Including team biography pages on your website is a wonderful way to put a human face on your company and to provide potential clients, colleagues, and vendors with additional insight into who you are and how you roll.

However, a good bio page requires some degree of individual content gathered from every team member who is featured.  And while web designers can do a lot of things, we can’t just invent content (especially personalized content) out of thin air.

How then, should you go about gathering the information you need for team bio pages?

1. Know Your Roster

When you get started, make sure you know everyone who will have a bio.  Turn this roster into a list.  It will make it easier to track what content you need to gather.

2. Understand the Format

If you’re going to be responsible for gathering bio information for the team, make sure you know what’s needed.

Will you be including links to works published?  How about team member photographs?  Whatever it is will need some sort of preparation.  Remember to build things like research time and photo shoots into your plans.

3. Set Deadlines

The day information is supposed to go live or be delivered to your developer is not the day you should be gathering it from your team.

Be sure to announce a deadline that gives you time to track down stragglers, compensate for missing material, and format your results before they are do due.

4. Make a Form

Once you know the information you’ll be putting online, you can figure out what information you need from to receive directly from the rest of the team.

Use this knowledge to put together a form with clear, directed questions and easy to understand length limitations.

5. Consider Interviews

Sometimes the best way to get information from members of your company is to ask them questions in one-to-one.

This approach is especially useful if you have a professional writer on the project, as they can take simple answers and weave them into an insightful narrative.

Interviews also come to a definite end.  So long as you can ask all of your questions in one sitting, the only way someone will be late is if they never show up to the interview at all.

6. Keep it Short

The number of questions you ask should be kept to a minimum.

The 2010 Census is only 10 questions long because the Census Bureau has learned this lesson the hard way.  The more questions they ask the fewer replies they get.

7. Don’t Ask for Information You Already Have

If you want to include someone’s job description or the number of years they’ve been with the company, you can look it up just as easily as they can.

For that matter, a little basic research may also be able to net you degrees earned, honors awarded, and works published (although just because you have this information doesn’t mean you need to post it online for all to see - remember your format).

8. Provide Examples

If you want playful biographies, consider bringing in the stage bill from a local community theater production.

For less exuberant overviews of interests and circumstances, book sleeves may be the way to go.

Whatever you’re looking for, talking about length and tone will never have the same impact as illustrating what you mean with an example or two.

9. Give Yourself Time to Edit

It is an unwritten rule of autobiographies that no two people will describe themselves in the same amount of space, to the same detail, or in the same voice.  If you are looking to present a uniform face, it may be necessary to make tweaks to the information receive.

More importantly, you should make sure that every bio has been tested for readability and has gone through a spell check.   Your people are just as much of your brand as your product.  If it looks like they can’t spell, that will reflect poorly on the company as a whole.

10. Expect Things to Go Wrong

As with any other type of project management, contingency planning is critical.

If someone misses a photo shoot, will there be time for a make-up before the final deadline?

How about the team member who simply cannot be bothered to reply?  Can you use a “fill in the blank” biography, or will you need to corner the delinquent after a meeting and insist on some answers?

By building in time for things to go wrong, you can ensure that you, at least, will be on time with your finished project.

Conclusion

Gathering content from every member of your team can be a daunting task, but with well reasoned planning and a little persistence it can be very rewarding.