The OU Editorial Notebook: Building a B2B Content System That Lasted

Outcome

Adopted unit-wide and sustained for four years across changing teams, agency partners, and editorial leadership. The Editorial Notebook gave a commercial team with no prior content infrastructure a governed editorial system that was embedded in practice and sustained long after the engagement concluded.

Client

The Open University's Business Development Unit (BDU), the commercial arm of The OU working with corporates, SMEs, and public sector organisations on learning and development.

The brief

The BDU was repositioning. The OU was world-class in academic education, but its B2B presence in the HR and L&D community was underdeveloped. The team wanted to become an active participant in the conversations shaping the future of work, talent, and learning, not just a service provider responding to RFPs.

The strategic ambition was clear. The operational reality was harder. Content needed to be produced consistently by multiple contributors, including internal staff, external thought leaders, and agency partners. It had to land with a fragmented audience of HR generalists, L&D specialists, OD strategists, and senior people leaders. And it had to do this inside an organisation whose primary identity was academic, not commercial, which meant the content system had to earn adoption from teams that were not naturally aligned to it.

Strategic considerations

Three tensions shaped every decision:

Commercial ambition inside an academic culture. The system had to serve a commercial objective (positioning the unit as a credible L&D partner) without losing The OU's heritage and mission credibility, which was itself a commercial asset. The work was holding both at once, not choosing.

Consistency across contributors who would never all be in the room. With internal, external, and agency contributors rotating over time, coherence couldn't depend on people. It had to be built into the system, so that structure enforced standards even as the team changed.

Ambition without fragility. Editorial principles had to be ambitious enough to make the content distinctive, and operational guidance pragmatic enough to survive contact with a busy team. Too aspirational and it would be ignored; too basic and it wouldn't differentiate.

Approach

The work wasn't really about writing. It was about building the editorial infrastructure that would let the unit sustain a substantive content programme over years, not campaigns. I led the development of the Editorial Notebook, the operating system that defined the narrative, voice, audience, and formats shaping every piece of B2B content the unit produced.

Narrative and intent. The starting point was narrative, not tone. We articulated the unit's editorial worldview: that only organisations placing L&D at the heart of business strategy would adapt and thrive in constant change. From that worldview, everything else flowed. A Think, Feel, Do framework gave contributors a structured way to plan editorial intent, so content was designed to land, not just to read well.

Audience. The segmentation defined five distinct groups within the HR/L&D community, each with different content needs and reading patterns, so contributors wrote for a specific reader rather than a generic one. [Artefact to add: audience segmentation visual]

Voice as a system. The tone of voice work defined four balanced principles (original, challenging, down-to-earth, balanced) with detailed "we are this, we are not this" guidance. Crucially, it was embedded in the editorial workflow itself, in briefs, drafts, and reviews, so it was used rather than shelved. Tone of voice fails as a document and succeeds as a system. [Artefact to add: the four tone principles]

Structure. Seven content formats were codified, from short Spotlights through to In-depth Analysis, OpEds, and Video Stories, each with word counts, reading times, and use cases, making commissioning, planning, and measurement comparable across the programme. [Artefact to add: the seven formats]

Governance. The system defined how content was commissioned, reviewed, approved, and sustained, designed deliberately around the team that existed rather than an ideal one.

Impact

• Adopted unit-wide as the operational reference for the entire B2B content programme.

• Sustained over four years, surviving multiple changes in team membership, agency partners, and editorial leadership.

• Grew the unit's LinkedIn presence from zero to over 5,000 followers organically.

• Continued to govern content decisions long after the initial commercial campaigns had concluded.

What made it last wasn't its design. It was that it was built to be used: it reflected how the team actually worked, the contributors it actually had, and the audience it actually needed to reach. The editorial principles were ambitious; the operational guidance was pragmatic. That combination is what produced adoption.

Read the original notebook.

What it taught me

Editorial systems fail when they're treated as documents and succeed when they're treated as infrastructure. The Notebook worked because a contributor could move from worldview through audience through format in a single read, and apply it the same day.

The discipline this engagement taught me, and that has shaped every content system I've built since, is that the test of a content strategy isn't its sophistication. It's whether it survives contact with the people actually making the content. Editorial infrastructure that gets used, adopted, and lasts is worth more than a beautifully designed strategy that quietly fails to embed.