There’s this joke that people tell about Saskatchewan: “Saskatchewan is so flat you can watch your dog run away for three days.” I’m here to tell you that is not entirely true.
Saskatchewan is flat, yes, but the geography of the prairie province is much more diverse than would-be comedians realize. And if you like wilderness, wildlife, and the outdoors, you should consider traveling to its wide-open spaces.
Getting the word out about all that Saskatchewan has to offer is the raison d’être of Tourism Saskatchewan. We were lucky to work with the amazing communications and marketing teams in Regina.
What we did for Tourism Saskatchewan
Our work with Tourism Saskatchewan ran the gamut of content strategy practices.
Our discovery work included audience research, including focus groups, online surveys, and web usability testing. We conducted workshops with staff early in the project to identify existing practices and assessed existing systems.
Tourism Saskatchewan is driven to become a more mature content organization, so we developed tools to support their transition. These included content personas and journeys, audience cards, a taxonomy, content models, and more.
We also provided guidance on building on a content support toolkit, which will be used by content teams going forward.
We also made recommendations to restructure teams to support a “digital first” approach.
Why we loved this project
Tourism Saskatchewan came to this project ready to work. One of the project goals was to work with the staff on the various content strategy solutions so they could learn how to continue moving the content strategy forward long after we were done.
This was one of the most engaged and dedicated team we’ve ever worked with. The energy and enthusiasm they brought with them to workshops and working sessions were instrumental, and is why we firmly believe they will become sector leaders in using content strategy to become better.
What we learned from this project
While content strategy, on some level, is topic agnostic, the realm of tourism and the context of tourism organizations is unique. Working with Tourism Saskatchewan gave us a chance to explore just how the context of an organization can shift the needs of a content strategy.
And it’s one thing to do the work of developing a content strategy, and something else altogether to do that while training and mentoring people to do the work themselves. The adage about having to teach making you better at your job certainly held here; our content strategy skills are better for having worked with the Tourism Saskatchewan staff.
Finally, there is great value in conducting workshops with clients as a discovery process. With Tourism Saskatchewan we spent time together to workshop existing content processes and revealed, to us and to our client, some interesting and profound things. It meant that when we got to collaboratively designing new content processes, everyone had a better understanding of what the new world should look like.
Update: Case study presentation
We were thrilled to co-present with Tourism Saskatchewan‘s Manager of Communications Elizabeth Braitenbach at MARCOM following the completion of the project. Our case study presentation shared CSI’s step-by-step approach to implementing a content strategy with Tourism Saskatchewan, from discovery to solutions. Thanks again to the great people at MARCOM for inviting us!
Check out our presentation to learn how we:
- Engaged and collaborated with Tourism Saskatchewan’s teams
- Moved from fragmented, inconsistent content to strategically targeted content across the customer journey
- Updated their organizational structure to reduce silos
- Created usable tools to support the new content strategy
Lessons learned in Content Strategy, Marcom, May 2017 from Content Strategy Inc.
Thoughts from Tourism Saskatchewan
On impact
“The content strategy provides our organization with a clear vision on changing our approaches to content creation, governance, and organizational structure. CSI clearly outlined the next steps and provided a roadmap for Tourism Saskatchewan to modernize business practices and make effective, long-lasting change.”
“Thank you, thank you, thank you. You took us from the darkness of content confusion into the light!”
On approach
“The highly collaborative and flexible approach taken by CSI really sets them apart from other consultants. The whole project felt more like a partnership with communication every step of the way.”
“CSI is unparalleled in their flexibility. Sometimes activities or tools were added, removed, expanded or reduced, based on the findings discovered throughout the project. It was an organic evolution, which resulted in a truly customized strategy.”
