were executed in the past.

Take this as an opportunity to set YOUR expectations and tweak the process to fit your communication style.

Be proactive about telling your writers how you work best:

  • How much time do you have to allocate to communicating about the project?
  • Will you be available on a weekly basis?
  • What means of communication do you prefer? Written or verbal?
  • If you like written communication, do you want longer emails with tons of detail or shorter more concise updates?
  • If you prefer verbal, do you like to talk organically about goals? Or, do you have a short, concise list to guide you?
  • When providing feedback on the project, how do you want to communicate draft changes and comments? Email? Phone?

You may also want to mention specific communication tools that work well for you.

Not sure what to suggest?  Knowing if you are an auditory, visual or kinesthetic learner can give you a clue.

Three Types of Learners

Auditory

Let’s start with Auditory.

Auditory Learners have a preference for transferring information via listening. Either to the spoken word itself, conversations, sound or noises.

An Auditory Learner uses phrases such as “tell me” and “let’s talk it over.”

These are people who can remember all the words to songs that they hear. They’ll also be able to perform a task after listening to an expert.

This group pays attention to detail and likes to be in the thick of things.

If you’re reading this and thinking this sounds familiar, then the following information might help.

  • Encourage lots of verbal Q&A. You learn best by talking things out. Rather than asking questions in an email or providing feedback on a Word document, get on the phone with your writing team and talk through any questions, concerns, or corrections you’d like to make to your draft.
  • Talk through project scope and timeline. Detailed project calendars, timelines, and flowcharts can seem overwhelming if you’re more of a “let’s talk” type. Make sure that you discuss all of the goals, objectives, and steps of the project with your writing team. You learn by hearing and speaking, so all of those dates and deadlines will seem more “real” once you’ve talked them over.
  • Steer clear of outlines for written content. If you’re like most auditory learners, you’d rather run a mile through Death Valley than sit down and read a bullet-pointed outline of your next whitepaper, web page, or annual report.  To you, planning and organizing happens best during a face-to-face meeting, phone call, or Skype session. Set up calls with your writing team. Verbally confirm that you’re on the same page, about what you’ve seen so far, and give them the green light to start writing a draft.

  • Set up a standing weekly call. Regular communication is a must for any large project — but you have zero interest in wading through “update” emails from your writing team. Here’s an auditory-learner alternative: Pick a time that works for everyone and schedule a 30-minute standing weekly “check-in” call.  This is a win-win for everyone: You don’t have to sift through a massive amount of emails, your team has a guaranteed time to ask questions, keep you updated, and bring up potential roadblocks. Everyone will hear the information and stay on the same page.

Visual Learners

Visual Learners tend to be the opposite of Auditory.

Visual Learners have a preference for seen or observed things, including pictures, diagrams, demonstrations, displays, handouts, films, flip-chart, etc.

They use phrases such as “show me,” and “let’s have a look at that.”

These are people who will work well with either reading instructions or watching someone else perform the exercise first.

At the same time, Visual Learners don’t want to be bogged down with lengthy wordy emails where the main point is hard to decipher.

They’re also not fans of long meetings where the goal or point is lost.

If this resonates with you, then you might find these tips helpful.

  • Ask for examples. Visual Learners as stated like to be “shown” ideas. Ask your writer for an example of previous written pieces to use as a catalyst for conversation. Take a look at the way the draft was written. If you see something that doesn’t work or might be a method that you don’t like – point it out on the initial calls.
  • Carve out time for a longer kick-off meeting. When you have your kick-off meeting with the contract team, carve out a minimum of an hour or more for an initial in-depth discussion. The preference would be a face-to-face meeting in this category, but when this is not possible, an extended phone meeting might do the trick. If the phone doesn’t work for you, and you need to have a more visual experience, try Skype or an online meeting site (think GoToMeeting) to make up for the lack of a visual connection.

  • Use call agendas. Talk with your colleagues and put together a list of questions you’d like to have answered by the contract team when going into the kickoff meeting. You have certain things you’d like accomplished during the meeting and would prefer to keep it high-level. The drafted questions will serve as a guide, and be a visual cue to what needs to be accomplished with the scheduled time.
  • Ask for process maps and at-a-glance schedules. During the meeting, ask for a roadmap or a chart of the project plan. Take into consideration the way you review written information, and create a timeline that includes highlighted keywords or color-coded cues for essential items.
  • Pick the progress report that works best for you. Progress reports on a weekly basis work better for you when they are typed out. Seeing is believing, and processing information in this manner allows you to take in what’s said. Also, don’t hesitate to ask for these notes to be to the point and short. An example would be asking for a report that highlights three items for the week – and have the contractor recap any of the three accomplishments, roadblocks, or action items that are the most important to the project. A short, brief, note will provide a quicker review and revision cycle with your contract team.
  • Suppress the urge to write commentary. Do you feel like your writer missed the mark? It’s ok to write up your comments, but keep in mind  that you’re prone not to provide a lot of detail in written feedback. This can be confusing to your writer if you are trying to convey a lot of complicated concepts at once.  Pick up the phone and give your writer a call. It’s not your preference to chat for long stints of time. But, carve out 15 minutes to go over initial drafts and give feedback. The chat will prove valuable to your writer, and get them back on the right track.

Tactile/Kinesthetic

And finally, there is the Tactile/Kinesthetic Learner.

Tactile/Kinesthetic Learners  are DOERS, and have been known to have a lot of energy.

Hands on experience and real-life activities help these learners remember.

A Kinesthetic Learner will use phrases like, “let me try” or “how do you feel?” and will be able to perform a task by just trying it out.

Think about someone who likes to experiment with a recipe before reading the book. No measurements or suggestions for them. They love for learning to be as experiential as possible.

Is this you? Here’s some tips that might help:

  • Pick the best project management tool. The Kinesthetic/Tactile group is another group where an in-person meeting would probably be preferred, but when meeting in-person, you might lose interest. You prefer to see what you’re doing and jump in to correct things. Try Google Docs to connect if possible, and to manage the project. Google Docs is a living, breathing, version of the document and will allow you to make edits real time. You’ll be able to be apart of the process and as hands-on as needed.

  • Express your vision. Visualization is another strong asset for Kinesthetic/Tactile Learners. Though visualization is normally an internal exercise for you as a person, you can share your vision by drafting a list of what you’d like to see in the document or what you hope to accomplish. Share this with your team, and explain the thought process behind it.
  • Come with examples. Another exercise to “visualize” the project is to show examples or writing samples of projects you like. Don’t just rely on your writer for examples: come armed with your own. You’ve got ideas about what you’d like to see written, and without psychic abilities, your team won’t be sure how to retrieve them. So show examples of what you’d like to see, explain the steps involved, and why it worked for you in the past.
  • Take action, and keep up with progress. Recaps or progress reports for the Kinesthetic/Tactile learner work best when you can take action. Think physically acting things out. You might prefer setting a 15-minute time each week to go down the list with the group, and physically cross items off. Or, you can combine an activity with your review and recap sessions of written pieces. Kinesthetic learners like being physical – studies have shown that combining a physical activity such as jogging on a treadmill or jumping on the elliptical fulfill the need to act out while reviewing. It might help you dig deeper and concentrate to really focus on what’s been accomplished and what still needs to be done.

Not everyone will fit into a neat category when it comes to using your learning style.

And, there is no simple answer on how best to tackle a writing project.

Your own personality traits will also play into a learning style and can impact your interaction with your writing team.  But, using how you learn and work as a guide to communicating the vision for your project is a significant initial step in the right direction.

No one knows YOU, better than YOU.