NOTE: Cumbria Council has now been replaced by 2 unitary authorities: Cumberland, and Westmorland and Furness.
Content design training and strategy at Cumbria Council
Scroll developed and delivered a multi-module training schedule to help Cumbia leverage user experience, manage content and work with stakeholders as they migrated from 7 sites down to 2.
The challenge
Scroll initially delivered content design training to Cumbria County Council. This led to Cumbria identifying 3 things that needed to be in place so they could make best use of the training, make the web content team more effective, and manage stakeholder expectations:
Website proposition – brief articulation of who the Cumbria site is for, its purpose and the content it should include
Publishing process – a ‘map’ of the steps to publish content which everyone agrees to and uses
Management endorsement of the proposition and process.
All the above would provide strategic and operational frameworks to training, aimed at raising the quality of content across Cumbria’s county and district council sites.
The benefits included:
providing a better experience for the users of Cumbria’s sites
helping the web content team raise quality and better manage consistency
optimising the relationship between the web content team and service areas
establishing sound web publishing practices ahead of when the 7 district councils and one county council merged into 2 unitary authorities
The solution
Training focussed on stakeholder management. This was identified as the number one issue for the content team in the first session.
Scroll developed a multi-module training schedule covering:
content design basics
the impact of user research on content design
publishing process
stakeholder management
briefing tools
thinking like a user
accessibility
2i and discuss and review tools
site proposition
co-developing content with subject experts
content lifecycle management
measuring content performance
What they say about working with Scroll
“Scroll’s help and strategic overview was invaluable – their bespoke training has given us the tools and confidence to make sure content serves (and continues to serve) the user first.”
Craig Barker, Acting Senior Manager - Digital and Customer Experience, Cumbria Council
Results
Cumbria has a well-trained and newly enthused web content team equipped with a ‘toolbox’ of techniques for raising user experience, managing content, and managing stakeholders.
District and county teams have a set of content design guidelines to ensure consistent user experience as they migrate from 7 sites to 2.