Beyond the build: Governing content at scale in higher education

A university website is never really finished — it's a living reflection of institutional identity, constantly shaped by dozens of competing voices, priorities and deadlines. At North Dakota State University, consolidating hundreds of independent sites into a single web platform forced a fundamental question: how do you maintain a coherent content strategy and brand identity at scale without silencing the diverse voices that make a university what it is? The answer wasn't purely technical. It was governance first, technology second. We'll walk through a case study describing how NDSU built a content governance model designed to balance institutional authority with departmental autonomy. Central to this was the creation of a Web Principals group — a community of practice that gave editors across colleges and departments a shared stake in the platform's success. Through structured onboarding, ongoing training, open feedback loops and peer mentorship, we shifted the culture from one of isolated site ownership to collaborative stewardship of a unified web presence. Content strategy shaped every decision along the way — from how we structured information architecture and defined editorial roles, to how we handled brand standards, content lifecycle and the ongoing challenge of keeping hundreds of pages accurate and purposeful. Governance without a clear content strategy is just bureaucracy, and content strategy without governance is just aspiration. Our technical implementation was built to reinforce both. Scoped permissions, structured content types and defined editorial workflows weren't features we bolted on — they were the infrastructure that made our governance model operable and our content strategy sustainable at scale. You will leave with a framework for building governance structures that actually get adopted, content strategy principles that translate across large and decentralized organizations, and an honest account of the organizational challenges that no platform can solve on its own.