Well, that was a long project that started out so simply. As the project team was discussing what worked, what didn’t, and what lessons we’ll pay attention to in the future (normal for big things like this), I said that it felt like we pulled a thread that was attached to just about every other piece of public-facing content on the company website.
I’ll back up.
Back in January, I was asked to help write some copy for a small project: a new communications card option for some of our company products. The card added some cool features that weren’t previously available in those products. But, there was a catch: the card was available in seven different products, each of which has its own product webpage, flyer, and other materials.
- SEL-400G Advanced Generator Protection System | Webpage | Flyer
- SEL-401 Protection, Automation, and Control Merging Unit | Webpage | Flyer
- SEL-421 Protection, Automation, and Control System | Webpage | Flyer
- SEL-411L Advanced Line Differential Protection, Automation,
and Control System | Webpage | Flyer - SEL-451 Protection, Automation, and Bay Control System | Webpage | Flyer
- SEL-487B Bus Differential and Breaker Failure Relay | Webpage | Flyer
- SEL-487E Transformer Protection Relay | Webpage | Flyer
So, we thought we’d streamline it: come up with general language that we could drop on each webpage and flyer. Easy peasy!
Unfortunately, the features touched a lot more stuff, and the more we dug into it, the more those two or three paragraphs ended up impacting (and being impacted by) other content that either currently existed or was being developed for other projects.
This small, simple project ended up being huge and complex, but we found some new opportunities to improve processes and some collateral along the way.
Outward Impacts
In addition to impacting the existing materials above, this enhancement impacted some material that’s in development and a few other items. Luckily, I am also the writer on the materials in development, because one of the major features of this enhancement is the availability of a communications protocol on two of the ports, which makes the products especially great to use in modern electrical substations.
As the common copy was being developed, I needed to work between two separate projects—with separate groups of subject-matter experts and approvers—to keep the language consistent around this protocol.
Inward Impacts
Because the enhancements affected substation digitization, existing language around that process (including language developing in other projects) impacted the way these product pages and flyers could talk about benefits and features from this card. Getting the language right meant talking to a variety of subject-matter experts in engineering and sales, and it meant continuing to refine and revise as different subject-matter experts provided new information over the project’s duration.
End Result
At the end of the project, we have a few blocks of common language across more product documents, as well as a social post, an email to customers, a promotional page (unlinked because it’s only meant to live for a few months), and some internal announcements, plus guidance on how to refer to these enhancements (and their benefits) in related projects coming up.
This project also opened some doors for streamlining similar work in the future, which is especially useful, since we found that it would be good to do some larger updates to the product webpages and flyers.
Maybe one of the largest results out of this was a pretty simple reminder to always pay attention to the benefits. At this point, I’ve been so enmeshed in substation modernization and PRP and other benefits from this enhancement that I had some trouble breaking away from features-language! Earlier versions of this language were full of descriptions of the ports, network segregation, protocols, stemming from an unrealized assumption that the target audience would automatically see the benefits from them.
Even after the language was moved into benefits-focused statements, it took a few meetings with different subject-matter experts to correctly order the benefits in a way that highlighted the most important features for our audience, but I walked away with a better understanding of what benefits folks are after in these contexts.
