Need Technical Documentation Money-generating Ideas
Nov 10th, 2006 | By AmyLisk | Category: DiscussionDoes anyone have any ideas for turning the technical documentation area of a company into a profit-making center? Thanks!
Does anyone have any ideas for turning the technical documentation area of a company into a profit-making center? Thanks!
This is a good question, because often technical manuals and other product-related information seem like costs without profit. However, if you take away the manuals from a software product, the appeal and value of the software falls. Consumers will pay more for software if it comes with a useful, helpful manual.
Additionally, when the manuals and guides help employees be more efficient, that saves a company money. So it’s not as if technical documentation is an extra cost with no payoff — although it sometimes seems that way and is viewed that way.
How can you be more direct with the profit-making? You might start selling the manuals as an additional fee on top of the software/product. But can you imagine buying a desk from Office Depot for $200 and then having to pay an extra $10 for instructions on how to put it together? I think that sort of cheapness would do more harm to the company than any profit derived from the manual.
On the other hand, charging for manuals would really give us the burden of making our help content worth it.
This is an excellent topic for discussion as I have believed for some time that we (technical communicators) would be seen in a different light if our end product generated revenue.
As for the question of how to implement this, I think that would depend on what type of company and/or industry is being discussed.
If, for instance, you work for a company that produces something that may require the end user to need training, your documentation department might also be able to write training materials which theoretically could be sold.
The idea of selling standard user documentation would only be feasible if there was some compelling reason for someone to buy it. It would have to be approached from a value-added perspective and even then I’m not sure how you sell something that has always been included as an expected part of a given package.
Most people would agree that information is power. Access to information is therefore access to power. Using this access wisely creates opportunities for a revenue stream or disclosing information in a timely fashion creates a business opportunity.
Regardless of the approach, it boils down to this: if you have something that others want it is up to you to find ways to create a market for it. Sales of documentation, while making economic sense, is not what end users expect. Deviating from that norm is risky, especially when the competition offers free documentation.
So it is somewhat of a dilemma. When should documentation be given away and when should you leverage against its value? Training is of course one logical answer but are there others? How can leverageing your information at the proper time create business opportunities and thereby grow your business?
My company takes a middle of the road approach.
We treat our online Help file as the primary info source. We single source to printed documents and create PDFs of the documents. We deploy both the online Help and PDFs with the product. Then on our website, we sell printed and bound copies of the printed documents.
When we initially offered the books for sale, I felt that people with an ounce of sense and a printer would never buy these books. I was wrong. We don’t make loads of money off of these books. However, one quarter when we were short on a budget goal, the sale of the books put us at our number. Who knew that the Doc department could save the day?