As technical communicators, we focus most of our effort into delivering quality documentation for users so they can find the information they need. Getting them what they need quickly means they can knock out their task and get on with their day. But at MailChimp, we think about our Knowledge Base as more than just …

My content strategy responsibilities for MailChimp’s Knowledge Base have recently grown to include user research. As a part of that research, I want to learn who uses the KB and what they find helpful, extraneous, or missing. Then, I’ll translate the findings into actionable personas the KB team can use to stay user-focused when we …

MailChimp is good at iterating, and our Knowledge Base team has taken that same iterative approach to educational content and structure. We’re good at reacting to change, but we also want to plan ahead, anticipating change before it happens. To guide us toward a better, more consistent product, the Knowledge Base is developing new procedures …

Despite the fact that MailChimp’s Knowledge Base published its first non-English language content early this year, it wasn’t our first translation. When I took charge of translating MailChimp’s Knowledge Base in February of this year, I recalled Octavio Paz’s essay, “Translation: Literature and Letters,” which opens like so: “Learning to speak is learning to translate.” …

MailChimp is designed to empower our users to send great email that helps grow their audiences and businesses. This empowerment philosophy extends to the Knowledge Base, where we provide tutorials and resources to make our users’ experiences better. But how do we determine how someone will use a feature to meet their unique needs and …

The technical content team has been busy this year. We’ve completed a few big projects that have made a huge impact on the content and usability of MailChimp’s Knowledge Base. But it’s not just the outcomes of these projects that are impactful. Even the small steps that lead up to each result can make a …

The Knowledge Base team is a ten-strong (and growing!) group of content lovers. We spend our days documenting MailChimp and figuring out how to connect users with the information they need, at the right time and in the right form. As Content Strategist, I work to bridge the gap between ideas and implementation. The writing …