TIQ bring gamification to onboarding and training software to truly engage its users, in a fun way that deliver results. Based in Edmonton, Canada, their growing team has been using GatherContent for over 4 years to drastically speed up content creation in the development of their onboarding, e-learning and marketing courses.

The challenge

Before TIQ found GatherContent they were using Google Docs to manage content creation. It worked from a shared document perspective but there were gaps that the team wanted to solve:

• It was hard to imitate the structure of the software.
• It was difficult to onboard clients into content creation.
• Significant time felt wasted having to manually copy and paste content once it had been approved.

TIQ knew there had to be a better way to manage content creation and set out to find a solution. After comparing us against other platforms including Contentful, GatherContent was selected for overall usability and pricing.

Solving content structure

TIQ's software creates complex content stories, with chapter-like, tree logic philosophy. Check out this interactive onboarding project TIQ built for the University of Alberta as a digital marketing initiative to help prospective students navigate programs in the Faculty of Arts. The content that goes into this platform includes UI microcopy, informative copy about each area of study, imagery and sound files. Google Docs is an unstructured content editor, great for writing long form content but when content is required in parts, each with specific length and format requirements, it isn’t fit for purpose. In GatherContent, TIQ are able to build structured Content Templates for their clients to provide and review content within.

Content Templates break down the content requirements, bringing structure to content creation, helping TIQ’s clients to storyboard the content that will live in their course.

Solving onboarding clients into content creation

Despite content being an integral part of the end product, the team had been battling against encouraging clients to provide content for their software products. A blank slate in Google Docs wasn’t helping—online content editing required education.

Even today, some customers still don't quite understand online content editing.

Jason Suriano, Founder & CEO

GatherContent provided a better way to facilitate content creation by establishing clear content roles for collaborators, so everyone knew what they needed to do.

TIQ have found the fastest way to get content approved is to input content to GatherContent themselves and grant reviewer access so that clients can comment to provide feedback and keep content moving through production. Custom roles and permissions in GatherContent allow TIQ to give their team rights to build structure, create content and update content status’, whilst restricting clients to comment or edit content where appropriate - making everyone’s roles in content creation clear.

Solving content migration

Without a system like GatherContent, when content creation requires multiple parties to create, review and edit the content to get it approved, the process can get messy. And that’s just to get content approved, there’s still work to do after that - the content needs to go somewhere to be published! For TIQ this process used to mean manually copying and pasting from Google Docs into the online platforms they create for their clients. It was time consuming, tedious and required eagle eyed project management to ensure the most up to date version was copied across.

It was such a nightmare in post process where you're using Google Docs, you're trying to share it out and then you can imagine trying to move all of that content into an online gaming platform.

Jason Suriano, Founder & CEO

Using the GatherContent API, TIQ have completely eradicated this manual content migration. Their development team built a grunt script that means with literally one click, all approved copy and image assets are pulled directly into the software and assembled on their screens. They have built the script so that if there are comments still open or content that hasn’t been moved to the ‘approved’ status in GatherContent, it will send an error back.

This has helped make content migration really fluid between both sides of their creative team and saved hours of tedious copy and paste.

The results

Introducing GatherContent to TIQ’s content creation process has led to:

• Fully dropping content editors like Google Docs or Microsoft Word.
• Structured content creation using GatherContent Templates.
• Faster content creation and approvals.
• Automated content migration using the GatherContent API.
• Happier teams with hours freed up to focus on work outside of content creation.

Want to know more? See how GatherContent could help your business take control of the content production process.