Often editorial energy is focused on each individual piece of content, in an effort to emphasize quality and clarity. But periodically, an editorial team should step back and look at collective communications. Depending on the volume of individual pieces, such a macro editorial review should happen monthly, quarterly or every six months. The macro review looks at the overall tone, topics, voice and style of the whole body of content that an organization has produced over a period. This macro-level review is important, because it is possible to end up straying from the organizational voice and brand in a series of incremental content decisions. By pausing to look at the big picture of all the communications delivered to constituents over a period of time, such subtle drift can be detected and corrected.

Before embarking on a macro editorial review, it is important to establish a culture of quality improvement and acceptance of evaluation and review. Rather than negative repercussions and defensiveness, all the parties in the review need to be open to giving and receiving evaluations, with the goal of making the overall communications more effective.

Questions to address in a macro editorial review:

• How does each individual piece of content contribute to the organization’s overall vision and mission?
• How does content fit into the editorial grid?
• Are there topics that have not been addressed often enough? Are there gaps which need to be filled?
• Are there topics that are too frequent? Is there a need for more variety in content?
• How does content on various platforms fit together (web, print, email)?
• What are the best content pieces over the period of time? How can we produce more winners?
• Which articles should not have been produced? How can we avoid lower-quality content in the future?

Macro editorial review processes can lead to increasing the overall quality of communication for an organization. Being open to giving and receiving evaluations on content sharpens the skills of the staff team and focuses everyone on communications strategy.