(Update: Signing is now closed. Thank you to all who have signed, translated, volunteered, created, and supported!)

It has been just over a year since the Content Design Manifesto was created, published, and launched into the world.

In that time, it has been signed by more than 1180 people around the world and translated into 28 languages. All of this has been made possible by amazing volunteers.

Among those volunteers, there has been a small group of people who wanted to be involved in the Manifesto’s next chapter, whatever that was. This has been a 💖wonderful💖 group. Their contributions–which include adding signatures and translations to the website, and envisioning possible futures for it–have been so very valuable.

This group has faced three big challenges over this past year:

First, the problems that the current Manifesto has (how signatures are manually maintained, the website architecture, and a few people unhappy with how AI and sustainability are included in the Manifesto) haven’t been big or urgent enough problems to drive action. That’s both comforting and frustrating; it’s good the problems are small, but not good that we weren’t able to get the required traction such changes would require.

Second, meaningful activity on this kind of community statement can’t be carried forward authentically by just one or few people. Any one of us could rewrite sections of the manifesto, but it would be inauthentic without representing the wide range of perspectives of people who have co-signed the work.

Third, while we could collect the wide range of perspectives mentioned above, we don’t have the person-power or hours to enact the feedback we could collect from the world-wide audience of signers.

So, here’s what the future looks like for the Manifesto:

• A durable, static document. Going forward, the manifesto will be kept on http://thisiscontent.design just as it has been, representative of its moment in time.
• Signing will be closed. If you kept meaning to sign (or you’re just finding out about it today!) now is the time. The signing form is open until May 14, 2024.
• Translations? If you feel strongly that the manifesto should be available in its 29th language or more, reach out to Torrey directly to discuss what you have in mind.

The Content Design Manifesto has many truths that will continue to resonate far into the future, and some that will fade with the passage of time. That’s OK! Those of us who got to be part of it will hopefully treasure this experience, learn from it, and even brag about it appropriately.

If there’s some idea you wish it included, please consider it a launchpad! 🚀 Be the future manifesto-writer and changemaker you want to see in the world, and reference the Content Design Manifesto however you want. 💪

The Content Design Manifesto is a durable resource was originally published in This Is Content Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Update, 7:15pm PT 1/18: Automation fixed, and corrections sent! More reports are being sent now, and they’ll probably be sent throughout tomorrow (it takes about a minute of processing for each one.)

Update, 3pm PT 1/18: There’s a snag in the automation, which I caught after about 20% of the reports were sent. I’m working to fix the problem, and will send out corrections and restart sending reports soon!

As I wrote when I launched the survey: I’m very serious about making sure that everybody who creates experiences knows about the impacts we can make with content design skills. These personalized reports are one piece of that puzzle. I’m looking forward to helping people advocate for the impacts they can make in their products, their careers, and their workplaces.

What’s inside the reports

• Skills summary: A bar chart shows how your skills are distributed across categories of skills. These categories are content methods, content systems, design methods, design systems, leadership, and research. Each bar is 100% of the skills in that category, with color gradations that show how comfortable you reported being with those skills.
• Impact summary: A radar chart displays how the impacts you can make with your skills are distributed among categories of impact, including financial, product, productivity, regulatory, user, and enhancer impacts. If you reported a comfort level of 4 or above for a skill, you got maximum impact points for it.
• Skills that differentiate you: These are the 5 skills that you reported the greatest comfort with, especially as compared to survey-takers with the same years of experience that you have.
• Skills to learn or practice: These are the 5 skills that could add the most potential impacts to your skill set. This list doesn’t compare you to other content designers, just to the potential impacts for individual skills that you reported lower comfort with using.
• What to do next: Concrete reflection, exploration, and steps to take action.

In addition to the above, each of the ten skills that are called out specifically for you is described with the conditions for using the skill, conditions for success with it, and impacts to focus on making with that skill. Early interviews told me that this was the most valuable part of the report, for them. And I hope that continues to hold true for report recipients! Writing these up was by far the most labor intensive part of this project so far. 😅

Reports on their way

The survey opened with an announcement that anybody who took the survey before January 16, 2024 would get a free report. That means that 778 respondents are getting free reports sent to their email addresses. Holy mackerel! If you see this article, but haven’t seen your report yet, please hang on–it’s on its way. Even with automation, each one takes a few moments of processing time at the rate I can afford to pay, so they’re going to be sent one by one, all day long.

People who took (or have yet to take) the survey after the cut-off date can still get reports, too. To get a report based on your responses, buy one on the Catbird Content website after taking the survey.

Next steps

If you’re looking for resources to help build a specific skill, check out the new Resources page on CatbirdContent.com. There’s also a link there to recommend additions to the resources list.

For people who have already received their reports and want to dive deeper into what it means for them, workshops are available! If you lead a team and want consulting or a custom workshop for that team around these skills, please contact us.

Many people are also waiting to hear about the worldwide, aggregate results! Insights from that analysis will be revealed in a Button party on February 27 at 7:00am PT. More details coming soon, check www.buttonconf.com for details!

Available now: Content Design Skills Reports was originally published in Catbird Content on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Who should take it?

People who are content designers or people studying content design who want to assess their familiarity and comfort with more than 90 different skills.

If that’s you, taking the survey is free of charge. The skills are large and small, covering skills in content, design, research, leadership, AI, and adjacent methods and systems. All of them are used in some content design roles, and a few of them are used in every content design role that I know of.

Survey takers get three big outcomes:

1. Your survey experience as a tool to think holistically about your content design skills, celebrate those skills, and think about which skills you might want to pursue building.
2. Input into a worldwide analysis of the state of content design skills, based on anonymized and aggregated survey data.
3. You become eligible for:
   Your personalized skills report (available late Jan 2024): Your top 5 differentiating skills, the business impacts you could focus on making with those skills, and skills you could consider building to increase your impact. (Bonus: If you take the survey before January 16, you’ll automatically get a personalized skills report for FREE.)
   Group and/or individual coaching (available late Jan 2024) based on your content design skills report and survey responses. (Session information and sliding-scale fees to be announced in January 2024.)

So… it’s just a list of skills?

I started with just a list of skills, thanks to the leaders and attendees at Button 2023. And then it grew: I ran a beta survey in October to test my assumptions, and conducted user research with survey takers to learn more. This v1 survey follows up on that analysis, which means I’ve clarified some skills and added a few more.

I’ve also worked to articulate each skill: the impacts it can make, the contexts in which the skill is useful, and the scope and authority a content designer needs to use the skill successfully.

That’s what I’m hoping to make useful to survey takers, and to design teams who want to be using content design skills to meet business goals.

Here’s how it breaks down:

In the survey, there’s the skill name, definition, and example statement for each skill.

In the individual skill reports, there’s the names, definitions, and examples of the person’s top 5 strengths and top 5 skills to build, plus:

• Descriptions of a business impacts a content designer could make with each of those skills
• Contexts in which an organizations can make use of each of those skills
• Scope and authority required for the content designer trying to use each of those skills
• Resources to learn about and/or get training in each of those skills (still gathering these! If you provide a resource, I’d love to know about it. Suggest resources here.)

In an aggregate report about the state of content design, I’m planning to report:

• Where content designers come from (geographically, and from diverse disciplines)
• How long we’ve been practicing content design
• The skills we most commonly use
• The impacts we’re more commonly poised to make
• … and more 😁

The bottom line

I’m very serious about making sure that everybody who creates experiences knows about the impacts we can make with content design skills. This project is one framework for that, and I’m looking forward to helping people using these tools to advocate for impacts in their products, their careers, and their workplaces.

I want to:

• Help content designers evaluate what skills would help build toward their career goals, by using the experience of taking the survey, and optionally receiving the report and signing up for coaching. I want content design to keep becoming the vibrant career path it could be, with designers like me getting paid to meet business goals and help users have better experiences.
• Help design team leadership connect their teams’ skills to their business goals, with custom surveys, reports, and consulting based on their teams’ skills and the impacts they can make. I want design leaders to keep growing in their understanding of what content designers do and can accomplish for their teams and their business.
• Position Catbird Content as a thought leader in meeting business goals with content design skills. I want to keep growing Catbird Content as a business; it’s only been a few months, and we still have a long way to grow. 🐦

Happy surveying! If you have questions for me, or want to learn more about assessing the content design skills of your UX team (whether or not you work with content designers!), please reach out to me at torrey@catbirdcontent.com.

Now Open: The 2024 Content Design Skills Survey was originally published in Catbird Content on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I started this project because I thought it would be most useful for folks to assess their experience with using a wide variety of content design (and adjacent) skills, to see where they might want to expand their toolset.

Also, I’m interested in reporting “what impact can I make with these skills?” This isn’t like our creative hobbies — this is the skillset we get paid to use. So why do organizations pay us for these skills? What skills can a person build to get paid more for them?

People want to be measured against others

I was surprised to realize that many people took the survey to answer some version of the question, “Am I good enough?” And I just want to give you all big hugs. You were born good enough.

We all have different strengths, and every single one of these content design skills can be learned.

Some of these content design skills require opportunities at work to learn, and some can be learned in classes or workshops. All of them are possible for you, and not all of them are necessary for your organization.

We lead from wherever we are

I designed the scale to self-report expertise thinking about the progression of how surgeons learn surgery: see one, do one, teach one. That is, that we wouldn’t teach it until we’re already capable of it — which seems logical! But I made a mistake when I broke up “do” into levels like “not comfortably” and “expert.”

I had put “led others to do” and “taught others to do” above “expert” in my scale, which skewed some results.

The problem is, we’re not always experts when we’re called on to teach. Within a team or organization, we may be the most qualified person in the room. Within a growing discipline, we may be simply making stuff up, hoping that it will work! To fix this in future versions of the survey, I’ll probably separate teaching and leading into separate questions, independent of individual skills.

Of course I missed some skills

The original beta survey asked about 87 different skills. But I did miss some, and will be adding a few more to the future version! Highlights include more content operations skills like ticket-tracking (Jira, etc.), and creative skills like peer critique, collaboration, and influencing across systems.

In addition, a few survey-takers pointed out that not all skills were at the same level of specificity — some were very broad, and others very narrowly defined. This is valid and helpful feedback, and I’ll be working to refine those definitions before opening the survey again.

I do want to note: I think it’s appropriate to have variety of specificity vs. breadth in some cases. For example, some skills that are adjacent to content design are done in different ways (or to different extents) by content designers. It doesn’t make sense to describe all of those skills in greater detail, when they are already adjacent skills to content design.

Survey analysis is its own skill

I’ve worked on designing far more surveys than I’ve been in charge of analyzing. My analysis skills are rusty, and this is a LOT of data! I’m lucky that I’ve worked with so many excellent researchers, and have people I can call for help. But really, that gets me back to the original purpose of this survey: for people to find the places they can grow their skillset. My research skills are definitely getting stronger!

Next steps for this project

For some of the initial survey takers, I’m creating individual reports that answer questions like: What are my top skills? What core Content Design skills might I want to build? What business impacts am I most poised to make? I’ll be setting up interviews to review initial reports with some survey takers, so that I can improve both the survey and reports.

I’ve also heard a huge amount of interest from folks to report out the wider “state of skills,” separate from individual reports. To do this, I’ll need to open up the survey again, and get a lot more respondents! Before I do that, I need to improving the survey questions and response options so that I can make a report I feel confident about.

If you want to take the survey in the future, or want to get in touch about this project, sign up for my newsletter.

Why I’m doing this

I started this project for two main reasons: (1) to provide a way for content designers and leaders of design teams to evaluate their skills against their business and career goals, and (2) to position Catbird Content as a thought leader in meeting business goals with content design skills

My hopes are that (1) Individual content design reports are useful tools for content designers and people who are curious about doing content design, (2) Team content design reports are useful tools for design and product teams who want to foster career development and solve business problems, and (3) Catbird Content attracts business to provide training, coaching, and content design development for businesses who want to develop and/or leverage these skills.

I want to be clear: My business (and my career!) exist because we content designers have a vibrant, growing, valuable community of practice. I’m doing this not only because I have a lot of love for this discipline and the people in it, but because I want us all to keep paying our housing and health insurance bills.

If you or your organization are also providing content design skill development services, like classes, coaching, or mentoring, I’m happy to promote your offerings to survey takers. Please reach out to chat about partnering.

Beta test: Content Design Skills Survey was originally published in Catbird Content on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

UX content makes, saves, and protects the organization’s money, while serving the people who use the experience. Unfortunately, the vast majority of product designers have no training in writing for user experience (UX). In training (and in my book), I teach designers how to troubleshoot designs and improve their effectiveness using research-backed guidelines for usability, brand voice, and starter strings for most occasions.

Designers who write (and know when not to)

When designers know how to write in the user experience (UX), they leverage their customers’ language in their designs. Their designs are more effective, and faster to improve, because they’re applying a system of content-focused usability guidelines.

I don’t teach UX designers to replace content designers. Instead, I help them recognize when the problem they’re facing needs specialist help. Just as writers should learn the basic tools of prominence and visual emphasis, designers should learn the basic tools of language — and both groups need to be able to recognize when their skills aren’t able to meet the need.

To understand why people would spend time and money learning content design, it helps to know why they’d use it: “The words aren’t working.”

What content design problems look like

There’s a spike in (expensive!) support calls: customers don’t think they can just use the new feature.

The “easy” solution to a new regulatory demand was to add an interrupting disclosure to the conversion flow — which has caused a massive drop in revenue.

The new, hotly-anticipated feature needs to appear in the main navigation, but the right label for it is already in use.

Customers just aren’t clicking the prominent, well-designed button.

Each of these are content design problems: that is, they are interaction design problems that need solutions from a content perspective. They require deep thinking about the language, images, and icons in use, where they appear, and how customers, regulators, internal stakeholders, and others will understand that content. Solving these problems requires thinking about the systems that already exist, whether it’s similar concepts or even similar-sounding words. It also requires innovating new solutions, using language or images that build confidence, understanding, and trust.

These are problems that can cost companies hundreds of millions of dollars if they aren’t solved, whether in lost revenue, support costs, or subsequent litigation. That’s why it’s cost effective to invest in the content, and in people who can anticipate problems like these.

One of the fastest investments to pay off is to train designers (and product owners) to spot where these problems might arise, and point them in the right direction to solve them.

What content training looks like

In my workshops and classes, I start with a definition of what UX content is, and how it’s different from other content. This grounds us in “content for doing” — the core purpose of UX content, and how it meets business and customer needs.

I provide a framework for content usability, including specific criteria to make the content accessible, purposeful, concise, conversational, and clear. For example, keeping descriptive text limited to a width of 50 characters, and no more than 3 lines deep. Just knowing these “rules” helps a designer spot where their design might be in trouble.

Participants get hands-on practice analyzing UX content for usability with this framework. We work iteratively, collaboratively, to reflect on improvements and inspire new paths forward.

We use a practical framework to define brand voice, including guidance for concepts, vocabulary, verbosity, syntax, punctuation, and capitalization (when appropriate for that language.) These are meant to align to the principles of the product itself: what the product is meant to be to the people who use it.

Participants improve on the newly-usable content to make it recognizably part of that brand, making it come to life. By comparing rewrites created for different brand voices, people get to experience the power of language to convey the product principles.

In the longer UX writing classes I teach, we have opportunities for research, information architecture, conversational methods of design, and more. But even in shorter workshops (like this one starting October 4!) people walk away with a new toolkit of UX capabilities, ready to apply these frameworks to their own products.

Why I train designers to write was originally published in Catbird Content on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Every part of a user experience (UX), whether it’s software or in physical space, uses content. Words are how people know where to go. They’re how people know what to do next. It’s what they recognize when they come back the next time. In regulated industries, the language requires even more scrutiny to avoid steep fines and deep legal trouble.

There are some people who think “but we can all write (or AI can write for us), so why would we pay for it?”

And then there are people who know “Sure, I can stack bricks. But I’ll hire a mason to build a house I want to live in.” (Thanks to Scott Kubie for the bricklayer analogy.)

This second group knows to hire UX content experts like Catbird Content. They know that AI can’t provide the judgment to negotiate new situations by itself. They know that they need to consider not only the words, but the decisions that make up the system of words, for example, choosing to optimize for scanning or skimming, or the use of plosives.

Content designers aren’t just dusting the content, they’re improving business outcomes.

So how and who do you hire? That’s where Catbird Content comes in.

External vs. in-house

Should you hire an employee to design UX content for your company? Quite possibly: In-house content designers can own the projects, the impacts, and the outcomes, betting their career success on the business and their product success. It provides stability for the company, and grows an investment in that employee’s skills as that talent grows.

But maybe you don’t have the budget for a new hire right now. Or perhaps you have a unique, short-term need (like meeting new regulations, or a short-term experiment), and you don’t know that there will be enough work for them in 6 months.

Or perhaps you don’t know that you can support a content designer as an employee, helping them happily grow their careers.

Maybe you already have in-house content designers, and they’re already overstretched.

Or perhaps you have a new project that’s so experimental, it could fail spectacularly. For somebody in-house, that might delay their next promotion by years. For a freelancer or agency, it still pays the bills and can be used as evidence of experimentation and innovation.

There are good times to use every kind of talent tool in your toolbox. Catbird Content was born out of my (Torrey Podmajersky’s) experiences in big tech and startups. Inside these companies, I had the opportunity to work as and with in-house, agency, vendor, temp, and contractor talent.

If you are looking for your first in-house content designers, we can help with that. We provide hiring consulting services, including building the business case for headcount, job descriptions, portfolio review, interview support, and mentoring.

Agency vs. Freelance

The way we see it, the differences are security and simplicity.

There’s fantastic freelance talent out there with great business practices and high quality output. When you hire a freelancer, you might be hiring (in your mind) temp-to-hire, and get a “taste” of what it’s like before you commit to each other in an employee relationship. You might be hiring somebody you love working with already. Way to go! We’re cheering you on!

But that’s one person, and lots of things can happen with that one person. They can have terrible things or wonderful things happen to them, suddenly and without warning. For example, if they suddenly inherit $3B with the condition that they never work again, they suddenly aren’t available to meet your needs. You’re at square one.

(This unrealistic example brought to you by not wishing natural or personal disasters on anybody, much less our favorite freelancers.)

With an agency, you have a relationship with a bigger entity. More people are available to step in, because the agency is working to meet its obligations beyond the capacity of one person. Catbird Content has my small team plus a network of sub-contractors (we love freelancers!) we vet and organize. If one person can’t make it — even if that person is me (Torrey)! — somebody else will be ready to step in with a minimum of fuss.

With any good agency, you get the security and ease of working with an organizational commitment that goes above and beyond a personal commitment.

With a great agency, the network of talent can call in ad-hoc skillsets, advice, business support, and benefit from the camaraderie of fellow-travelers.

Catbird Content strives to be a great agency.

Work with Catbird Content

If you need your user experience to convert users into paying customers, to meet their needs, to increase engagement or adoption, to reduce your costs or liability, or to be more recognizable among your competitors, give us a call.

I can be so confident in the work we do because my work and the teams I’ve led at major companies and startups have made and saved hundreds of millions of dollars across multiple verticals: advertising, customer engagement, platform, education, gaming, consumer marketplace, privacy, and more.

Also: I wrote the book. I speak and teach in various institutions, and Strategic Writing for UX is used as a textbook in many more. My students have gone on to UX content careers at Google, Microsoft, CrowdStrike, Cisco, and more. My workshops are highly rated and fill up fast.

Whether you want us to do the work, or hire, train, or mentor your team to do the work, reach us by email, phone, website form, or set up a meeting. I’m happy to talk with you about what you need, and whether we might be right for you.

Why choose Catbird Content? was originally published in Catbird Content on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Once I decided to start a dedicated UX content agency, I was looking for a name. Getting to Catbird Content was a journey that started with my 2018 book, Strategic Writing for UX.

O’Reilly authors don’t choose their book cover animal.

Before my contract with O’Reilly was formalized, I was already thinking about the book cover.

The animals on O’Reilly covers are iconic. They’re how the reader recognizes the book. They don’t use the same animal on two different covers. Everyone I knew was asking me: “What’s your animal going to be?”

The thing is, the decision of the book cover design is entirely up to the publisher. It’s not something the author can even formally request — but what authors can do is make an argument, with supporting evidence. (And we can check animals.oreilly.com to see what animals are already taken.)

My argument: Catbirds are like great UX writing.

Just like great UX writing, the catbird is ubiquitous in its ecosystem. Once you start paying attention to it, you see it all around you. There are several messages on every door you walk through. There are frequently more than a hundred words on app screens. It feels lightweight, familiar, and like something would be missing without its familiar-yet-unstudied song.

Just like great UX writing, the catbird isn’t flashy. It’s not seeking attention like a peacock — it avoids the hook of a marketing tagline. It’s not predatory like a raptor, promising to detach you from your money like the fine print of a sales contract. Until you’re looking for it, it blends in. It’s easy to ignore until you need it.

Just like great UX writing, the catbird mimics the sounds of its environment. Catbirds include parts of other birds’ songs in their own if they think it’ll work better for them. Content designers do the same: Even if it’s not a phrase they would normally use, they know that UX content is most effective when it’s using the words that are already in its users’ minds. One of the most effective ways to improve UX content is to conduct research to find out what those words are.

When it came time to find a name for my UX content agency, one of my friends recalled my reasoning and suggested Catbird Content. I was stunned with its immediate appeal to me — but I thought I was biased. So I did some research to validate, and here we are.

Sitting in the Catbird seat

According to the American idiom, someone who is sitting in the catbird seat has an enviable advantage. They might even be a little smug, because they know they have the upper hand, that they’re ideally situated.

That’s what I want for Catbird Content clients: to know that they have the best possible UX content strategy, confident they’ll meet or exceed their business goals. Even a little smug.

What Catbird Content does for our clients might not be flashy, or predatory, or take up bothersome space in their users’ brains. But we can improve customer adoption, engagement, and retention through excellent UX and content strategy. That’s enough to be smug about, right there.

What’s in a name: Catbird Content was originally published in Catbird Content on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The short history: A wild idea

I had been invited to a gathering of content design leaders (itself an experiment!) Like the first Content Strategy Consortium in 2009, attendees were asked to bring something useful to share: an idea, a process, whatever. The door was wide open.

As the group discussed what they were bringing, I thought about the October 1927 Fifth Solvay International Conference on Electrons and Photons. At that conference, the top physicists of the time met there, discussed their biggest ideas, and wrestled their ideas against each other. In doing so, they sparked advancements realized in most of today’s modern technologies.

For the gathering of content design leaders, I thought about the amazing people who I’d be joining. I knew a few of them. I admired all of them. I imagined their experiences, the wisdom they’d gained, and their frustrations, joys, and insights. What could be the most amazing crystallization of the time we content design leaders spent together?

If this group could develop a single, concise definition of what it is we call “content design” –even if we never shared it–it would help us identify where we agreed and where we had shared places to explore and define.

So I tossed out to the group that I’d be happy to lead the collaborative writing of a manifesto.

A manifesto is a document intended to make manifest a set of ideas. By naming and defining an idea, the manifesto conjures that new thing to solidly stake its own spot in peoples’ common ground for discussion, disagreement, belief, or rejection.

Some famous manifestos include The Communist Manifesto and The Agile Manifesto. Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses was a manifesto, even without that word in its title. Before their manifestos, the ideas existed, but weren’t tangible enough to matter. Because they made those ideas manifest, they helped to change societies, industries, and religions.

Content Design, in my opinion, could use the solidity of an agreed-upon definition. And to get it right, we’d have to do it together–and that’s the collaborative writing part.

Collaborative writing

Collaborative writing may be my favorite way to write. It’s also the most difficult: technically, intellectually, and emotionally. For most people–even content pros–it’s unfamiliar territory. It requires trust, a commitment to optimism, and the guts to object. It requires facilitation.

I had already stood up to facilitate. At the beginning of the first day of our gathering, after we had done our introductions, I asked these five questions:

1. Who is this group of people, in your own words?
2. What is the context in which this group of people makes sense?
3. What do you wish other people understood about us?
4. What are the top 3 things you hope are universally true about us?
5. How and where would you expect to hear about this manifesto?

I passed around large sheets of paper to collect their answers, written on post-it notes. Then I moved the papers to the side of the room, and we went on to the rest of that day’s presentations.

The next morning I created an initial draft by filling a generic manifesto framework with language from the post-it notes.

We returned to the manifesto late on the second (and final) day. We started by reading each of them out loud, the way their suggestions came together in the very first draft.

Already there were faces of surprise, comfort, discomfort, and curiosity. Good. I told them it was fair to say “But this one shouldn’t even exist” or “We’ve gotten this all wrong” or “But we really need another one…”

People worked all at once, in the same Google Doc. Another person played music to keep us going. When we were done working, we read the new versions out loud to each other.

My intention was to finalize the text, and dramatically gavel out our decisions–but that was not to be.

Instead, one person called out: “What about thisiscontent.design”? We cheered. They bought the domain name.

Two months and a lot of feedback later, the Content Design Manifesto has been translated by volunteers into 17 languages, and has been signed by almost 900 people. It’s a manual process, and all volunteer-driven. So far, I’m the one checking a spreadsheet and adding names to the website.

This isn’t sustainable. To make a future, we need the same things that any discipline needs: resiliency, transparency, authenticity, governance, responsibility to the people who create the practice.

We need maintenance. We need governance. We were a small group that created the original text. We have since had more volunteer translators than original authors, and have a Slack community to gather and discuss.

The future: Volunteer for Stewardship

I have a few core assumptions about the group of people needed to maintain this effort: Besides being volunteers who work interdependently, we require diversity of region, language, background, and more. The diversity of the group will have a direct impact on the Manifesto’s ability to reflect our changing discipline within our changing world.

As a set of design principles, I believe:

• The Content Design Manifesto needs a resilient system to keep it relevant, accurate, and maintained as so many dimensions of our world change.
• To be resilient, a community needs people to have authority in balance with their responsibilities, building on a foundation of respect for individuals while deliberately creating interdependence among them.
• And finally, it requires accountability and transparency, so that all signers of the document are made aware of changes that might be made.

What this means in practice is to have groups of people taking roles that are designed to balance authority with responsibility. These groups will decide the text of the manifesto, how it’s delivered, and how to include the community. They will self-organize, maintain communications about the manifesto, and continue to hold the manifesto true to its purpose.

The individuals may come and go, but the groups will maintain themselves. These groups are the boards of stewards to manage the Content Design Manifesto.

Stewards on these boards will take responsibility to guide the document through future iterations. They will commit to discussing the manifesto periodically and executing its maintenance. Eventually, they may decide if and when the Manifesto is no longer necessary.

In the future, I hope the manifesto will continue to be available to the public, and updated thoughtfully with input from the community. I hope any changes will be visible to anybody who wants to investigate (through, for example, a change log), and will be proactively communicated.

I also hope that someday, the manifesto won’t be needed as a living document. The discipline will be well understood, or grow into changes we can’t yet predict. The people responsible for it will decide to stop updating it, stop taking suggestions, and choose how to retire it.

If you’re interested in volunteering, use this form to indicate your interest. I’ll be setting up open meetings to provide more information, take questions, and gather feedback. Sign up for the Content Design Manifesto Slack if you’re interested in discussing or getting links to those meetings, even without volunteering.

My ballot used to make me feel like I was taking a final exam for a class I never attended. It starts with a few tricky yes-or-no questions that I have no context for. Then, a bunch of multiple-choice questions where all the answers are people I’ve never heard of. What a nightmare!

There’s a way to do your civic duty and have fun at the same time.

While tests were never fun, the study groups were. To do homework and prepare for tests, we met up in groups, shared snacks and joked. We helped each other get motivated, beat back procrastination, and succeed.

Now I get the same benefits from a voting party.

Just like the study group, everybody does their own work, people only share what they want, and nobody has to agree. By doing it together, the process of voting is easier — and much more fun.

I send an email a few weeks ahead of Voting Day to suggest a date. The evening itself is easy: We gather at the appointed hour, then eat dinner.

After clearing the food, everybody takes out their ballots, political flyers, voters’ guides, and black pens. Then we decide the most important thing: How far do we have to get before we can have dessert?

The differences between neighborhoods, counties, and cities come together at our dining table, as none of our friends live in exactly our neighborhood. Our ballots differ as they get more local, but the conversations about what’s good for our county, district, region, and schools are still valuable.

We end the night with a pile of flyers and newspapers to recycle, and ballots ready to go to the voting boxes.

If you want to have a voting party, there’s only a few things to do:

1. Invite people whose opinions you value.
   Keep the list smaller than 10 people, total. More than that takes too long for discussion, or breaks the group into smaller groups that are hard to keep on the same page.

Will you come to my voting party? I value your thinking.

1. No voting until you’ve eaten together.
   This is important! Sharing a meal brings human hearts together more than any cajoling or rule-setting. Go potluck, or make or order food that everybody can eat. In different years, we’ve served spaghetti, taco bar, rice bowl, and Chinese take-out.

Could you bring a side dish?

1. Discussion is fair game, and nobody can tell each other how to vote.
   Start with federal contests and then move to the local level, so you’ll get in the groove with the big juicy contests that more people will know about. Read passages out loud to each other from voting guides, flyers, newspapers, the Internet, and more. People make their decisions, and don’t have to share.

This is a voting party, not a political party. Bring your ballot, not your campaign!

Anyone who doesn’t have a mail-in ballot can check what their ballots will look like using Ballotpedia or Vote411. Each person can make notes, then go to the polling station armed with their decisions.

By the end of the evening, voting won’t feel like a chore. Instead, it’s an event you and your friends will look forward to each year. Cheers!

Walking in to a job interview with all the confidence in the world is like putting money in the bank. Just by showing up with confidence — shoulders relaxed, eager smile, powerful stride — you’ve got a higher chance of getting that job.

And not just job interviews. Confidence helps in court, in the classroom, in healthy outcomes for patients, and more.

I came up with this model after a friend congratulated me on sending a risky email. I laughed, telling him that I’m frequently terrified, and had lost a lot of sleep about that mail.

He said, shocked, “But you’re the most confident person I know!”

What he was seeing looked like confidence, but was actually energy-draining brain-racing tummy-hurting teeth-clenching courage on the inside.

So where do we get confidence? Why do some people have more than others? Why isn’t it fair?

This model is based on the idea that confidence and courage are related things we can spend, invest, and run out of.

If confidence is cash, then courage is credit

So what if confidence really is like having money in a bank? If you had plenty of confidence, you’d know you’re fine to walk in to any risky situation, knowing that you can do exactly what you want, up to the limit in your confidence account.

I’ve been at the point where I didn’t have enough money in the bank to buy food. I was fortunate enough to have credit to misspend, so I could buy some eggs and discount mac-n-cheese to make without milk — it was too expensive.

The costs of having to spend credit go beyond the financial cost. It’s also the mental energy required to track the exact amount of money available, the emotional toll of disappointing others because you can’t spend more, and the physical toll of working hard for the money you do have.

I’ve also been at the point where I don’t have enough confidence to make a job interview worthwhile. I was convinced that there were more qualified candidates, that I didn’t have enough special value to make a difference. I was terrified, discouraged in advance, and miserable.

Going to an interview with zero confidence requires courage. Having courage is essential when there’s not enough confidence, but it is mentally, physically, and emotionally exhausting. Just like spending credit is more expensive than cash, courage is more expensive than confidence.

Both confidence and courage are limited. You only can spend as much confidence as you have already, and eventually you’ll hit your “credit limit” of courage. We only spend confidence or courage when the risks of acting are outweighed by the potential benefit. If the outcome isn’t important enough, then we don’t take the risk.

Imaginary case study: Bill and Harold

Let’s imagine Bill and Harold as fictional, cisgender, heterosexual, white, American men living in the same town, working for the same company. They started on the same day, one year ago.

A promotion is available in Bill and Harold’s company. It would be a step up for either of them. Neither of them have all the skills the new role will require, but the company is willing for the right candidate to learn on the job. Bill and Harold both apply, and both are given interviews.

And now we need to flash back two years.

Bill’s first job was for a plumber. The plumber needed someone to answer the phone, schedule appointments, bill insurance companies and clients, order common supplies, keep the books up to date, and clean and restock the van at the end of every day.

Harold’s first job was for a doctor. The doctor needed someone to answer the phone, schedule appointments, bill insurance companies and patients, order common supplies, keep the books up to date, and clean and restock the exam rooms at the end of every day.

Bill didn’t have any experience, and didn’t have any confidence he’d get the job, but spent courage to get through the interview. He got the job, and his confidence grew.

Harold didn’t have any experience, and didn’t have any confidence he’d get the job, but spent courage to get through the interview. He got the job, and his confidence grew.

The plumber knew Bill wasn’t experienced, but the mistakes were pretty hard to take. One time, three clients were billed with each other’s work, and it took a whole month to get it straightened out.

The doctor knew Harold wasn’t experienced, but the mistakes were pretty hard to take. One time, three patients were billed for each other’s treatment, and it took a whole month to get it straightened out.

Bill was terribly embarrassed about his mistakes. The plumber was clearly angry, and keeping Bill took more time than having an experienced person — but not as much time as finding a new person.

Harold was terribly embarrassed about his mistakes. The doctor was clearly angry, and keeping Harold took more time than having an experienced person — but not as much time as finding a new person.

The plumber asked Bill where the problem was, and what he was going to do to fix it. Even though Bill couldn’t clean up all his own messes, he figured out what went wrong. As he went forward, he took care to avoid problems in the future.

The doctor asked his junior nurse to take on more of the billing work. Nobody trusted Harold’s work, and frequently double-checked the appointment book in front of him. Harold had less responsibility than he started with, and was resented by the rest of the staff.

When Bill made mistakes, even though it was a big hit to his confidence, he got the opportunity and support to build up a bigger store of confidence afterward.

When Harold made mistakes, he had the same hit to his confidence, but he didn’t get the support he needed to recover and build upon it. Going in to the interview, Bill has more confidence cash to spend. He’s got a better chance of getting that promotion.

Discouragements are drains on our accounts

I made up Bill and Harold to show how similar people might develop unequal levels of confidence. But one work experience can’t be the only difference between two people. Real people have different hopes, dreams, family and friends, past experiences, and internal resilience.

There are all kinds of normal human drains on confidence. In puberty, boys suffer through their voice changing, so they are suddenly not in control of how others hear them. At roughly the same time, girls have the onset of menses, so they are suddenly not in control of even their basic hygiene.

Discouragements that have eaten away at my confidence cash include college classmates who didn’t want to let me contribute because “you can’t understand all the math.” The professors who wouldn’t make time for me in office hours, because “you’ll just drop out soon, anyway.” The managers who have suggested, “Maybe if you smile more.”

I can only imagine how much daily confidence it would drain if I were followed around a store when I’m shopping. Or harassed while visiting a museum with my child. Or if I had brown skin and commuted past a “Make America White Again” billboard. Or if I had DACA documentation instead of citizenship or a visa. Or if I did not know where I was going to sleep that night. Or if I couldn’t legally use a public restroom.

What this makes me realize is that some people have to spend more confidence and courage in a day than I do in a month. These are people I work with every day, who live in my community and neighborhood. So why do I find myself in a constant, lampoonable state of worry?

Even though every TV channel and magazine cover invites me to worry (and therefore spend confidence) on germs, vaccines for those germs, terrorism, personal hygiene, being fashionable enough, aging well, and the intricacies of celebrity life, my well-funded, white American existence is abundantly insulated from risks that, for many other people, are normal.

Exceptions to every rule

There are people who have much more confidence than they could possibly have earned. For any risk they’ve taken, even if they have failed repeatedly, they have been insulated from feeling the consequences.

Not only do these people have more confidence than reasonable, they have never built up a courage “credit limit.” When faced with a personal embarrassment or difficulty that they can’t insulate themselves from, their behavior is cowardly and defensive. They don’t have the courage to do the right thing, even when the right thing is obvious.

Encouragements add to our accounts

So the goal isn’t just to have more confidence. We need a flow of courage and confidence to build businesses, buy homes, and take any of our next leaps forward — even falling in love. If we never had to spend courage, we would fail to grow and change into the best selves we can be.

With this model, the answer is simple, boring, and hard: Exercise courage, invest your confidence, and be encouraging to others.

Exercise courage

To build muscle, we lift weights. Not necessarily huge weights — just enough to push a little farther than comfortable, increasing as we go. Same thing with courage.

I started a year ago with very light weights: small, little risks. I dyed my hair a bright, Muppet-like red. Now, after most of a lifetime of zero coordination and fitness, I’m learning to tap dance. I continue to write and submit stories and articles for publication and public scrutiny.

Then, when it matters, I have the courage to take bigger risks. I’ve told more than one corporate vice presidents they were wrong, and backed it up with expertise and data. I’ve stood up for myself when discriminated against. I’ve stood up for others when they’re in trouble. I’ve interviewed for a fantastic job, and won it — even when I had less confidence than I projected.

So: Tell your crush you like them. Start writing down that music. Take the mic at amateur comedy night. Run for elected office. Raise money for your favorite charity. Ask for that promotion.

Invest confidence

Creative work is always risky. When I work creatively, whether it’s writing, coding, drawing, or 3D modeling, I try to make the choices I have confidence will be most effective.

When I’m not successful, it still stinks. I have enough creative failures to know that they don’t prevent future success, but they still hurt.

Every time I’m successful, my confidence (and my skill level) should increase.

But somewhere deep in my childhood, I learned that taking credit for individual work was somehow shameful. Instead, I learned to give generous credit to others, to point out their contributions over and above my own. It feels risky to enjoy feeling successful.

Using this model, I’ve had to accept that sometimes there are good things that have happened, that I’m responsible for — and that I’m limiting my future self if I fail to acknowledge it. Now, when I have successes, I make a point to acknowledge that the successes are real, and I add that cash to my confidence account.

So: Do the things you’re best at. Ask for and take payment for your work. Accept compliments with “Thank you.”

Be encouraging and encouraged

As a parent, manager, teacher, or mentor, I wasn’t always good at giving people their own space and encouragement to take appropriate risks. Now, I understand that they can only gain confidence and courage by taking on their own risks, and enjoying their successes.

One of the easiest things any of us can do is to encourage others to take their own risks. When I have confidence that my friend or associate will be OK, that they will be successful, that they will be happy, I can add to their courage credit limit just by telling them so. I want them to take risks so that they can grow their confidence by spending courage.

It’s also encouraging to see that something is possible. Where and when I grew up, I didn’t see professional women who weren’t teachers or nurses. As a physics student, I didn’t have role models who looked or acted like me, who faced the same misogynistic pressures in the same challenging environments. Today, I draw encouragement from groups like the Systers of the Anita Borg Institute. Their example encourages me just by being visible, showing their own successes and perseverance through challenges.

Just as seeing role models helps me, being a role model might help others. And it gives me a chance to invest confidence and exercise my courage. I speak at conferences, teach my skills, help people rewrite their resumes, and have conversations about careers.

So: Coach, mentor, manage, and teach other people what you know. Blog, present, tweet, and share your successes. Celebrate out loud.