[*Note: this post by Holly Hayden, marketing director at D.C.-based law firm PilieroMazza PLLC, began as a JD Supra Tip of the Week on how to motivate attorneys to sustain their online writing efforts. We liked Holly's suggestions so much, we thought we'd share them, in full, here with you:]
It was an occasionally tedious uphill battle, but I finally managed to convince our attorneys - or, more importantly, the partners - that we needed to join the party and begin sharing our content online. We decided that, to have any chance of success, we needed every attorney in the firm to contribute to our new blog.
Not everyone was thrilled.
We already produced a quarterly newsletter and contributed six to eight articles a year for a national newsletter in one of our biggest practice areas. Now I was asking our attorneys also to write a blog post once every two months. We set up a schedule so that, each week, two attorneys would submit an article for the blog. In order for this to work, I convinced our managing and senior partners that they needed to write a blog post as well, instead of just assigning it to an associate.
...attorneys were asked simply to write about what they know.
We tried to make this process as flexible as possible, allowing attorneys to edit newsletter articles and repost them to the blog. We didn’t assign a word count; attorneys were asked simply to write about what they know. It didn’t matter if it was 100 words or 1000 words.
We are now 18 months into this adventure and everyone is basically on board. I have attorneys who turn in their blog posts right on time and others who are several weeks late and need prodding to turn in an article before their rotation comes around again.
This has worked out wonderfully as we have had winners who initially hated writing...
Using JD Supra analytics, I decided we needed to have some fun and reward the attorney whose writing got the most visibility each quarter. I obtained a blog trophy (an actual trophy!) and each quarter I hand out 
awards to the authors of our top five articles.
The runners-up get branded swag, either our own or items I pick up at trade shows. The winner gets: 1) to keep the trophy in their office for the quarter and, of course, 2) bragging rights. This has worked out wonderfully as we have had winners who initially hated writing posts; and we've also awarded it to that quiet, smart attorney down the hall who doesn’t socialize much.
We also started the “Late Blog Award” which is awarded to the attorney who is the most behind on submitting their article. This is a broken branded clock with a tacky sticker that reads: “Write That Blog!
Most law firms have a lot of “large” personalities, so we've had some fun with this process and now there are attorneys trying to compete to see who will win next quarter. In fact, last quarter, the attorney who won the Top Blog award also won the Late Blog award.
Thankfully, she has moved the late award on to the next recipient: our managing partner!
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