Sarah Lay » Website

Stop, collaborate & listen

Sarah — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 10:49:58 +0000

Out of one of those random Twitter conversations comes another potentially useful place to share experience and knowledge with other local gov folk.

We’re currently gearing up for the project to redesign / rebuild our public website and I tweeted a couple of people at other authorities I knew were a little further down the line or recently relaunched. Within a day we’d gathered a number of like minds and Liz Azyan had suggested we find a space to share more fully.

From this Ken Eastwood set up a Huddle for us all to join, discuss and share our experiences and knowledge around redesigning council websites.

There are already some interesting and useful discussions happening around user research and testing, technology, information architecture and content migration. Potentially this could help share good practice, hints and tips between authorities and somewhere in there is a saving I’m sure

If you work in local government and have experience to share or questions to ask about redesigning a council website contact me or Ken Eastwood for an invite to Huddle.

Getting to know you

Sarah — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 11:49:34 +0000

When was the last time you took a stroll through your website and looked around at what was there? Did you look below the surface at not just what was there but evidence of how it was working (or not) for your site visitors?

It’s one of those tasks that is often pushed down the To Do list or is put off because of the scale of the challenge, particularly when you manage an organisation’s entire web presence or intranet. Sometimes it’s easier to assume you know your website, because you’re the manager and that’s your job, than set aside the time to plan and execute a content audit, analyse the findings and get your recommendations taken up.

I have just started looking at auditing my organisation’s website, as part of the work toward my MA dissertation (more about both on the About page). I’m collecting a load of information about the content (initially a sample of 300ish pages) including mapping the structure, where the content is stored server-wise, what type of content it is, keywords, unique page views over a three month period, feedback from users, enquiries into our contact centre and elements of content on the page (such as documents, images etc).

As well as collecting all this information there is a more heuristic evaluation involved in checking the content for accessibility and usability, currency, compliance with our style guide, whether it is (or could be) transactional, who the owner / author is and which business goal or user need this is supporting.

Putting aside the academic reasons for doing this audit from an organisational point of view the findings should help to identify content which needs removing or archiving certain areas of content, improving areas which should be but aren’t working for the site visitor and formulating a plan for development for specific content and the governance of it as well as for the site as a whole.

I’ve made a first pass over the 300 pages in my sample and the findings weren’t unexpected but were a little surprising in places. Some pages got a lot more external traffic than I’d assumed they did, others which support high priority services barely registered with visitors (based on stats and visitor and channel feedback).

There were also some likely candidates for archiving simply because the information was not current. Of course the content owner may be able to update it to give some current context making it relevant to visitors.

I’m looking forward to getting to know this content better as I head back into the audit for the heuristic elements and linking it to the business goals and user needs. It’s making for an interesting dissertation but also knowledge without which I’m not sure I’d ever been really, truly managing the organisation’s web content or supporting authors in our service areas where they are responsible for managing the content.

There is always loads of talk about how creating channel shift to online will create efficiencies for local government / public sector but one of those efficiences surely needs to be in the way we manage and nurture the online content? How can we do that if we don’t know what is there or how people are already using (or we’re failing to support them using) it?

Crisis comms online

Sarah — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:53:51 +0000

This UKGovCamp 10 Session by Al Smith was focused mainly on how council’s responded to January’s Big Freeze in terms of online communication.

Al had some interesting experience and innovations to share around communicating quickly information on school closures, road gritting and any affected services.

The group talked about how in a rapidly occurring situation online communication was best placed to deliver information first and respond to any inquiries from the public. Indeed, in some councils the online communicators were delivering information out of hours before press officers and others were even aware of a developing situation.

This way of working was also discussed – online communicators working in isolation are an unsustainable plan for crisis communications. Too often they are left out of the loop and get information too late or not at all meaning the benefits of the online channel are lost.

Al shared his experience of being able to work out of hours with a line to chief officers and the on-duty press officer. He is also involved in emergency planning so the online work can be included in the plan but also he is aware of where the authority is at in terms of response.

The discussion strayed further into the territory of emergency planning bu eventually came back round to how online could be used to gather information into the council as well as disseminate outward. I briefly outlined a change we were planning on making to how headteachers report school closures, using our secure schools’ extranet to which they all have access. Bringing the information in from this source would mean we could repurpose and quickly send out by RSS, by SMS, and across a number of online channels.

We’re not the only council looking to make changes in this area. Along with us there are many others who are looking at making content delivery not just through the online channel but also make it mobile (I blogged about our stats on visits from mobile and other devices during the January snow). From this a discussion on digital inclusion began with differing views across the participants about whether online was a waste of time or not given how few people can access it well. Ally Hook gave some interesting information about the number of people joining the council’s Facebook page when an unexploded WW2 bomb closed parts of the city.

There were a number of interesting points I took away from the session in terms of developing our online communications in the face of a crisis as well as integrating more fully with the council’s general contingency plan. There were some great social web innovations around reporting the uksnow but these ideas could be applied to other situations. It has also helped consolidate the thoughts floating around my head about not just thinking of online as web, or social media, or mobile – it is all of these, none of these and more.

LocalGov group hug*

Sarah — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:35:26 +0000

A slightly unusual name for the first session I attended at UKGovCamp10, suggested and led by someone I won’t name as they’d come unofficially rather than on behalf of their organisation.

The session was intended to share progress, experience and tips on social media,online and technology for local government. The focus was on how to get middle and senior management to see the value in social media for communication.

In this respect, for me, it was a familiar topic for a govcamp but this wasn’t a bad thing. It’s always useful to be reminded that we’re not all at the same point on the journey and those of us further ahead haven’t necessarily passed on all our tips to everyone just yet.

The session was a real mixture of people from those of us who’ve made some progress with projects or ideas and others who are struggling to do anything at all due to lock downs and risk avoidance.

There were some good tips shared on starting to monitor what is being said about an organisation and the Derby social media map by Tim Cooper and Paul Coles was cited as a great way of giving stakeholders a visual overview of the reach of social media. (You can find the social media map on the Derby and Derbyshire Social Media Cafe website).

Ideas around calculating opportunity to view figures and other marketing-style reporting of social media. Choosing a project and, here’s a GovCamp phrase, Just F**king Doing It (JFDI), in order to show benefits rather than presenting an abstract concept was also muted by several of us with stuff already underway. There are good examples of use by different councils and organisations and these could be tapped into if you can’t JFDI yourself – an example with a tangible result may take away the ‘Emporers’ New Clothes’ feel for risk averse organisations.

My raising of (another GovCamp phrase) ‘forgivness being easier than permission’ got mixed reactions in the room and on Twitter. In retrospect I may have sounded more blase about JFDI than I really am. It is a big step, and I’ve not got so many projects behind me that I’ve forgotten the fear and the risk of the first time.

A big part of my feeling able to take that risk is the support network and expertise I’ve found through GovCamps and networks like Twitter.The group shared some of the resource points we go to – Liz Azyan’s amazingly wonderful and extensive LGEO Research site, IDeA Communities of Practice, pubsectorblogs, Twitter and, hopefully in the future, the Knowledge Hub.

(I shared our Local Elections 2009 example as part of this discussion.)

The general feeling at the end of the session was that most local gov organisations are still at the stage of having only one, or a small group, of passionate people determined to move forward in the right way with online communications and social media. Through sharing across local government (and with the wider public sector too) we can support the individuals and provide evidence to enhance the confidence of organisations in communicating in this new channel.

Perhaps once communicating online seems more normal than innovative we can move onto engagement and other ways the social web can transform local government.

* No physical hugging took place as a part of this session

Snow…to go!

Sarah — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 11:29:11 +0000

So, the transition from 2009 into 2010 was dressed in two jumpers and mittens as The Big Freeze hit the UK.

The snow which had made a white Christmas a fun-filled festive treat turned the return to work flicker between tedious and treacherous on the disruption scale.

There have already been posts about how council services and comms coped with the bad weather – there is a good round-up of those by Kev Campbell-Wright.

In the last week, since the weather started cheering the heck up, I’ve been having a look at our visitor stats for the period. Yes, we got more visitors than usual, to the relevant areas of the website (latest update, gritting and school closures pages) and lots of them were coming via our social media channels (mainly Twitter).

What was interesting to me, and something I hadn’t fully anticipated, was the devices which people were using to visit the website.

While a massive 97% was coming from computers ( 92% Windows OS; 4% Mac and 1 % Linux) not so much the volume of traffic but the diversity of devices making up the other 3% was slightly surprising and certainly a big change for us.

Smart phones made up lots of of the list – following in the next four places in the chart were iPhone, iPod, Symbian and Android. Further down the list with under a hundred visits from each are Sony OS, Blackberry, Playstation 3, Samsung, Nintendo Wii, Nokia, LG, Playstation Poratble and Sidekick.

Plenty of mobile phones of both the smart and, erm, not-so-smart phones. I expected this although the range and the percentage, while still small, was higher than we’re used to seeing.

I hadn’t anticipated the traffic from gaming systems (and the iPod). I’d like to know more about who these visitors are.

We’re reviewing the online response we made in the cold snap to see what we could improve on in preparation for a repeat (or some other situation) and delivering content and information in a way suitable for mobile and other devices will have to be a part of that.

Has anyone else looked at their visitor traffic by device / operating system?

Power to the People (reprise)

Sarah — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:35:42 +0000

I first blogged asking for people to share their experience of devolving authorship responsibility back in June. From the response I had then and since it seems that this is a thorny issue that many of us (as local government web people) are grappling with.

As a theory, creating content for an organisation’s website and sharing responsibility for its maintenance by devolving the authorship (allowing many to write and publish) is a pretty fine idea. However, for it to work well the authorship needs to be given to the right people otherwise you end up with no content, bad content, unhappy authors, an unhappy central team and a spiral of training-correcting-retraining which means the model may as well not be in place.

There are lots of reasons why this theory shouldn’t be written off merely because it is hard to implement and maintain. The main one is probably this: councils have hundreds of services they could or should publish information about online and the staff in those services are the ones with the knowledge about how they work. They are in a good position to know what information they are commonly asked for or what a citizen needs to know in order to access that service or carry out a transaction.

What they don’t have (in most cases) is the specialist knowledge and experience of presenting that information to meet a variety of online targets or the time / interest / empowerment to add online publishing as a task on top of their unrelated workload. This means a central team either ends up re-writing the content to make is meet accessibility, usability and house style; there is a long cycle of training where neither the trainer or the trainee end up happy; content gets stuck in a workflow because the central team aren’t happy to publish and the author can’t or won’t make changes. In other words the model stops being efficient and starts evolving into a beast.

Of course those issues could be dealt with by taking away any involvement by a central team. In essence this means deciding to no longer manage the content of your website and in the end this will lead to the citizen and the organisation losing out. The citizen may lose out due to poor or out of date information or no information at all and through a lack of consistency and therefore confidence in the brand. The organisation will find itself failing to work to optimum efficiency with duplicated information, some services not represented at all, reputation issues and (probably) breaches of accessibility guidelines.

So, what to do? We discussed this at length in the small session I ran at LocalGovCamp Lincoln. It was interesting to hear views from North Devon, Coventry City and East Lindsay councils on the models they had in place and how they were working. We all seemed to be struggling to get the right people into the author roles and therefore be able to balance efficiently with central editorial control.

I don’t think we came to any firm conclusions about how to tackle changing an existing model or how to engage stakeholders in the importance of this issue to the success of the website / online channel. What did come out of it, for me, was:

What works for one organisation probably won’t work for another. In fact, in big organisations what works for one department may not work for another.
In the same vein, I’ve come to the conclusion that what works for your external site in terms of authorship may not work for your intranet or smaller sites. Some of the success may depend on the workflow here and that should be considered as a vital ingredient in implementing a devolved authorship, not a separate decision.
I’m not aware of any way of trialing or testing to find out what is an appropriate author model for a department, organisation or site. If anyone knows of a way of analysing before implementing I would be really pleased to hear about it!
I’m also not aware of anyone who thinks they have successfully devolved authorship. If anyone would like to share an example of an organisation in which the model is working well from all view points I would also be happy to hear about this – especially if you want to share the secret of the success!
It is easy to get carried away talking about the newer channels of the digital stream but if we can’t produce the right content in the right way at the right time either through devolved or centralised authoring we won’t have anything worth publishing to the wider social web.

I’m still interested to hear others experience or view of devolved authorship so please join the discussion through the comments section. Thanks!

Do councils need websites?

Sarah — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:10:01 +0000

This was the question posed by Peter McClymont for his LocalGovCamp Lincoln session and the answer may not be as easy to come by as you think, even when presented to a room of council webbies.

In fact it isn’t even quite the question which needs answering. A more appropriate way of phrasing it, as quickly became apparent in the session, is Do Councils Need the Website They Have Right Now?

Councils have huge amounts of services and information which they need to get to residents. They also have tight budgets to meet, lots of requirements from central Government, limited resources but in most cases a big desire to do things right. Having a website helps to meet lots of these requirements with the limitations in place. Or they would, if they were done well.

Lots of people in this session felt that council websites had in lots of cases got a little bit out of control. A sometimes bloated beast hard to control with only the whip of a malfunctioning devolved authorship model. We agreed in the group that an online channel or mix of channels would meet the efficiency savings head on while fulfilling an increasing demand from residents to communicate in this space – if only we could get it working right.

So, councils need websites but how do we build and run the website a council needs?

We discussed a whole range of things but most of the sharing focused on:

Devolved authorship – a really nice theory but almost no-one has got it working right. I blogged about this separately as it was also the theme of the session I ran later in the day.
Respect for web teams – the need for organisations to recognise that online is a channel which needs to be run with the same respect as traditional channels, and that respect should also be given to those employed to be experts on how to do that.
Definition of boundaries – how much of what is online is within the remit of the web team to either run or advise on?

All three of these issues could come under one broad heading – respect and understanding. Where many websites and web teams are struggling is that there are two many cooks for the broth. In most councils at the moment there are a lot of people who have a say in what goes on the website and in what format. Some web teams have more control than others in terms of approving or improving this content before it is published but in some cases there is little control at all.

Compare this to the way that information is published through traditional channels and the service areas have to pass several gate keepers and abide by the advice of the communication professionals in order to get messages out. This allows them to reap the success and benefit from the experience of those professionals.

Online is a different matter though. Vanity publishing and ‘just in case’ publishing (there is no real drive to get this online now but one day someone might want this so I’ll publish it anyway) abound. And while there are lots of good reasons to devolve authorship if it isn’t implemented properly and backed with a workflow approval process it causes more problems than it solves. This can lead to poor content (in terms of accessibility, usability, relevance and currency) and too much of it.

Then there are the bits which aren’t directly part of the website itself – the bolt-ons, the dreaded applications. In one of those moments so typical of a LocalGovCamp that I felt simultaneously glad not to be the only one struggling with this problem and disheartened that the issue was so all-encompassing. Council websites are let down by the applications which make them interactive and transactional. Why? Partly because web teams have no seat at the table when applications are procured and no jurisdiction to have them removed if not improved.

What can be done then? Well, there is the Web Professionals group for a start. Paul Canning did a great job of introducing this to us all and it is a good step toward building that respect for communications and technical professionals specialising in the online space.

Each council also needs to work out how to publish information to the online space (across an increasing number of channels rather than just a website) tapping the knowledge of the service from that area while also utilising the skill of the web team in writing content which is accessible and usable.

Councils do need websites, the cost not to is too great (as Peter Barton explored in his blog a while back), but they need to improve the way they run them and part of that may be admitting there is specialist knowledge involved.

Say anything:Google’s Sidewiki

Sarah — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:15:20 +0000

We’ve had lots of debate in this organisation (and I’m sure it happens in every organisation as they explore the online channel) about opening up our website and its content for users to comment on or adapt.

This has focused on specific areas such as discussion forums or the more general ideas of making our pages commentable or accepting user-generated content. There are pros and cons whichever path is chosen and careful consideration of resourcing, moderating but not censoring and weighing up what this feature or option would add in terms of user experience are all part of the decision.

One of the considerations is around opening up your online space in this way means that a visitor may write negative things about your organisation. Sure, if they write something defamatory or libelous then there are clear ways to deal with that. But what about accepting that they might make fair comment about one of your services or the organisation as a whole – you just might not like what they say very much?

The well argued reasoning here is that they are probably already saying those things because the conversation is happening in the online space whether organisations choose to hear or take part. But, whether the choice was wise or not, there has been a choice until now.

Guess what? Google just changed that. Now anyone can share their thoughts on your organisation and online content, alongside your web page, through Sidewiki – the newest addition to the Google toolbar. It’s actually less of a wiki and more of a universally applied comments system – people can share their thoughts and knowledge by adding a comment into the Sidiwiki bar hanging down the left of the page (well, they can if they have the Google toolbar installed in Firefox of Internet Explorer).

The benefit is, say Google, that everyone can now easily add their insight or helpful information to a page. And if everyone takes on the Do No Evil motto Google propose then isn’t that a massive and marvelous step forward in making the Internets a creative and equal utopia?

However, this could also be a flawed product. My heart beats faster at the possibility of an open internet where we are all in it for the greater good but I’ve got some reservations:

Google control the content in Sidewiki. You can claim your position of webmaster of a site with Google and then be able to have a sticky post which always appears at the top of the bar. However, while Google are happy to have inappropriate comments flagged with them for investigation and possible removal there is currently hazy guidance from them on what is inappropriate and how long they’ll take to decide whether to remove.
There is no way (that I can find) for a webmaster to be alerted to new comments being posted against their content. So, even if Google’s ownership of the comments forces organisations to accept people may have negative feedback for them it doesn’t allow them to find those comments or manage their response (and reputation) easily.
Spammers. The fly in Google’s ointment. A way they can post their stuff onto any web page anywhere with no immediate removal? Thank goodness they aren’t the sort of people to exploit a situation like that. *sigh*

So, worst case you could end up with spam sitting side by side with your web content, negative feedback or enquiries that you don’t realise are there to deal with and the control of the whole thing is with someone else. Best case may be people write lots of nice things about you or what they are writing genuinely enhances the visitor experience to your site.

Reality, for now, is probably that no-one will write much of anything or if they do, not many will see it, because not oh so many people have the Google toolbar, less of them know what Sidewiki is and as the spammers start to party fewer people with see it as enhancing web content.

The theory of universal comments could have good use in internal communications (as @jonnop and I discussed on Twitter today) as a way of building collective knowledge (with the spammers locked out) but in the wider web the potential for damage and the removal of control from website owners is concerning.

Google aren’t the first to take a shot at this so maybe they will just be the latest in line to try out an idea that is great in theory but may not be quite there in practice. Perhaps there will be some more useful webmaster controls in the API as it is developed or maybe it will start to force a change and organisations will need to realise that if someone has something bad to say about them they need to deal with that underlying issue rather than concentrating their efforts on stopping other people from seeing the feedback.

You can read more about what Google thinks of Sidewiki on their blog.

Getting the conversation started

Sarah — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:41:20 +0000

I gave a presentation last week to other teams in the public relations division here. They covered an overview of social media and its use in online communications.

Generally I think the presentations were well received and hopefully will help us make some moves on updating existing policies and making use of relevant social media to evolve our online communications. There were also some really interesting discussions in both of the groups and I wanted to make a note about these.

Presentation:

Explaining what social media is was a fairly wide remit so I decided to give a very quick explanation of some of the terms commonly used, see who in the sessions used social networks and then look at online as a communication channel.

The majority of people in the sessions were members on Facebook, a few were on Twitter, a couple on LinkedIn. There were some who used Flickr and had watched videos on YouTube. Everyone used Google Maps but didn’t really customise them, no-one had heard of Ning, no-one blogged. I found this really interesting and it was useful to have discussions about preferred communication channels and why they did / didn’t use online networks.

I borrowed heavily from Al Smith’s presentation from PSF Buzz NE (find out more on his blog) and also from Dave Briggs‘ Four Steps to Social Media success presentation (which you can find out more about here). This got the groups thinking and in the first session we had lots of discussion about how / who and why was going to monitor online conversations about the organisation online.

In the second group the discussion was more focused on the need to develop policy / strategy and we’ll be having more conversations about this soon. In both sessions we talked a lot about demographics of online use, the way this might change and what that means for us as an organisation.

I very briefly touched on augmented reality with both groups and they were interested and excited by this.

I think this was a good start to getting others in public relations more confident with online and I’ve had some good feedback (and some excellent ideas and questions) since this morning.

I must also thank Al Smith for sharing with me his anecdote about turning round some negative sentiment in a Facebook group while we were chatting at googlelocalgov. I regaled the group (well, I repeated the story) as part of my presentation this morning and it really helped to give a real example of how we could be working between online and offline. In a coincidental act of synchronicity while I was telling the story Al was writing it up as a case study so you can read the detail on his blog.