Quarterly content review

What a quarterly content review is

A quarterly content review is a scheduled meeting, ninety minutes, held four times a year, in which the content plan is either confirmed or changed. It has a fixed agenda, a short pack circulated beforehand, and a written decision log that carries forward to the next one. The dates are set a year in advance, so the meeting happens whether or not the quarter went well.

It is not a report. The monthly content report says what happened; the review decides what to do differently. It is not a new strategy either. A review that ends in a rewritten plan every quarter is a sign the plan was never properly agreed, and that is a content strategy plan problem rather than a review problem.

When you need one

You need this once a plan is running and more than one person is involved in keeping it. The failure it prevents is specific and very common: a plan agreed in January is still being followed in October by people who all privately think it is wrong, because nobody has ever been given a moment to say so.

The second situation is a business that changes direction faster than its content does. A new service, a lost supplier, a competitor doing something different: each of those changes what should be published, and without a fixed date in the calendar the change reaches the publishing schedule about six months late.

You do not need this if you are one person publishing one thing a month. Read your own monthly report and adjust. The review earns its keep when a decision needs several people in a room and a record of what was agreed.

The agenda

The same five items, in the same order, every time. The order matters: the numbers come before the opinions, and the decisions come before anybody gets tired.

1. Last quarter's decisions. Each one read out and marked done, not done, or overtaken. Nothing else is discussed until this is finished. It takes ten minutes and it is the only reason the meeting has any authority.
2. The numbers, three months at a time. The agreed measures across the whole quarter rather than the month, which is the shortest period over which most content tells the truth.
3. What was published, and what was not. The plan against the reality. Where the schedule slipped, why it slipped, and whether the cadence itself was ever realistic.
4. What changed outside. The trade, the competition, the questions arriving from customers. Fifteen minutes, and whoever does the selling does most of the talking.
5. The decisions. Three at most, each with an owner and a date. Written down in the room, not afterwards.

What you get

The pack. Four to six pages, circulated two working days before. The quarter's numbers, the published list, the outstanding decisions, and three questions for the meeting to settle. Anyone who has read it can take part; anyone who has not says so at the start.

The meeting. Ninety minutes, chaired by me, on video or in person. Chairing matters more than it sounds. Somebody has to stop a discussion about one headline eating the time set aside for the decision about next quarter's budget.

The decision log. One running document, not one per meeting. Each decision with the date it was made, who owns it, and what became of it. After a year this is the most useful content document the business holds, because it shows what was tried and what was abandoned.

A worked example

An illustration. A landscaping company in Kelowna runs its second review in October. The log shows three decisions from July: two done, one quietly dropped by everybody. The numbers show inquiries flat across the quarter but a clear rise in requests naming irrigation work, which is not what the plan is built around. The publishing record shows nine of twelve planned pieces published, and all three misses falling in the busiest month of the year.

Three decisions come out of it. Move the summer cadence from weekly to fortnightly, permanently, because three misses in one month is a plan problem rather than a discipline problem. Add four irrigation pages to the next quarter, ahead of two general pieces that get pushed back. And retire the maintenance-tips series, which has run for two years and has never produced an inquiry. Each decision has a name and a date against it. The whole meeting runs to eighty minutes.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Who should be in the room, what is already being measured, and which decisions keep failing to get made. No charge.
2. The dates. Four dates set for the year, each about two weeks after the quarter closes so the figures are complete when the pack is written.
3. The pack. Two to three working days of preparation before each review, pulling the numbers together and writing the questions.
4. The meeting and the log. Ninety minutes, then the updated decision log circulated the same day. Not the following week, when half of it has already been forgotten.

What it costs

The quarterly review is included in the ongoing monthly service, whose band is on the pricing page, and most of the preparation is already done by the monthly reporting that service produces. Bought on its own it is a fixed fee per review in CAD, quoted after the half-hour call and agreed in writing, depending mostly on how much digging the numbers need.

What happens next

A review that changes the plan usually changes the dates too, which means redoing the content calendar for the quarter ahead. Where the review decides part of the archive is doing nothing, the follow-on is deciding what to delete. Once a year the fourth review sits next to the ROI analysis, which is the one conversation about money rather than about work. None of it is assumed. A single review, run once, is still worth more than a year of unspoken disagreement.