How to Create Great Content: Be Personal, Useful, and Timely (PUT)

How do you create great content as a nonprofit communicator? Or, more specifically, what should you put on your website, in your emails or newsletter, and on social media? You should put content in those places that’s “PUT” — Personal, Useful, and Timely. 

This has always been true — we first blogged about PUT as an email newsletter content strategy in 2016. But it is definitely as relevant as ever, especially with more AI-generated content and Google’s interest in highly ranking content that is helpful, reliable, and people-first. 

AI can help with the U in PUT: being useful, or helpful.

AI is not necessarily reliable as it’s trained on old data, not the most recent information or breaking news.

And AI is certainly not people-first.

That means it is really up to you, no matter how you use AI to support your writing, to supply the Personal and the Timely. 

Here are some of our favorite ways to do that.

Easy Ways to Create More Personal Content

• Tell even more stories than you already are.
• Share more first-person accounts (“I” or “we”).
• Do more personal videos.
• Include more direct and attributed quotes from real people.
• Uses phrases that express values like, “We believe . . .”
• Add bylines and bios

Think about Personal Content Strategically

Beyond implementing these tactics, you should consider strategically adding more personality to your content plans.

• Lean into brand and reputation building as a marketing goal so people will want to hear from you directly.
• Lean into thought leadership writing that clearly expresses opinions and human points of view
• Be clear about your target audience within the content itself. As search engine AI gets better at knowing who is asking the question, it will want to direct people to content developed specifically for that type of person and “information gain” for that person.

Easy Ways to Create More Timely Content

• Update your nonprofit’s important website content more regularly (at least every six months) – and add the “updated on” date.
• Respond to breaking news or cultural moments with relevant insights and resources.
• In your content introductions, reference breaking news or other timely topics (and on evergreen pages, remember to go back and regularly update those references).

Stretch Your Nonprofit to Create More Timely Content

• Use polling and surveying to create new data and research to share. AI and those ranking more highly that you won’t have it!
• Don’t be stingy with your expertise and lived experiences as an organization and individual staff members. As your knowledge and experience grow, share it sooner than later on your nonprofit’s website. Again, this is a great way to beat AI-generated content.