It’s Tuesday morning. You’re mid-way through a piece of work that actually matters – finishing your new content strategy, the redesign of a key page – something that requires proper thinking time. Then the Teams messages start. Can you write something for the newsletter by Thursday? The CEO wants a statement on the website. Someone’s launching a campaign next week and needs ‘just a few bits of copy’. Oh, and ‘can you just wordsmith’ this document someone’s written? It won’t take long.
By the time you’ve responded to everything, the morning is gone. The work that matters is still waiting. And you’re silently screaming because you know it’s going to be exactly the same tomorrow.
I see this pattern constantly in the content teams I work with. The requests are relentless, the priorities are unclear, and the team is stuck in reactive mode – not because they’re disorganised, but because no one has ever stopped to agree on how content fits into the way the organisation works.
Service level agreements – SLAs – have become one of the key tools I reach for in this situation. An SLA is a shared agreement about how content requests work: what the team will deliver, what stakeholders need to provide, how long things take, and what happens when something is genuinely urgent. Done well, it protects your team’s time and sanity, sets clear boundaries and standards with the people you work with, and – over time – starts to build the case for content as a strategic function, not just a service desk.
Sound good? This guide takes you through what an SLA is, how to build one, and how to make it stick.
Why your content team might need an SLA
There are a few reasons that can mean content teams end up stuck in a ‘can you just’ reactive state:
- Content is seen as a support function – the people you call when you need something written – rather than a discipline with its own processes, priorities and self-directed work.
- Content is not understood – the full breadth and scope of the work is hidden and not appreciated by the rest of the organisation.
- Content teams are often, frankly, too helpful. They say yes to everything, absorb every request, and quietly get on with it, which makes the problem invisible.
- Rapid growth in the organisation. When an organisation grows but the content team stays the same size, the number of requests goes up and it becomes impossible to do anything but manage them. (This has happened to a lot of charities over the last few years as fundraising teams have grown due to increased financial pressure.)
- The wrong organising structure for content. If you’re running a centralised content team in a big organisation, you’re very likely to get buried under a mountain of requests. Read more about organising structures for content teams.
These things can all result in a team without clear boundaries, without shared expectations, and without the organisational permission to prioritise the work that matters. The requests keep coming because nothing has ever been agreed about how they should work – and without that agreement, it’s almost impossible to push back, reprioritise, or protect the time that strategic work needs. (For another take on this, read Overcoming the ‘everything everywhere all at once’ of content.)
An SLA won’t fix all of this on its own. But it does something important: it turns an invisible, informal set of expectations into something explicit. It gives content a shape that other people in the organisation can understand and respond to. And it creates the conditions for a different kind of conversation – one where content isn’t just reacting to everyone else’s priorities, but has its own.
An SLA can feel like a dry, administrative thing. But I’d push back on that. Done well, an SLA is an act of care. It reduces the anxiety of not knowing what’s expected. It means everyone – your team and the people you work with – knows where they stand. And it gives your team something to lean on: not a wall to hide behind, but a shared agreement they can point to when things get complicated. That’s not bureaucracy. That’s clarity. And in my experience, clarity is one of the most valuable things you can offer the people you work with.
What goes into a content SLA
What you need to put into your content SLA will depend on your team’s size, structure, and the organisation you’re working in. But there are some core components that I think belong in most SLAs as a starting point.
A service list or content ‘catalogue’
This is the backbone of the SLA: a clear picture of what the content team does and doesn’t do, what each type of work involves, how long it takes, and ideally an example or two of each. It’s the thing that answers the question ‘can you just…’ before it gets asked. For teams that get buried under requests, making scope explicit – including what’s out of scope – is often the single most useful thing they can do.
How and when to request work
This covers the practicalities: how to submit a request, what a good brief looks like, and what lead times are required for different types of work. The lead time piece is particularly important – and often the most surprising to stakeholders. Being clear that a new page needs three weeks’ notice, not three days’, isn’t being difficult. It’s being honest about what good work requires.
Prioritisation and scheduling
How the team decides what gets worked on, and in what order. This section sets out the criteria – and the process for escalating when something genuinely can’t wait. Having this written down can help to take some of the politics out of prioritisation. It should mean decisions are based on agreed criteria, not on who shouts loudest.
Feedback, revisions, and sign-off
Unclear review processes can be a big source of friction in content work. This section covers how feedback should be given, how many rounds of revisions are included, who has final sign-off, and what happens if that process isn’t followed. It protects the team’s time and sets a standard for the quality of collaboration the team needs to do its best work.
Resources and guidance for non-content teams
For organisations where people outside the content team produce content – which is most organisations, let’s be honest – an SLA can also signpost to the tools and guidance that help them do it well: tone of voice guidelines, templates, training, and so on. This isn’t about offloading work. It’s about raising the standard of content across the organisation, and giving people the support to meet it.
Creating your SLA
A big mistake teams can make when creating an SLA is starting with a blank document and trying to write the thing from scratch. That tends to produce something aspirational rather than accurate – a list of turnaround times that look reasonable in theory but bear no relation to how work actually flows.
A better starting point is what’s already happening.
Start with an audit of your current work
Before you write anything, spend some time mapping the requests that actually come in. What are they? How often do they arrive? How long do they actually take – including briefing, drafting, review rounds, and sign-off? What comes in at the last minute, and what’s planned in advance?
This is also where you’ll start to find your service list categories. If you’re a reactive team with no formal intake process, you probably don’t have a neat list of request types – but you do have an inbox, a Slack channel, and a memory. Go through recent requests and start grouping them. Patterns will emerge. Those patterns become your categories. A diary study can be a great exercise to help fill in the blanks here too. Learn about diary studies.
This doesn’t need to be a lengthy process. Even a rough picture of what comes in and how long it takes will give you something real to build from.
Building your service list
Once you have a picture of what actually comes in, you can start shaping your service list – and this is worth taking some care over, because it’s one of the most visible parts of the SLA.
Start with what you actually do, not what you think you do or what you’d like to do. The audit will show you this. From there, start grouping: what are the recurring output types? What do stakeholders actually ask for? Using stakeholder language here matters – your categories need to make sense to the people reading them, not just to the content team.
Out of scope is just as important as in scope. Being explicit about what the content team doesn’t do – writing internal emails for individual team members, producing print materials, building PowerPoint decks – removes ambiguity and heads off requests before they arrive.
Finally, think about how the service list is presented. This isn’t just a functional document – it’s also a statement about how the content team wants to be seen. A well-presented, clearly written service list signals professionalism and expertise. It makes the case for content as a discipline, not a service desk, before anyone has read a word of it.
Get a senior sponsor
An SLA carries more weight when someone with organisational authority is behind it. This doesn’t need to be a big ask – it might just mean a director or head of department saying ‘yes, this is how we’re going to work’ in a team meeting or all-staff email. But that endorsement matters, especially in the early stages when people are still finding their feet with the new process. If you can’t get a senior sponsor, you should pause and try to address that before going any further.
Involve stakeholders early
An SLA that’s handed down from the content team tends to get ignored or resented. One that stakeholders helped to shape tends to stick – because people respect agreements they’ve had a hand in making.
This doesn’t mean designing by committee. It means bringing the right people into the conversation early: showing them what the audit revealed, asking them what they need from the content team, and being honest about what’s realistic. That conversation is often illuminating for everyone involved.
Find the right moment to introduce it
Introducing an SLA out of nowhere is harder than tacking it onto something else. A restructure, a website redesign, a new content strategy, a period of team growth – these are all natural moments to reset how things work. If one of those moments is on the horizon, it’s worth waiting for it, as it may give your SLA a better chance of success.
Frame it as a benefit to everyone
The content team should feel the benefits of an SLA immediately. Stakeholders need to understand what’s in it for them too – and there’s a genuine answer to that. Clearer briefs mean faster turnarounds. Agreed review processes mean fewer rounds of amends. Knowing what to expect means fewer surprises. An SLA isn’t the content team putting up barriers. It’s everyone agreeing to work better together.
Making your content SLA stick
Getting stakeholders on side is the perennial challenge of content work. SLAs are no different. Even with the best co-creation process and a senior sponsor behind you, some people will be sceptical, some will forget, and some will simply carry on as before. That’s not a reason not to do it – it’s just the reality of changing how an organisation works.
Start small
Give yourself permission to start small. You don’t need a perfect, comprehensive SLA from day one. Start with the components that will make the biggest difference to your team right now — a service list, a definition of urgent, a lead time for new requests — and build from there. An imperfect SLA that people actually use is worth more than a thorough one that sits in a folder somewhere.
Don’t worry if not everyone gets on board
Accept that not everyone will come on board straight away – and that’s alright. What matters in the early stages is finding the stakeholders who get it, working well with them, and letting that build momentum. Visible wins – a project that ran smoothly because the brief was complete, a campaign that landed on time because the lead time was respected – do more to build buy-in than any amount of explanation.
When people don’t follow the process, treat it as a conversation rather than a confrontation. ‘We agreed that urgent means X, and this doesn’t quite meet that bar – let’s talk about how we schedule it’ is a very different dynamic to a flat no. The SLA gives you something neutral to point to. Use it.
Note the successes
The real measure of success is adherence – not whether people have read the document, but whether they’re behaving differently. Over time, the other signals follow: fewer last-minute requests, the content team feeling less reactive, and – gradually – leadership starting to see content as a function that plans, prioritises, and delivers, rather than one that just reacts.
Update regularly
Finally, treat the SLA as a living document. Build in a regular moment to review it – every six to twelve months is usually enough – and make it a collaborative exercise when you do. Teams change, organisations change, and the volume and type of requests changes too. The goal isn’t a perfect document. It’s an agreement that reflects how things actually work, and that everyone trusts enough to lean on.
An SLA is an act of care
If you’ve made it this far, you probably recognise the problem an SLA is trying to solve. The relentless requests, the unclear priorities, the content team that never quite gets to do the work that matters. An SLA won’t fix all of that overnight – but it’s a practical step that a content team can take towards a healthier, more sustainable way of working.
To recap the key points:
- A content SLA is a shared agreement about how content requests work — covering what the team does, how long things take, how work is prioritised, and what both sides are committing to
- Build it from what’s actually happening, not from scratch – your inbox and your recent requests will tell you more than a blank document will
- Co-create it with stakeholders rather than presenting a done thing, and find a senior sponsor to back it
- Start small, expect some resistance, and treat non-compliance as a conversation rather than a confrontation
- Review it regularly – it’s a living document, not a one-time exercise
And underneath all of that: an SLA is an act of care. For your team, yes – but also for the work, and for the people the work is ultimately for. When everyone knows where they stand, there’s more space for the things that actually matter: the thinking, the craft, the content that makes a real difference.
If you’re ready to build one, the toolkit that accompanies this guide will help you get started. And if you do build one – or if you’ve already got one and want to share what you’ve learned – I’d love to hear from you.
