You're collaborating with freelancers for content creation. How do you ensure a consistent tone and message?

Share your brand and content guidelines with all your agencies and freelancers. This ensures they are aligned to your content framework. The more detailed they are, the better it is for seamless teamwork and collaboration. It’s also helpful to familiarize your freelance community with prior articles on the subject or theme on which you want them to work on. As content teams are generally not large, freelancers become an extended part of the team for many organizations. It’s important to build a professional relationship based on mutual respect, make them feel part of your team and establish a relationship that is strategic, and not merely transactional. And keep giving them feedback no matter how trivial. Content is an iterative process.

A style guide is nice, but also lazy and an abdication of your responsibility to whomever it is that you're creating content. No style guide can replace having creators hear those guidelines in your own words, complete with vivid examples. Any project lead who defers to the style guide should prepare themselves for disappointment and needless additional work.

To ensure consistent tone and message with freelancers, I: Provide a Detailed Style Guide: Outline tone, voice, and key messages. Brief Thoroughly: Share project goals, audience, and requirements. Use Examples: Offer samples of desired content. Maintain Communication: Address questions and provide ongoing feedback. Review and Edit: Ensure content aligns with brand standards. Give Feedback: Help freelancers adjust to improve consistency. This approach keeps content aligned with the brand’s tone and message.

There are briefs that are little more than details, and then there are briefs that tell a story. The latter is better - it ignites your creator's imagination, triggers the mirror neurons in their brain that they need to imagine themselves as the content consumer and ask "what would I want in this moment"? To do this, you need more than itemized list of who's it for, what you should say and shouldn't say...you need to interpret what those details mean, and then bring that story alive. Content creators are just like your audience - they're provoked by the imagination. They more you can do that, the better the content will be. More than that, they may come up with amazing things that didn't occur to you.

This is one of those categories that seems so obvious it's a surprise to find it here, but on the other hand I've had lots of clients who check out of a project, come back and realize they had a completely different expectation of the work and didn't express it. So yes, regular check-ins are crucial, but not just to see if your creators are following the brief, but if they're evolving the brief in some way. It's as important for you to pivot as it is for them.

Even if a team of people are helping generate freelance content, a consistent voice needs to oversee it so that the output is on brand and on message. Otherwise, you run the risk of the final output(s) being sloppy and inconsistent in quality.

I use blended learning for flexibility, microlearning for bite-sized knowledge, and adaptive learning to tailor training to individual needs. Gamification keeps it engaging, and an LMS helps track progress. Addressing learners' specific requirements ensures that training is relevant and effective, while Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Evaluation helps measure and refine our approach.