As a part of their corporate responsibility activities, State Farm launched their Neighborhood of Good program to demonstrate how their agents and employees contribute charitably to the neighborhoods where they live. I designed an editorial system and strategy to foster employee involvement and evangelism.
My role: Content strategist, content design lead.
The situation
State Farm has thousands of employees, and each one is asked to do good work in their own neighborhoods.
The complication
The definition and threshold for good work wasn’t clear for many employees. What qualifies? How do I share the good work that I’ve done? What would inspire me to act?
With channels as diverse as intranets, lobby video reels, and messaging via senior leadership, the situation was quite different than a standard website launch.
The question
How can we raise awareness and increase participation in the program with the limited channels available?
The answer
By developing a comprehensive communications framework, a content strategy and an easy-to-use toolkit for State Farm staff to support the ongoing effort.
The process
State Farm needed a content strategy to support the internal companion to the program, 100 for Good, to raise awareness of it, and increase participation in the program.
- The 100 for Good work operated separately from (but in harmony with) the larger Neighborhood of Good program
- Our remit was to create a set of rigorous editorial tools for client use
- No publicly-accessible assets — all materials would be seen in State Farm physical locations, on intranets, behind logins, and in internal emails
- Limited tracking opportunities to measure success
- Tight timeline due to larger project release dates
The work
We conducted an in-person workshop with subject matter experts to inform persona development:
Created a set of tools that we handed off to content creators, program managers, and leadership to use on day one
Established a content strategy that gives a nod to the quirks of non-web, (and sometimes arcane) digital channels
Developed editorial guidelines to help content creators focus on what they do best
Provided careful instruction on how to use and adapt the tools as needed.
The results
We handed off a series of tools to State Farm:
An Implementation Toolkit driven by the content strategy work
A Content Attribute Framework to help them create content for each of their internal channels
Simple Content Reuse Flows to guide what gets published where in their ecosystem
An Editorial Matrix featuring an asset-by-asset plan to support content creation and publishing
