About Finalsite
Better tools. Stronger schools.
Finalsite is a software-as-a-service company that provides communications and content management solutions to educational institutions, particularly focused on K12 schools. In addition to their flagship content management system, Composer, Finalsite offers modules to help schools manage: calendars, forms, contacts, athletics, bulk email and text messaging, files, social media feeds, news and blogging, mobile apps, and more. While sites are designed and built internally with customized templates, and some content migration services may be included, clients are expected to use Finalsite’s tools independently after site launch.
Over the course of 7 years, and a period of explosive growth for the company, I worked to build scalable onboarding and product training opportunities for clients as well as Finalsite employees. From knowledge base articles and blog posts to recorded webinars and interactive video-based courses, I designed empowering learning experiences that helped multiple types of users make the most of their Finalsite tools.
Know your audience
Finalsite’s broad user base presented unique challenges for creating educational content to address their needs. A Finalsite user may be anyone from a teacher with no technical background building a form during her free period to a district IT administrator implementing sites for dozens of elementary, middle, and high schools. Finalsite’s granular user permissions allowed even parents and students to access Composer or any of its modules. Users’ needs varied widely depending on where they were in their journey, whether launching a new site, updating an existing one, or (often) taking over a site from a previous admin who didn’t leave adequate handover instructions. As a SaaS, Finalsite also released new features regularly (on a two-week agile cycle) that required additional training for even the most seasoned admins.
To ensure we were catering to our clients’ needs, whatever their background, I created three levels of user personas: User, Admin, and Superadmin. A User was someone who was creating content or using a module for its intended purpose, such as publishing a news article, sending a message, or building a form. They would almost never need to change the configuration settings for a module, which is where the Admin role comes in. Superadmin encompasses users still in the initial design (or redesign) phase and preparing for site launch, as well as district admins whose actions may impact multiple Composer instances. These roles are fluid, and a Superadmin may function as an Admin or even User the majority of the time.
Finalsite’s Help Center contained more than 700 articles, with even more content in courses in the Finalsite Training learning management system, with no clear-cut procedures or standards governing content creation and management.
I began championing content strategy in late 2020, kicking off the effort in April 2021 (1) with a team comprising members of both departments. I trained and managed a smaller team in conducting a comprehensive qualitative audit of the Help Center articles (2), keeping the larger group engaged and apprised of the project status via Slack (3). After analyzing and presenting the results of the audit (4), I led a series of strategy sessions to define elements of the strategy and collaborate on solutions.
Although the process faced numerous delays, we successfully identified more than 100 articles in the Help Center to archive and targeted many others for improvement. Simply looking at the content in a critical way changed the way my team approached creating new resources for training and support.
Lauren B. Lentini 