Content strategy at HSE
Scroll provided consultancy for senior management and training for the digital content team at HSE Ireland. We also wrote a style manual and a voice and tone guide.
The challenge
The HSE provides all of Ireland’s public health services. It’s a big remit, and their audiences are diverse. Their digital content covers medical services, health advice and campaigns. They also provide corporate content for medical staff and HSE employees.
Senior management needed help with their content transformation project. This included advice on developing a content strategy that would meet their needs and the needs of their users.
HSE’s distributed model for content production and publishing was problematic. It was hard to assure quality and standards across their digital estate. They struggled to govern their content, and to know whether it was meeting user needs.
What they say about working with Scroll
“Working with Scroll has been fantastic! They understood exactly what we needed and delivered great work. Their support and expertise has been invaluable in helping us to take the next step with our content and digital strategy.
Our content design training and content manual has empowered us to make great content and be relentless about our users’ needs.”
Brian Malone, Digital Content Experience Manager, HSE Ireland
The solution
Scroll spent a lot of time in early discussion with the HSE management, to work out how best we could help them achieve their aims. We agreed that we would supply management consultancy (to help work on strategy, governance and to help them build a team). Then we would provide training for the new team in content design and agile working. We would also write a style manual and voice and tone guide, to help set and embed new standards.
In the management consultancy training, we aimed to equip HSE management with the tools they needed to successfully carry out a content transformation project.
We worked with management to create a proposition for the website and create a draft roadmap for the project. We set out how they could create a content strategy based on meeting user needs. We covered issues of stakeholder management and internal communications – how to really effect this change in the organisation. We also covered agile ways of working, how to organise a content team and how to set up the right workflow and governance.
We were simultaneously working on the style and voice guidance.
The HSE wanted a strong set of rules to work from, to give their team a mandate and to say ‘This is how we do things.’ Scroll spent a long time exploring the current HSE site to understand its strengths and weaknesses.
The style guide we wrote included non-negotiable digital principles – from using plain English to only publishing content that meets user need – and a set of hard rules for language and structure on the site. The voice and tone guidance included a set of tone variations, showing how and where the HSE should vary their tone (for example, to show compassion in content around ill health).
The training for the content team referenced and reinforced the style manual. This training covered identifying user needs, designing with data, writing for the web and agile content production.
To check that the style manual was clear and actionable, Scroll ran 2 content review workshops with the HSE team. The team developed new content based on the style guide, and Scroll helped them review it. This meant we could help HSE apply the new style manual and also iterate the guide where necessary.