From one customer story to an editorial system

The most valuable part of a customer story is often not the finished article or video. It is the evidence, access and relationships underneath it — and what you do with them next.

I have been involved in Sage’s EFL customer-story work from fairly early on. My first contribution was research: looking at clubs, working out where we already had customer relationships, and identifying where there might be a genuine business story worth pursuing. I handed that work across to Elizabeth Ryan, who did the much harder relationship-building work of contacting clubs, finding the right people and helping turn those possibilities into real stories.

Some of that work is now becoming visible. AFC Wimbledon is the latest example, with a customer story around Sage 50, a Sage Advice feature and a hero video about the club’s work helping to develop the next generation of female coaches through LeaD ON. More Wimbledon stories are planned around the product and community work.

What interests me from an Editorial Intelligence perspective is not simply that one relationship has produced several assets. It is what becomes possible when you stop treating each output as a separate content job.

The visit changed the texture of the work

I also had the chance to visit AFC Wimbledon at Cherry Red Records Stadium as part of the supporting work. It is a great ground, but what stayed with me more was how welcoming people were and how strongly the club’s community identity came through once I was actually there.

That is difficult to pick up from a brief alone. You can read that AFC Wimbledon is fan-owned, or read about its community programmes, but being at the stadium gives those facts a different texture. You see the people around the club, how the organisation presents itself and how closely its history seems to sit alongside what it is trying to build now.

One small conversation stuck with me. I spoke to a supporter who had known Wimbledon in its earlier form and who had later picked up signage work with the rebuilt club. It was not a formal interview or something I went there expecting to capture, but it said something useful about the continuity between supporters, local work and the life of the club.

I would not use one conversation to make a sweeping claim about AFC Wimbledon. But it reminded me why being physically close to the subject still matters. Some of the most useful evidence is not sitting neatly inside the original brief waiting to be extracted.

One relationship can answer several editorial jobs

The Wimbledon outputs are doing different things. The video creates a human and emotional entry point into the coaching programme. The customer story provides product and organisational proof. The Advice article can spend more time on the operating story and the decisions behind it. Social gives people a route into the work in the first place.

That distinction matters because content teams often organise themselves around formats. We commission an article, make a video, create a campaign page and cut some social posts. Once those assets ship, the project is treated as complete and much of the useful source material disappears into transcripts, folders and old briefs.

The expensive part was rarely the format. It was getting access to the people, building enough trust for them to talk openly, understanding the organisation, asking useful questions and capturing evidence that somebody else could not simply recreate from a search query.

That is the scarce layer.

The editorial opportunity is to route that scarce evidence intelligently rather than treating every destination as a new starting point.

Customer stories can become source systems

I increasingly think of a strong customer story less as a finished asset and more as a source system.

A good interview can contain product evidence, operational detail, decisions, tensions, outcomes, useful quotes and details about how the organisation actually works. It will often contain material that never makes it into the first published story because that story has one specific job to do.

If the underlying evidence is captured properly, structured and kept accessible, it can continue to support useful editorial work after the first deliverable ships. That does not mean squeezing ten pieces of content out of every interview. Producing more for the sake of volume is not the point.

The better question is whether the same piece of evidence can legitimately answer another audience need, and whether there is a useful destination for it.

That changes reuse from a production tactic into an editorial judgement.

The next layer is a connected body of evidence

This is also how I am thinking about the next stage of the EFL work.

I am currently working on a Sage hub that will bring together business lessons from different clubs across the season. The aim is not to reproduce existing customer stories on another page, or to force every club into the same template. Each club should contribute something distinctive, grounded in what we actually learned from the people running it.

AFC Wimbledon, for example, can tell us something about fan ownership, trust in financial information and investment in community programmes. Another club may surface a stronger lesson about planning, growth, operational pressure or the complexity of running several parts of an organisation at once.

As more stories emerge, those individual pieces can start to form a connected body of evidence about what it takes to run football clubs as organisations and businesses.

That is more interesting to me than simply adding more assets to a content calendar.

Sponsorship can create relationships and access that open up stories an editorial team might otherwise never reach. The editorial job is to make sure what we learn through that access does not disappear after launch week, but becomes useful knowledge that can be preserved, connected and built on.

AI helps with the routing, not the evidence

There is an AI point here too.

AI makes it much easier for me to work across transcripts, identify recurring themes, compare interviews, create evidence tables and map source material to possible formats. It can help me see that one detail from a customer interview might strengthen an Advice article, answer a GEO question or become a useful part of a wider club story.

That is valuable, but AI cannot manufacture the thing that gives the system value. It did not create the relationship with AFC Wimbledon. It did not build the trust needed to get people talking. It did not put me in the stadium talking to a supporter about his history with the club.

Without that human evidence layer, better routing just moves generic information around more efficiently.

The Editorial Intelligence model I keep coming back to is therefore fairly simple:

capture valuable evidence → structure it → route it to the right editorial job → preserve it for later reuse → add new evidence over time.

The output might be an article, video, customer story, social post or campaign page. The format comes later; the evidence system comes first.

The first asset should not be the end of the story

The Wimbledon launch is satisfying because it makes a long-running piece of collaborative work visible. Elizabeth and the wider team have done the relationship and production work that turns early research into something people can actually watch, read and share.

For me, though, the bigger lesson is what happens after that first story is published.

The goal is not to get more content from every interview. It is to make sure valuable evidence does not disappear when the first asset ships.

If we can keep the evidence alive, preserve the context around it and route it into the places where it is genuinely useful, one customer relationship can become part of a much larger editorial system.

That is what I hope this next layer of the EFL work can become.

Update, October 2026: the hub is live

The hub is now live as The lessons behind the badge. It takes one business lesson from each of three clubs: Tranmere Rovers on connecting purpose, people and performance, Club Doncaster Foundation on how small changes create lasting impact, and AFC Wimbledon on building pathways rather than one-off opportunities. I developed the concept, the club lessons and the copy, then mapped them into the page’s production structure. Colleagues did the club relationships, video, assets and build that turned it into something people can use.

The more interesting test was what survived production: the evidence choosing each lesson, a request for more Sage answered with more precise proof rather than more promotion, and the editorial idea holding through a CMS build. Wimbledon’s lesson also ended up being about pathways rather than the fan ownership and financial trust I expected when I first wrote this piece, because the evidence decided. I’ve written the fuller account, including a fair objection to the shared template, in Behind the badge: what an editorial idea has to survive.

Publication is not the same as impact. The page shows the editorial model surviving a real production process; it does not yet show what readers do with it.