When we think professional writing, one of its most developed fields is that of content management, involving content from social media operations, organizational communication, and more. A management of content necessitates a strategy, and WRD runs – as you can probably already tell – a course specific to that need. If you have ever read a company style guide, employee manual, or engaged with organizing a social media campaign on platforms like Twitter, you have already come into contact with practice of content strategy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WRD 532 offers the chance to gain guided professional experience with content strategy. Led last quarter by Dr. Lisa Dush, the course incorporated a service learning element that partnered students with two nonprofit organizations, UCAN<\/a> and Chicago Peace Fellows<\/a>. Students learned several practices, like competitor analysis and stakeholder research, along with multiple genres and their conventions, like content audits, editorial guidelines, and audience personas. Their time with these practices allowed them to develop professional experiences with theoretical consideration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When asked about their experience in the class, the students offered different viewpoints of the course, particularly because of its connection to SWAN.<\/a> SWAN is a certificate offered jointly by WRD and SPS<\/a> to students from both programs, leading to an overlap between their respective teachers and courses. One such student in WRD 532 was Will McFarland, who is pursuing his Masters in Nonprofit Management and provided an interesting perspective for a student outside of WRD.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis course was different than I expected because of the writing focus of the course,\u201d said Will. \u201cBeing an MNM student, most of the my courses focus more on the management of different areas of an organization, while this course focused specifically on the implementation of writing and strategy.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Will, for his part in the course, worked with UCAN. \u201c\u201dWe partnered with UCAN to collaborate on improvement of their backend content strategy through a content critique and a comprehensive portfolio report that was then shared with UCAN at the end of the quarter.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kerri Martin, a WRD student, worked with CPF to deliver them similar documents. \u201cWe had to develop a strategy from the ground up because they did not have their own website or social media accounts set and only existed in the digital space under their umbrella organization, The Goldin Institute. The biggest challenge in the beginning was figuring out exactly what they needed and what the priorities were because theoretically, they needed everything.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Kerri, a multitude of experiences and skills helped to ensure the project\u2019s success. \u201cWe divided into three groups to work on our three major deliverables – a press kit and release, social media templates and a handbook of guidelines, and a website navigational structure. Fortunately, everyone in the group had certain talents that made the project feasible. Some of us had more of a journalism and media background and others were more experienced with technical writing or graphic design while still others were great at leading and organizing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite the multitude of student histories, students seemed to have walked away with similar rewards for their efforts, from gaining items for their professional portfolios to valuable insight into the field of content management. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThrough this course, I was able to gain insight and understanding into the ways in which content strategy fits into a nonprofit organization,\u201d said Will. \u201cSome specific examples include content metadata, social media templates, and audience identification.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cProfessionally, I gained some great samples to share when applying for future internships, volunteer work or employment,\u201d said Kerri. \u201cI also feel like I can analyze an organization’s content and have a toolkit of methods to analyze how well they are reaching their goals with the content. Personally, I feel more confident I can use what I learned in this class on smaller projects like making a personal website or portfolio but also much larger projects such as helping an organization develop a strategy for their content.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last quarter, Dr. Lisa Dush taught WRD 532 Content Strategy as a part of the SWAN certificate. Read about what students had to say about the course, both inside and outside the department.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":11502,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,471],"tags":[572,562,18,544],"class_list":["post-11501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-courses","category-graduate","tag-courses","tag-graduate","tag-professional-writing","tag-wrd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wrdblog.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wrdblog.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wrdblog.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wrdblog.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wrdblog.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wrdblog.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11501\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wrdblog.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wrdblog.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wrdblog.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wrdblog.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}