What is content management?
Content management is about treating content as a key component of service and information delivery. Constituents will read and act on what you publish. They’ll also interact with your content when it appears in search engines and interfaces powered by large language models like ChatGPT.
Your websites, letters, social media posts, etc.:
- Help people accomplish goals--or frustrate them and decrease trust in your organization
- Decrease your staff's administrative burden and help you manage risks. Alternatively, they can increase call center volumes and incomplete applications submissions.
- Reach huge audiences through tools like Google and ChatGPT. When they do, they can provide helpful, accurate information—or the opposite.
This guide is broken into 4 phases. You don’t need to complete each one before moving on to the next. However, each builds on the work of the previous one, and so we recommend beginning them in order.
Each phase also includes simple first steps to take to get started.
Phase 1: Remove the ROT, fix basic issues, and create content governance
This phase is about improvements you can make without knowing anything about constituents’ experiences with your content. We don’t need insights to fix issues like broken links and accessibility problems.
The work in this phase may not seem impressive. However, it can have a transformative effect on your content. In 2025, one organization fixed its redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) content. Negative feedback fell 65%. It also had 33% fewer webpages to manage!
First steps: Run an audit and conduct monthly quality assurance checks
A content audit is a review of everything you’ve published to make sure it’s accurate, relevant, and accessible. If you’ve never run one, you can follow our guide.
Once you’ve cleaned up your content, start running monthly quality assurance (QA) checks. Your teams can do these quickly, in only a few hours per month. We recommend checking for broken links, accessibility issues, and information that's out of date. However, you can adapt the process to your organization’s needs.
Maturing your content governance processes
Most organizations need processes and rules to govern content design and management. Governance helps:
- Prevent authors from publishing redundant content
- Implement and maintain quality controls across your organization
- Everyone use consistent language and ways of addressing your audience
- Maintain a common look and feel across your content
You’ll need to design governance processes to fit your organization. For example, if you communicate through websites and paper letters, you'll need a governance process that covers both print and digital. You may also need a process to coordinate between these channels: If one needs an update, the other might, too.
If you’re feeling more ambitious, you can also begin developing an organization style guide.
Phase 2: Coordinate across channels
Your organization likely publishes in more than one place. You may have information on Mass.gov, send out paper letters, operate another transactional website, and have automated call center responses. Constituents treat these channels as all contributing to their experience—and so should you.
For many organizations, this is an operations challenge. For some organizations, updating a policy might mean updating multiple websites, each managed by separate teams. Call center scripts and letters often point callers to websites, and websites claim that letters will have certain information in it. Keeping all of these channels up to date is both critical and complex.
First steps: Work cross-functionally, not in silos
Here's an authoring process that many state organizations struggle with. 1. One team (or person) creates a document. 2. They send it to another team (or person) to publish it.
This tends to produce bad content experiences. For example, an author may not know much about the people reading the document. If they knew that 50% of the audience was on cell phones, they might’ve produced a shorter document, or a webpage instead of a PDF.
Similarly, the content manager may not be told that eligibility criteria has changed. If they had been, they’d be able to report that several webpages and letters need to be updated.
Better collaboration between the teams that create and manage content can solve these issues. Try creating a cross-functional team to work on your communications. (A cross-functional team is one with different skillsets and expertises.) The team might include content managers, content owners, and other communications staff. It might even include someone who engages frequently with constituents. This collaboration can help produce content that better fits your audience’s needs.
Another key step is to open feedback loops about published information. Invite content owners to revise content as content managers learn how people are using it. (See phases 3 and 4 for more about this.)
Maturing cross-channel coordination
Here are 2 ways that mature organizations address the challenges of cross-channel communications.
- Hire or name an experience owner. This role focuses on how something works and feels for a critical segment of your audience. For example, some government organizations have “applicant” experience owners that envision and improve the process of applying for their services. Managing experiences this way helps you see how a change in one place might require updates elsewhere.
- Have a content strategy team that works across products and channels. Position your communications staff so that they’re not narrowly focused. Instead, task them with overseeing information across your channels. If an experience changes in one place, they need to be able to make updates in another. They should also be skilled in the technologies you use to communicate.
Phase 3: Refine your content design process
Content design is the process of developing content from idea to final published form. A good content design process incorporates and benefits from multiple perspectives:
- Legal and policy requirements
- Business requirements
- Plain language
- Accessibility
- Data about the experience of people who use it
Content work in complex environments also benefits from small, incremental improvements. This helps you publish and refine quickly rather than taking months to get a single document or webpage developed and approved.
First steps: Experience reviews
Experience reviews are fast, flexible, and low-cost ways to test your content. They help you continually improve what you publish. You can also use them to catch issues, iterate, and improve before you release something new.
Start with these 2 methods:
- Scenario walkthrough: You and your team will pretend to be someone who uses your content and “walk through” a common scenario. For example, you might try to complete a form, use a benefits calculator, or learn how to do something. Along the way, you’ll note where you get stuck or what’s confusing.
- Plain language review: Focuses on whether writing communicates information effectively. This includes:
- Helping audiences understand jargon
- Making sentences more efficient
- Improving document design with bullets, better headings, and shorter paragraphs
Phase 4: Use experience data to continuously improve constituents’ experiences
We can't know if our content works without learning from the people who need to use it. Gathering and acting on experience data is critical every state organization.
First steps: Start with data you already have
You may already have experience data about what you’ve published. For example, you can:
- Get feedback about your content from web surveys. (Every Mass.gov page has a feedback form on it by default.)
- Get summaries of common issues from call center staff
- See what people are saying about your organization on social media, such as Reddit
To get started, task a team that publishes information with regularly reviewing, reporting, and acting on experience data that you have. Make this a habit. This guide on analyzing text feedback can help the team get going.
Mature your practice: Test with constituents
You can take your content design even further by conducting testing with real constituents. Testing provides deep insights into constituents’ experiences. Here are some examples of how testing has helped organizations improve what they publish:
- The Dept. of Veterans Affairs conducted usability testing on its form letters. This reduced support calls from 1100 to 200 per month.
- The FCC used testing in redesigning regulations for marine radios on recreational boats. This led to a 70% improvement in readers’ comprehension.
- Testing helped the IRS redesign a form used for reporting income selling a house. The number of people who successfully filled out the form the first time increased from 10% to 55%.
If you need help getting started with testing, request support from the Constituent Experience Center of Excellence.
Staffing
Several roles can help you design excellent content. Not all of them are content writers or managers. This is because content improvement is experience improvement.
You can build expertise in these areas by hiring, retraining, or working with vendors.
- Content strategists (or content designers) create and manage information. They make sure constituents can use your websites, documents, and forms to accomplish their goals.
- Experience researchers help you investigate the experiences of the people you serve. This understanding is critical for how we design and improve government services and products.
- Experience owners focus on how something works and feels for a critical segment of your audience, such as “applicants” or “businesses.” They help you coordinate experiences across products and services.
Read more about other experience design and research roles that might help you improve experiences.
Guidance and resources
Here are some recommended first steps for managing content:
- Conduct an audit of your Mass.gov content
- Clean up your Mass.gov documents
- Begin conducting monthly quality assurance checks
- Collect and analyzing feedback
- Book a consult with a Mass Digital content strategist
- Join Content Lab, a community of practice focused on content strategy