Website text writing: How do you get input from your organization?

Do you know all the ins and outs of your organization? Does anyone really know everything? If you were to answer these questions with a resounding “YES,” that’s great, but in practice, the opposite often proves true. This is quite logical because everyone in an organization has their own specialized knowledge in their field. On the website, all the knowledge and expertise of the organization must come together and be presented as coherent information to the visitor. Therefore, it’s essential that input for website texts comes from across the breadth of the organization. In practice, this often proves to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks because transforming all this knowledge into a coherent piece of text can be a daunting task. In this piece, we’ll discuss the reasons why you might not be getting the input you need and how you can actually get the information you need.

Sometimes it seems like there’s enormous resistance to helping you with something as simple as providing input for your website text. A piece of text that’s about their own department or specialty! What we often forget is that people hide behind unwillingness or other practices because they simply can’t figure it out and don’t want to admit it. Your open request for information, images, or text about their work, specialty, or department causes them a lot of stress. Below are a few reasons why you might not be getting input and therefore can’t write website text:

1. Organizational Blindness: Due to the daily grind, your colleagues may no longer know what makes your organization unique or how they work. They have no idea how special it actually is!
2. Your Colleagues Are Not Writers: You probably have more affinity for writing, but for many of your colleagues, it feels like being back in high school and having to submit an essay for a grade.
3. No Time: Your colleagues probably don’t have extra hours in their week or have enough backlog to use this time productively. This is also sometimes used as an excuse.
4. Fear: Having something in writing, black on white, is very definitive in our culture. If something is in the newspaper, it must be true. Many people are afraid that they’ll write something wrong and it will be used against them by colleagues, competitors, or even the boss.
5. No Common Ground: In practice, we often encounter that different departments have completely different ideas about what makes an organization unique. When you ask for input, you receive information that is actually at odds with each other. That gets you even further from your goal.
6. Open Questions: You ask your colleagues an open question, so they have to come up with what’s important to tell themselves. It’s logical that you get very specialized information or a narrow perspective.

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There are, of course, more reasons why you might not be getting input, but you’ll probably find the most important ones listed here. Now that we know what challenges exist, we can look at solutions.

How to Get the Necessary Information from Your Organization?

There are several ways to get the information you need to write a good website text, but the key questions are: how much time are you willing to invest, and how much time do your colleagues have? Therefore, here are three different examples:

1. Create a Question and Answer Form:
– This is the most cost-effective solution. Formulate clear and specific questions to which your colleagues provide answers. Use these answers as a basis for your text. The downside is that you’ll likely get concise answers, and you won’t be able to dig deeper.

2. Organize a Workshop:
– Bring key figures together for half a day and gather as much input as possible from them. Record the session and incorporate all of this into your texts. It takes more time, but you can delve deeper. An additional benefit is that you promote camaraderie and more organization-wide knowledge, as these key figures get to peek into each other’s kitchen for once.

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3. The Interview Method:
– Take the time to interview each key figure individually. Prepare your questions and knowledge as best as possible to make the most of their (and your) time. During the conversation, you can go into depth, and you can ask probing questions. It takes a lot more of your time, but based on an hour-long conversation, you can sometimes write 10 pages of website text!

Now that you know why it’s difficult to get input from your own organization and how you can make it easier for your colleagues (and yourself), you’ll understand why we always include these activities in our projects. In practice, our clients are always very grateful for this afterward because even with our assistance, this is a time-consuming process. But forewarned is forearmed, so consider the points above, and the whole process will become easier and more enjoyable.