Hi Megan Guilfoyle - thanks for your question. Sounds like you're doing a lot of stuff right already. Tagging in Tammy Triplett as I know she'll have some good pointers on what you're looking at here. I'm sure the rest of my team can think of some others as well!

Jocelyn De Los Santos , Lisa Marion , Rebecca Nielsen , Aneik Gandhi , Roxana Lovrekovic  

Brad - Thanks for pulling me into this discussion   

Megan Guilfoyle  - Yes, we, too, have a decentralized content management model.  And, we, too, start with templates, training, best practices, office hours, a blog series ... all those things you said and have a lot of inconsistency.  With an ever-changing population of around 550 people and numerous use cases, it is nearly impossible to maintain consistency.  

I am currently working an effort to overhaul our HR area, which is among our largest and the most used area of our platform.  In this effort we have done a complete content audit to reduce the overall volume of content, added Recommended Results to ensure users find the right content at the top of search results and we did user studies to ensure the structure and content is organized in a way that makes sense for our users.  The page layouts have been greatly simplified and will provide users with a more consistent and streamlined experience across the HR structure so they will be able to easily get to the content they need.  We are in the final stages of this effort now and due to roll out for users on Oct. 7.  Our plan is to press this process across the entirety of our platform over the next year.

Also, I attended a presentation awhile back where the presenter had set things up so that the publishers could edit their content, but not their page layouts.  I can't recall right now who the presenter was but the gist was they were provided page layouts that were all consistent, but they had a secondary page where only the publishers could access for an easy way to edit their content in their channels.  I may not be getting this right. Brad Rooke do you recall what I'm talking about?

Tammy Triplett - Thank you very much! I knew you'd add some value to this discussion. You're correct in that I recall that use case as well. I'll do some digging and post here. 

Megan Guilfoyle , Tammy Triplett - I believe this was on one of our User Group sessions, which aren't recorded. Allowing I'm right, I believe the way the customer accomplished this was by requiring moderation on submitted content, while making the de facto space or page admins moderators. That way they had access to modify the content if needed but not to edit or alter the space or page. Dori Gray - am I thinking correctly in that this was mentioned in a recent user group?

Brad Rooke I think so!

Hi! We have a ton of publishers/space admins on our Igloo but I don't have the best answer for you. We do all the things you've listed above, but still reached a point where we had to accept that each space/team was going to have a bit of individuality. We do insist on key elements (an HTML 'about' box in the upper left to explain the space topic, a quick links on the right, a member pane, etc.) and will change them on a page if we see they don't have them or moved them but from there, we let the content guide what they think they need. We recently did a brand refresh and went through and updated all page banners/graphics ourselves - so we've got some consistency there. But as far as the structure of the page, it definitely differs. 

Molly Sproatt - thanks very much for this!

We have a class of users we call "Content Creators" that are able to post articles and blog posts, but if they want to change or build pages they have to consult with our UX person, who is in charge of overall design.   That way overall design is controlled by management, but content is designed by the staff.  

Michael Wolfe - great strategy, thanks!

Michael Wolfe I'm late to this party but how did you grant access to the "Content Creators," did you do it via the page Access tab, or did you make them all Space Administrators? Thank you.

Heather Van Roo via the Access tab.  

My organization also follows a decentralized publishing model with over 300+ content creators across the different business functions. Echoing what what others have contributed to this thread, we still see inconsistencies even with the provision of different resources (page/content templates, guides, live training, reminders, support with initial set-up). To counteract this, my team conducts a quarterly audit of all Spaces and underlying content where we record any UX, content, data protection, and critical translation issues for content managers to fix prior to the next quarterly review. It's a 2-week commitment every 3 months but we've found that this works for the most part, especially with the turnover of content creators over the years.