What I learned delivering Scroll’s modular content design training
Image by Jason Goodman at Unsplash
We recently delivered Scroll’s new training to a local council. Here’s how it worked out.
By Andrew Charlesworth
Andrew is a content strategist and Scroll consultant. He specialises in helping organisations measure and improve the impact of their content and efficiently manage its life cycle. He's trained content designers from public and private sector, journalists, and PR execs.
Scroll’s content design training, in practice
I recently delivered 2 days of Scroll’s new on-site, modular, bespoke training for Richmond and Wandsworth Council’s content and comms teams.
Driven by the needs of the 7 attendees, the modules covered:
the basics of writing for the public sector
assuring, controlling and measuring content quality
user research
analysis of content processes
lifecycle management
stakeholder management
The course blended conventional training with practical exercises and strategy workshops. It drew on lessons from manufacturing and aviation among other diverse fields. Even Napoleon’s doomed Moscow campaign made an appearance (think of it as a complex user journey).
Whereas there is sometimes animosity between comms and digital content teams in central government, training Richmond and Wandsworth’s comms and content teams together helped them find common ground, share common frustrations, and set themselves up for future collaboration.
Training driven by user needs
The reason Scroll has developed modular bespoke training is because every content team is different. The organisations they work for are different, as is the role they fulfil. The expectations of their content stakeholders are different. The technologies they have available are different.
Sometimes it seems as though content teams are as diverse as the audiences they serve. And just as content is driven by user needs, so should training.
I’ve trained teams in small and large private sector firms, digital and PR agencies, and central and local government, so I know one-size training does not fit all teams.
Working with the teams at Richmond and Wandsworth Councils brought home to me how content maturity varies between organisations, and between the different aspects of content strategy and organisation.
For example, as with many content teams, the Richmond and Wandsworth team struggles with a publishing process that relegates content design to a stage after all the vital decisions have been made. That makes it difficult to design in users’ needs from the start, and creates stakeholder management issues when content designers make user-need-driven amendments to pre-approved drafts.
Together, we mapped their existing processes, worked out what causes the team pain and where it occurs in the process. We examined remedies, including what management effort would be required to put them into effect.
However, the team is streets ahead of some central government departments I’ve worked with in terms of focussing on managing their content estate, rather than just publishing ever more content.
They already use a quality assurance stage in the content process (a la the GDSs ‘discuss and review’ step) for everything but the simplest of content changes.
Furthermore, there was little new I could teach them about how to optimise their scant resources by prioritising the content for the most popular tasks used by the largest number of users. And they already make use of SiteImprove analytics to measure content performance.
Regional advantage
Once the poor relation in terms of content best practice, local authorities’ content teams look much improved.
One aspect stands out: despite a lack of cash (or maybe because of it), local authorities have access to modern, lightweight content management tools that are a rarity in better-funded central government.
I’ve found content teams in central government departments are held back by the paucity of content management technology. Whitehall is barely worthy of being called a CMS. Mainstream is not much of an improvement.
If central government departments are to improve the basics of content lifecycle management, let alone embrace structured content, intelligent content, a degree of personalisation in services, or a level of automation, they will have to migrate away from their early 2000s-era content storage to a modern CMS which isn’t developed in-house.
The alternatives are a steady drain on resources as ever more content professionals are required to maintain a bloated, creaking digital estate; or to degrade the service level and user experience at just the time when digital services are most needed to make the state more efficient.
The latter would be a sad outcome given the world-leading legacy of GOV.UK.
Talk to us about improving user experience by upskilling your content team.
Read more about Scroll’s content design training