Recently, we celebrated the publishing of 150 #EvalTuesdayTips! We wrote a blog about our journey, and specifically how the humble #EvalTuesdayTip has enabled a content culture at Khulisa. From this experience, we developed five tips for evaluators, consultancies and other organizations on how to sustain and grow a thought leadership presence:
- Encourage staff to share evaluation resources that they find interesting on an internal communication platform like Yammer or Slack. For us, this was the start of building a thought leadership presence and content culture at Khulisa.
- Turn staff’s internally posted resources into compelling content, by asking them how they applied the specific guideline, or resource in their daily work as evaluators. This in return, leads to more innovative applications of new evaluation methods, tools or technology platforms.
- Develop a thought leadership schedule and ensure that the entire organization is aware of it. Whether this is daily, weekly, every second week, or monthly, having a publication or content schedule, keeps you on track. Our introduction of the weekly #EvalTuesdayTip every single Tuesday propelled us into a more disciplined approach to content creation and sharing.
- Theme your content. Themes help to structure your content. We developed internal themes for our #EvalTuesdayTips such as evaluation methods; data visualization or tools and platforms.
- Recycle your content. In other words, use your existing long-form blogs to develop micro-content for your website and social media. Our #EvalTuesdayTips are short. They usually contain an example of a resource that one of our evaluators found useful, and posted on our internal Yammer channel. However, the short weekly posts later encouraged and inspired staff members to write longer thought leadership pieces about more in-depth evaluation issues. In return, we recycled the long-form content as weekly tips, and created micro-content to keep our social media channels active.