City Year
City Year: Content Strategy
Created as a Freelance Strategist with the Boston based agency, Connelly Partners.
Challenge
City Year engaged Connelly Partners to reimagine the purpose and manifesto of the brand. This effort delivered a singular brand purpose that needed to be infused into the website and major engagement channels such as social, recruitment efforts, and donor engagement.
The brand purpose, pillars, tone and personality needed to be customized to each audience type: Students, Parents, Education Executives, and Donors. The challenge is keeping the story consistent while being relevant to the audience who have different intents and goals when engaging City Year.
Solution
As the Content Strategist, I worked closely with the Experience Design and Brand team to provide a set of recommendations on how to structure content for the new website reaching a global audience, creating content with a purpose, and ensuring it meets the intents of site visitors. These came to life in a set of frameworks, content guides, and templates. The recommendations guided the redesign of the website, content creation, and had impact on owned/operated channel executions making City Year’s digital presence more effective in meeting organizational needs.
Insights
“Leaders of social movements inspire the curiosity to develop an understanding of cultural issues, sparking ideas on how to get involved to create change. ”
“Making a difference in today’s school system is challenging and requires resilience to sustain education and social impact.”
“Contribution solicitations are a competitive landscape requiring City Year to show innovative and different uses of dollars to create social impact.”
Framework to show how the insights would be used throughout the content creation.
Approaches and Frameworks
Objectives and which audience to target to achieve the goal.
Establishing principles, tactics, and metrics.
The City Year Content Playbook included a series of guidelines and frameworks to govern consistent content creation. Multiple teams from Marketing, Donor Relations, and individual cities creating their own content.
