Hello, Brand Super Admins! By assigning users the roles of Content Creator or Content Publisher, you can distribute campaign creation and publishing capabilities to more people in your organization while keeping guardrails in place. Read more about how roles work in our permissions article.

A Content Creator can:

• Access Creator Studio, where they can see only the content for their assigned topic(s) and audiences.
• Create content, but not publish it.
• Access analytics on individual campaigns via the Calendar page.

The Content Creator role is recommended for users for who you want to draft communications, but not publish without review. Good candidates for this role are communication specialists, editors, or interns. If you want a user to be able to create and publish content, the Content Publisher role may be a better fit for them.

Check out this video on how to use Creator Studio as a Content Creator!

A Content Publisher can:

• Access Creator Studio, where they can see only the Insights reports for campaigns they created and campaigns under Campaigns and Calendar that are assigned to one of the topics or audiences that they have access to. They will only be able to edit a campaign if they have access to all of the topics and audiences that the campaign has been assigned to. Note that even if Content Publishers manage a topic that is targeted to an audience/s, the user must still be assigned the audience/s in their user profile to publish to them.
• Leverage direct publishing - when they submit content to their assigned topic(s)from the mobile app or web experience, that content is published immediately (skips the "needs review" status).

Check out this video on how to use Creator Studio as a Content Publisher!

Who Is a Good Candidate for the Content Publisher Role?

Anyone that is trusted to publish content without review (to at least one topic and/or audience!) is a good candidate for the Content Publisher role. Think content managers who are purely focused on creating and publishing content, not managing the community. To set the Content Publisher up for success, check out Questions to Ask below.

Here are some scenarios to consider when thinking about how this role can best fit into your organization. These scenarios are not a comprehensive list -- you may find that there are other ways where you can apply this role in your company.

• Expand to Other Departments - give a representative from outside of the Comms organization control over a topic for their business unit or team.
• Employee Resource Group - empower a group of employees to manage their own topic focused on a specific topic.
• Leadership Topic - allow an executive or other leaders in the company (or their assistants) to manage their own topic.
• Champion Content Creators - unlock direct publishing for employees who are already submitting great content. Use the submissions report to identify and recruit those users to become Content Publishers.

Questions to Ask

We recommend reaching out to your Strategic Advisor or Customer Success Manager for an in-depth conversation about your strategic approach to engaging Content Publishers. Plan ahead so that you can think through how to maximize the Content Publisher role and set them and your platform strategy up for success. The following questions are intended to help prepare for that conversation.

These questions assume that you are a Brand Super Admin with access to all functionality in Creator Studio.

Ask yourself about the big picture:

• What is your platform strategy?
• Are you following Firstup's best practices? You can talk to your Strategic Advisor or Customer Success Manager about these practices.
• Where are Content Publishers required to enable your strategy?
• How will you train and prepare Content Publishers to leverage the platform to perform their role and responsibilities?
• Do your Content Publishers need access to drips in addition to content creation?

Some topic settings you should consider in the context of a Content Publisher:

• Targeting - Do you need to make a public topic targeted to ensure that Content Publishers can only reach a certain audience? If you have a targeted topic, do you want to adjust which audiences are targeted or make changes to how the audiences are defined (i.e. which users are in the audiences)?
• Auto-follow - Do you have topics that include content that the business needs all users in the target audience to see? By enabling auto-following, you increase the visibility of content.
• Auto-publish - Content Publishers can publish regardless of this setting (the special power of the Content Publisher is to always auto-publish!). You may want auto-publish turned off so that Member content goes through "For Review" and only Content Publishers can publish immediately.

What can you do to help your Content Publishers be successful? Some ideas:

• Establish the topic strategy, which should include the topic’s goals and metrics, content strategy, promotional strategy, and all associated process and governance documentation.
• Send an email campaign to your Content Publishers to communicate your hopes or expectations for their role, along with the resources you can include to help them train and get up to speed on your strategy.
• Encourage your Content Publishers to check out the Firstup article Getting Started - Content Publishers.
• Create a topic targeted to just Content Publishers and turn on auto-publish. You can use this topic to educate and train, share best practices, and/or communicate special messages.
• Make a plan for reviewing and rewarding content performance. The goal should be to develop a process that enables Content Publishers to understand what to publish and when to publish (how often, what time of day), with regular meetings to review goals, metrics, and results (content performance). Content Publishers should know that they can learn from content and improve results via this process.

Do you want to explicitly advise Content Publishers of some features they cannot access, but you could adjust for them? These users may be perfect candidates for a custom role. For example, Content Publishers cannot:

• cross-publish posts to topics the Content Publisher is not assigned to
• auto-follow users to the assigned topic
• update the targeting of the assigned topic
• add new users to the community
• change a feed configuration

Resources

Learn more about Content Publishers from our Knowledge Base articles:

• What can Content Publishers do? See Defining Roles and Permissions.
• How do Content Publishers create content from the mobile app? See Direct Publishing from Web or Mobile App.
• How do Content Publishers send emails? See How to Create a Standalone Email.
• How do I give Content Publishers access? See Manually Add or Import Users.
• How do I review Content Publishers at the Topic level? See Create or Edit a Topic.
• What Knowledge Base articles are written for Content Publishers? See Getting Started - Content Publishers.