Our content creation strategy: Faversham House

Q: How is your content strategy evolving?

A: Faversham House’s core values are creativity, ambition, and a commitment to excellence — values that guide our content strategy across all media brands.

At edie, our sustainable business media brand, we’ve recently made significant changes to grow both our core and non-core audiences while driving revenue. With the sustainability media landscape becoming increasingly saturated, it’s crucial for us to stay innovative and maintain our position as a trusted leader.

Two key areas of focus have driven this evolution: community and communications.

1. Community-driven membership: Last year, we re-launched the edie Membership — an annual subscription model for exclusive content and events access, with both individual and corporate licences available. Our editor holds 30-minute onboarding calls with all new members and renewals, and what’s been really interesting is the hierarchy of what our audience wants, and is willing to pay for. In-depth exclusives and more practical, how-to content were both seen as important — but far ahead of those things is facilitated connection to other members, both virtually and in-person. We know that cross-industry collaboration is a critical aspect of driving sustainability and climate action, and given edie’s breadth and depth of audience, we’ve recognised that we’re in a relatively unique position to drive that collaboration through our content and events.

So, rather than simply putting higher quality content behind a paywall, we’ve positioned our subscription service first and foremost as a community, with the added benefit of member-only content. In addition to hosting quarterly in-person member briefings and roundtables, we have utilised our webinar platform for this — with virtual ‘collaborations’ now being held every week for small groups of edie members, on topics of their choosing. Each collaboration is chaired by edie’s editor, with a written output sent to all participants afterwards.

This subtle change in our subscription model from ‘content with events’ to ‘collaboration with content’ has proved pivotal, and our corporate membership is now growing rapidly — creating sustained revenue growth for the brand.

2. Bespoke communications with edie Enterprise: One of the biggest pain points coming through in our conversations with members is their difficulty sourcing and developing relevant climate action content which they can share with their teams; along with difficulty effectively communicating the progress they themselves are making with stakeholders.

And so, we have just launched ‘edie Enterprise’ — a bespoke content intelligence service which provides paying corporates with regular, specialist sustainability content and insights. This bespoke content can include anything from regular newsletters and case study articles through to in-depth industry research and reports and the co-hosting of webinars. All of this content can either be edie branded or white-labelled — to help keep organisations ahead of the curve and able to communicate more effectively with stakeholders on sustainability.

It is still early days but edie Enterprise is already proving to be a success, with several large corporates now paying for licences, which also include edie Membership by the way.

Q: What have you learned when making content strategy changes?

A: Three key lessons have emerged from these content strategy developments:

• Content is more than just articles. The most valuable thing we offer isn’t always a piece of writing but rather the opportunity to connect the right people for meaningful discussions.
• Team skills must evolve with strategy. For instance, our focus on virtual collaborations required webinar training, while our bespoke content model led to the creation of an intelligence editor role.
• Listen to your audience. Our onboarding calls for new members have been invaluable, revealing insights that challenge assumptions and allowing us to fine-tune our approach.

Three top tips

1. Be best-in-class at something. When evolving a content strategy, it’s important not to spread yourself too thinly and end up doing an ok job across the board. Whether it’s exclusivity and accessibility of content, use of multimedia, or even something like content-led campaigns, be clear on the areas you are best-in-class at, and protect those areas as you grow.
2. “Lock and learn”. I’m stealing this tip from a presentation that Decanter gave at an industry event a couple of years ago, but a paywall can be a great source of insight for your brand — try locking some content and unlocking others to work out what your audience finds most valuable, and don’t be afraid to test things out along the way.
3. Consider AI as a new audience member. A slightly left-field tip to end on, but I have read several articles in InPublishing and other titles over the past year about how AI can be used to support editorial content development — one thing that is often missed is developing content in ways that will appeal to an AI audience. A growing proportion of edie’s audience are actively using AI to source their sustainability information, and we are therefore starting to consider how we can write and structure articles which will be more easily findable and readable for AI bots. An interesting angle to the AI / journalism discussion which I hadn’t previously considered!

This article was included in the Content Creation Special, published by InPublishing in June 2025. Click here to see the other articles in this special feature.