Using Data Governance Frameworks Against Data Breaches

A snapshot of the original article.

During my work with Bank of America's cybersecurity team, one area of our effort was rewriting existing content: optimizing articles for search and making intimidating cybersecurity education more accessible to all Bank of America customers.

Take this cybersecurity journal article, for example. "How to Protect Your Data" (page 4-9 in this PDF) was written to business leaders on the importance of automation and strategies to protect against data breaches. It was originally written at an 11th grade reading level with a low Flesch-Kincaid reading ease score.

A snapshot of my detailed copy document.

The following detailed copy document of "Using Data Governance Frameworks Against Data Breaches" shows my rewrite which brought the reading level down to a 9th grade reading level. The Flesch-Kincaid reading ease score went from 55 to 69, a 25.45% increase in reading ease. Additionally, the word count went down from 1656 to 1287, a 22.28% decrease. Additionally, our recommendation included a more digital-first approach: moving away from a PDF journal and encouraging reimagining the journal as articles. At the end of the detailed copy document, we included an SEO-friendly page title and meta-description. Please note, this version of the detailed copy document does not include tracked changes. We send clean and tracked changes versions to the client—this is the clean version.

I loved working in this way so that we could clearly show our clients the copywriting suggestions. We proved the impact of those suggestions on accessibility metrics. These suggestions were also based off keyword research and an SEO audit. And finally, making sure the client had everything they needed, we fixed some back-end content strategy with optimized page titles and meta-descriptions.

In this project I refined our agency's approach to detailed copy documents for our clients. In this template, we could more clearly articulate our changes and rationale.