Does this mean anything to you or is it just another ‘buzz’ phase you’ve heard floating around? Is it something you’ve been working on for ages but you call it your ‘website strategy’? Is it something you think you should have but don’t know where to start?

Well, as part of our ongoing quest to establish the level of content strategy in place in local government and Carl Haggerty and I have put together a little survey to find out a bit more about what people know, what they’re doing and what they’d be able to share (if anything)!

As they always say with these things, it will only take a few minutes to fill in but your responses will provide Carl and I with many more hours of chin stroking, deep thinking, inspiration and excitement on the subject. Not only that but we’re hopeful what we learn from you all will help kick-start the content strategy community we’re currently pulling an online space together for.

So, over to you, let us in on your thoughts on content strategy in local government* We’ll keep the survey open until the end of February to give you a chance to fill it in and pass the link round. I, for one, am really looking forward to finding out where everyone else is at with this!

Oh, and of course, thanks in advance!

Click here to take survey

*And if you don’t work in local gov fill in the suvey anyway – your information will also be helpful to us!

Related posts:

1. Content strategy linkapaloosa
2. Content strategy WTF? session at UKGC12
3. Content strategy in local government

Our session on Friday afternoon was a good chance to explain the work we’d both been doing and our thinking about content strategy (Carl is working on a content strategy for Devon County Council and I looked at content strategy in this sector for my MA dissertation last year).

In trying to think how we’d pitch this session we’d sort of ended up with the title of  ‘content strategy…WTF?’ as this seems to summarise nicely where we were and also the response when we tried to explain to other people.

In the end we had a busy session, well attended and with some great discussion which I certainly found useful and throught-provoking.

I think, as a group, we covered:

• What do we mean by content strategy and what the heck is Carl going on about when he says web strategy is dead.
• The roles within an organisation needed for content management
• Models of content governance (devolved authorships, workflows, responsibility)
• Content standards
• Turning the current accepted content strategy on its head: no more following the eGov mandate of 2005 with publishing absolutely everything onto one website in an inherited structure like the LGCL (whether we subsequently organise by top tasks or not) but defining common standards so content can be presented in the space most relevant to the audience, whether that be the corporate website, MumsNet or Facebook.
  And no more measuring only quantitatively – increasing the number of visitors to your corporate site is not a valid measure on its own!
• Evalutating the organisation’s digital footprint – content audit and mapping to get a hold on ‘where you are now’ in order to know your starting point on the road map to ‘where we want to be’.
• Content strategy means lots of things to lots of people, will look different for each organisation but there are common elements and there was interest in sharing knowledge and practice around these.

The Saturday session was supposed to be more practical (as were all sessions on the second day) but as it was mostly different people to the Friday session some of the discussion was along the same lines. This was still useful to me – it wasn’t repeating the same for a different audience but let a few different questions and discussions surface for consideration.

As well as what we discussed on Friday our discussions in the second session also covered behavioural marketing, evaluating success through quantitative and qualitative means, using existing surveys etc for audience analysis and what the units which make up a content strategy might be.

The practical outcome of this session? Well, in both sessions it was clear that there are lots of people working on content strategy type stuff even if they aren’t calling it that or writing it down yet. What they do want is somewhere to ask questions, share knowledge and learing and perhaps even collaboratively come to a sort of content strategy checklist for local government over time. In short we need to find an online home for the Content Strategy Community.

And Carl and I are committed to doing just that – we’ve had a suggestion via Twitter that Google+ might be a good space for this but we’re open to ideas and want to try and find somewhere that most people can access from work.

Would you like to be a part of this community? Where would be the best place in your opinion? Leave us a comment or contact myself and/or Carl on Twitter and we’ll try and get something up and running asap!

Related posts:

1. Content strategy linkapaloosa
2. Content strategy in local government
3. The mind-bending brilliance of UKGovCamp12

Friday and Saturday last week saw me at UK GovCamp 2012 (or #ukgc12) – the annual unconference for gov geeks, digital doers and people who just want to make public services and society better. It was, as ever, a mind-bending delight of energy, passion, ideas and camaraderie.

It’s been suggested by Dan Slee that we all post 20 thoughts or things we took away from the event. It’s taken me most of Sunday to get my head together but here’s my contribution:

1. The public sector (all of it – central gov, local gov, public services) need contructive disrupters and there seemed to be less of them at camp. Maybe this is because things seem to have started in the right direction with the creation of the Government Digital Service (GDS), maybe it’s because people don’t want to speak out because they don’t feel secure in their jobs, or maybe complacency is seeping in. Whatever the reason constructive disruption is vital and we need to get back to having more of it around.
2. I guess this is related to my first point but at some time on Saturday I started to worry that group think is starting to emerge within the govcamp community. I haven’t thought about this enough but I know that the thought really worries me at the moment.
3. Mike Bracken‘s presentation at the end of Friday was a mixed affair for me – slightly patronising (and I know it wasn’t in any way supposed to be), slightly worrying (from both a user and local gov perspective) and yet very very positive and exciting. I’m glad he came and spoke although I’m not wholly comfortable in the way he did it.
4. We need a local government version of GDS – and I’m sort of excited that one may already be self-organising even if it eventually gets consumed by the centre.
5. I wouldn’t normally encourage going into an unlit room with men you only really know off of the internet but spending most of Saturday in a ‘reflective practice’ session with Dave Briggs, Carl Haggerty and Jeremy Gould (as well as a number of others drifting in and out) was absolutely the best decision I could have made.
   Having a quiet space to just let thoughts flow does lead to a fair bit of nonsense but also to a lot of revelations. We covered digital history, how GovCamps and the movement have changed over the last five years, what’s next in grassroots digital government and whether a two-day GovCamp works or not.
   Reflective practice about a general and personal journey as well as some critical thinking about the bigger questions was definitely worthwhile.
   As if that wasn’t enough the Quaver Twiglet Sandwich Dog was quite something to witness the creation of.
6. GovCamp isn’t so much about digital anymore. It’s bigger than that and while it’s really interesting and important it means it isn’t so relevant to my day-to-day working life (which is about digital). It meant that while I could have happily sat in any of the many, many sessions and learnt something or shared something I didn’t feel as compelled to do so as I have before.
7. Again, putting GDS aside, central gov seems even worse than local gov at thinking about things from a user perspective. I wonder if this is because it’s harder for them to imagine their end user – especially for the policy makers – and localgov is moving faster toward thinking about UX due to being closer to our users in terms of service delivery?
8. We still aren’t thinking about UX enough.
9. I was honoured to co-host a session with Carl Haggerty about our thoughts on content strategy for local government. I think we both learnt a lot and for me, hearning Carl say these things out loud, was brilliant. I speak more so than ever for myself and not on behalf of my organisation, when I say I believe Carl is absolutely right – local gov should stop doing what they’ve always done, stop creating their own everything-in-one-place websites and start concentrating on content standards so wherever the information is delivered online it’s fit for purpose and full of UX win.
10. I am very lucky to have a job which I love, working in a great team in my direct workplace but also with som many peers I’m so pleased I can now call friends.
11. When you get off the Victoria Line at King’s Cross to head for St Pancras don’t follow the signs for St Pancras unless you like a really, really long walk underground only to emerge at the wrong end of the station. Annoying. I’d follow the signs for Euston Road instead.
12. While the great thing about GovCamp is that we’re all there on an equal footing, because we want to be rather than because we’ve been told we should, there are definite tiers emerging – the usual central/local gov line is still there although being crossed in places; GovCamp veterans / n00bs; thinkers / doers. We all absolutely deserve to be there, should be there and should have voices heard if we want to participate but the practicality of organising sessions which don’t play to one side of these relationships more than the other is becoming noticably harder (and that is no reflection on Dave, Steph or any of the session facilitators who all did sterling work).
13. We should have a big localgovcamp again in the summer – I’m happy to help organise this if others think it’s a good idea?
14. My reflection on how GovCamps have changed for me over the last few years is that when I started attending I was hungry for information and practical sessions about how to use social media tools. Now, I hardly think about social media, or tools and it’s about looking at the bigger picture, gaining context for the things I do and having Big Conversations about even Bigger Ideas with people who never fail to astound and also amuse me.
    This visualisation by Tim Davies (I think) of tags associated with each GovCamp since the first one in 2008 is fun and interesting too.
15. It was great to see light bulb moments happening within sessions, especially within sessions you’re nominally facilitating. My favourite was from Charlotte Stamper about being more savvy about understanding users on our own site and making use of high traffic areas to market other council services – the example was that if we know lots of people are coming to report potholes why don’t we advertise our need for foster carers to those people, within the pothole reporting pages? A brilliant question and this sort of thing is something I’d like to think more about.
16. I didn’t get to speak to everyone I wanted to and didn’t get to have long enough conversations with most of the people that I did. Sorry if I missed you or we were cut short. I think GovCamp would need to be about a week long if I were to achieve conversations with everyone on my list!
17. There were a lot less comms folk there than I’ve seen in previous years. There were about 300 people there over the two days and I think I saw about 10-20 comms people. I’m not sure whether this is good or bad – either it means comms has got out of the way and digital is more open to others within organisations under their guidance or it means they have really stepped up their self-appointed gatekeeper role and aren’t even willing to engage anymore. The ones that were there were amazing and inspiring and credits to their organisation.
18. A slow walk on a quiet morning from Pimlico to Victoria Street via bustling markets and amazing architecture is the sort of thing that makes me soften toward That London.
19. I’m only putting 19 points in my list as a small bit of disruptive influence on my part and to feel in some way I’ve not been compliant in group think

I will try and write up some notes about both of the content strategy sessions I ran with Carl (well, I stood at the front with him) and give some pointers about our practical outcome from the Saturday session.

Thanks to Dave Briggs, Steph Gray, Microsoft, Lloyd Davis, the generous sponsors, Hadley Beeman and my very old friend Matt who now works in the Treasury for their respective parts in making GovCamp 2012 amazing (and successful for me) yet again. I’m already looking forward to UKGC13.

Related posts:

1. Content strategy WTF? session at UKGC12
2. Content strategy linkapaloosa
3. Who’s a happy camper?

Top of my list is content strategy in government and I’m hoping that this could make a good practical session on Saturday (or equal would make a good chatty session on Friday). Either way I thought it would be as useful for me as anyone else to pull together some of the people and resources I’ve been finding helpful or inspirational on this topic.

Local Government-wise I’m not aware of many people actively working on content strategy. When I started research my disseration back in 2010 I found that while lots of us have a content strategy we haven’t actually documented it or do particularly well in using it as a living strategy.

Anyway – here’s some useful content strategy links to people and resources:

• Not sure of what content strategy is? Good, brief description in this article by Rahel Bailie or in Content Strategy for the Web – basically content creation, curation, delivery and governance.
• Carl Haggerty is probably the most active local government content strategist that I know of at the moment and I’m grateful that he’s been sharing his progress with me. Not only is it hugely interesting but it’s exciting and inspiring too! If you don’t already keep an eye on his blog for updates on his learning and how they’re developing content strategy in Devon.
• Kevin Jump and Conor Moody are also doing good things with content strategy and the wider practice of user-centred design and information with the Liverpool site. They’ve shared their experience and knowledge at a few conferences and are generally pretty helpful and open folk.
• The Government Digital Service and the project to bring Government departments under a single domain. Taking an Agile approach to development content strategy has been a part of their Alpha and Beta releases. I’m hoping to get to speak to them at UKGC12 as I have many, many questions but you can also check out the GDS blog.
• Kristina Halvorson – author of the ‘Content Strategy for the Web‘, useful links and support for those grappling with content strategy, UX and the emergence / convergence of this new discipline.
• The Brain Traffic blog – lots of great articles and useful info in their content strategy archive.
• Diana Railton – content strategy and communication – posts lots of useful links to content strategy articles and thinking.
• Rahel Anne Bailie – content strategist in US who has just written a chapter on content strategy in government for forthcoming book
• Gather Content – the twitter account for a product (which I haven’t seen as it’s still in private beta) but posts useful links to other resources and things that anyone who has managed online content can relate to.
• Contents – online mag for content strategy and digital publishing. Also on Twitter as @Contents.
• #contentstrategy – a useful hash tag on Twitter for links to articles and people talking about content strategy and related disciplines.
• Content strategy knol – online community for practitioners to explore and define the field.
• My brief summary of the findings of my dissertation – Content strategy to support eGovernment principles in local government.

Looking for something more detailed or that you can hold in your hand? As a start, I found these books useful in my dissertation:

• Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson
• The Web Content Strategist’s Bible by Richard Sheffield
• Letting Go of the Words by Ginny Redish

So, there we go. A brief list of content strategy resources and people. Now to work on that pitch for #ukgc12 – see you there?

Related posts:

1. Content strategy WTF? session at UKGC12
2. Content strategy in local government
3. Answer me this…

I was particualarly thinking about Twitter as an example of this. Many councils and public sector agencies have invested time and resource in using the platform – some still using it as a broadcast channel but many are moving toward it being a customer service and engagement channel. From the tales I hear from my peers lots are really beginining to see the value in this to the organisation, citizens are expecting this service and when they get it (and it works well) they’re positive about council’s engaging in this way.

But, my mind idly wondered, would councils be so keen to pursue the channel if they had to pay? Indeed, would they be able to pursue it, regardless of desire, in these cash-strapped times? Although we’re all thinking of digital by default (aren’t we?), would a fairly new online channel such as this win out against a traditional channel if there’s only so much money to go around.

I had some conversation’s along these lines when Hootsuite moved to a paid-for model. This is (was) quite a popular tool with the local gov sector for managing not only their Twitter presence but other social media profiles as well.

When it moved to a paid-for model lots of councils were forced to question whether they could justify continuing to use it and would sticking with the free version make it useless to them as features they relied on disappeared behind the paywall.

But what if not only the tool but the platform started to demand your cash? What would you do if Twitter suddenly announced a pay structure was coming into place? (And how Twitter is / will become profitable is one of those cyclical questions online).

Would you be back to the beginning on trying to explain it’s use and value to the organisation? Are you currently gathering any quantitative or qualitative data which might help you if you ever needed to make this case? Is how and when you use this channel part of any of your organisation’s strategies and do they consider what would happen if it suddenly wasn’t something you could rely on for free (thinking not just of your content / web / digital strategy here but also how it fits with your emergency / crisis comms strategy)?

That’s quite a lot of questions for something which may never happen. I guess a parallel question would be: have you got an exit strategy? Are you monitoring how much of your population actively use Twitter or how it is a starting point for information which then gets diseminated more widely through other channels? At what point would you scale back your effort in the channel or leave completely?

Because social media is still relatively new, and many are still fighting the battle to use it in the first place, I’m not sure how many people are thinking about what would happen if they had to leave due to cost to them or a diminishing audience unwilling to pay for their social media.

*If you’d like to hear me speak about Magic Numbers: Measuring the Quality and Quantity of Social Media check out the Epic Social Media for the Public Sector South West event happening in Exeter on 7 February 2012.

*I’ll stick this in as my contribution to #weeklyblogclub. Second week of the year and second post – my resolution remains intact so far!

Related posts:

1. #lgovsm 18 March 2011
2. Abandoned outposts
3. So this is Christmas

I used to quite happily bang out a couple of hundred words of an evening if something had caught my attention or there was some experience or learning I thought might be usefully shared.

Not only that but I have multiple blogs to compartmentalise my externalisation of thoughts on different matters – here you find my ideas about online communication, there you see the frustrated music hack at work, yonder my yearnings for a finely crafted C90 compilation, there my half-cocked attempts to run a 5k charity race. Yes, I was spreading my thoughts across the interwebs like butter on hot toast!

The last couple of years have seen my involvment in the blogosphere wane although I’m pretty sure I’m the only who noticed. It’s easy to put this down to busy years and bad times but when I felt totally unable to post something here yesterday I really started to question what had changed.

It took me a while to put my finger on it but I think it is a legacy of having recently completed my Masters – something which takes a different mindset to blogging. For my dissertation I was definitely working with a right / wrong in mind and going through myriad checks, improvements, citations and iterations to get to the finished piece.

Blogging is more about ideas and opinions though. Yes, there’s little point in someone sharing information which is clearly wrong in some technical or practical way but when you realise you’re doing little more than throwing your opinion into the online conversation The Fear begins to recede.

So, for me at the moment it’s about changing gear from academic writing with the aim of approval and a certificate at the end to just trying to be helpful, in some small way, online. What’s the worst that can happen? Someone disagrees – brilliant! That means there is a conversation – my blogging is as much about me learning from others as it is about sharing what I think I know.

Dan Slee, ever the champion of blogging particularly about digital comms in local gov, suggested a weekly blogging club to encourage me, and other lapsed bloggers, back into the habit.

So, if you need peer pressure and an editorial calendar to get you going in 2012 then join us – post by noon each Thursday, check the hashtag #weeklyblogclub or follow @weeklyblogclub on Twitter and be mocked by other club members should you fail without providing a note from your mum.

And like all resolutions I make this one with the full intent of seeing it through but I’m also prepared to get a mocking by mid-January (at the latest) should the muse disappear again.

No related posts.

So, where is it written that we capitalise this but not that (apart from Strunk and White or in grammar 101)? Well, you’ve got a style guide right? Right? No? Oh…*shuffles uncomfortably*

I did a little research into style guides this summer as I was updating our in-house digital style and standards guide ahead of a website refresh. I asked on Twitter as to whether any other local gov folk already had adopted style guides and the response was pretty low.

Someone used a cut back version of the Yahoo! style guide;  someone else offered up their writing for the web guidance. There were quite a few vague assertations about thinking, possibly, they used the Guardian Style Guide as a basis.

This all suggests that even where a council has got a style guide it hasn’t been widely adopted, accepted and possibly isn’t enforced before publication, which sort of negates the point of choosing or creating one in the first place.

I think they are an essential tool in the digital comms toolkit and that any web team should have one (BS 8878:2010 has more info on what documentation should be in place for running an accessible website).

So, if you’re just starting to think of setting or refreshing the guidelines for your website here’s my top five steps to online style:

1. See if there are any existing style guides out there which pretty much set out the tone and decisions on phrases that you’re looking for. There’s no point re-inventing the wheel and while it’s unlikely to set out every single thing you’re looking for, or may not be in tune with you on some decisions, it’s a good starting point.
   I like the Guardian style guide – their online version is really handy and they will adjudicate or clarify through their guardianstyle twitter account too. Plenty of well known newspapers have online style guides although some may now be behind a paywall.
   Not happy to use an existing guide from a media organisation as your basis? Well, take a look at what’s around anyway and then get writing – there’s a lot to be listed in your box fresh guide!
2. Where you are using an exisitng guide as your main reference the next step is to set out any differences your organisation wants to recognise. Things in this section may be the way you write the date, the way you write out numbers, how you use symbols such as % and how you refer to your own organisation on your website. As an extension of this I’d suggest creating a quick reference guide of common mistakes – perhaps Excessive Use of Capitals is one you could address.
3. Set your tone and make it clear in the guide. This is something that lots of people will struggle with as most often you want an informal but knowledgeable tone, often in the first person, always in plain English. This can be like writing in a foreign language for someone who’s main experience is cabinet reports.
4. Set up a workflow. Ok so this isn’t directly part of the style guide you’re creating however it’s a key part to whether it’s a success or merely a busy exercise in creating a document to collect digital dust on the shared drive.
   Using a workflow approval process (your content management system should support this) – the digital communication equivilent of a sub-editor if you like -  means that you can gently correct mistakes made by your content authors and, most importantly, enforce the style you’ve set before publication.
   There is a resource implication here – someone has to be able to approve content without causing a bottleneck. Not only that but by putting approval in place (and by definition this means sometimes rejecting content which needs improving) your organisation is showing the importance they place on their digital offering.  Many organisation’s still have a ‘it’s only the internet, just get anything up there, any old how – no-one’s reading it anyway haha!’ attitude this is generally changing. The same organisation is unlikely to let anyone at any level publish what they like, unseen by a comms professional, in the council newspaper.
5. Raise awareness within your organisation. In the past we’ve delivered half day ‘writing for the web’ workshops (devised in-house) open to all but strongly recommended to those responsible for online content.
   There is sometimes resistance to this type of workshop but generally we’ve found they’re an excellent way to share good and bad examples of web content, explain the key points of our style guide and empower authors and content owners.

I could probably expand this list further but it’s enough to get started with a style guide. If you’re serious about the quality of the information you put out online and recognising your digital offering as equal to your offline publications (or possibly increasingly more important than traditional channels) then adapting common communication practice is an obvious starting point.

You can’t expect everyone in the organisation to read it, memorise it and stick to it unquestioningly and faultlessly but it’s an essential tool in the digital communication toolbox – use it for getting consistency in approving content before publishing and for referencing authors or content owners to when they disagree with your decision.

Oh, and don’t forget – you’ll need to review your decisions at some point to. The internet is evolving, language is evolving, your organisation’s attitude to online is probably evolving and your style guide should recognise that and evolve over time too.

Finally, I must thank Robin Morley for flagging up this course on capitals resource from the BBC – it’s a useful refresher for those of us doing the approval and a handy link to send people who insist that council is always Council.

Related posts:

1. Content strategy in local government
2. Abandoned outposts
3. Do councils need websites?

Our research was really to satisy our own curiosity but will probably also be used at some point as context when we review what we’re doing here. We’ve now completed our review of 32 English county council websites and here are the headlines for what we found:

• Average monthly total of 32 news stories / press releases (based on November 2011)
• Average of two news stories / press releases a day (based on November 2011)
• 69% of sites reviewed featured news or press releases somewhere on their homepage
• Two councils didn’t seem to have any news or press releases anywhere on their website
• 67% are carrying only press releases, no informal news / events mixed in
• 33% offered no obvious way of subscribing to updates
• 38% offered subscription via RSS.

I think it’s worth mentioning that we consider a press release to be written in a formal tone, contain a quote (usually from a councillor) and be intended primarily for the media rather than citizen Joe.

So, that’s what we found at a top level. At some point we’ll probably analyse these findings further – maybe look for frequency / quantity over a longer time period or cross-reference how many sites have both news and featured content on the homepage and what line is drawn between these two types of content (if any).

Further research which could hang off this (but we’re not planning at the moment):

• Expand study to include other types of council or the rest of the United Kingdom. Julian Scarlett started to review district / borough websites using the same framework as us but I’m sure he would be open to offers of help!
• Expand period review takes in – we looked at one calendar month of news / press releases (November 2011)
• Distinguish further between press release  and news item or intended audience and look at how each of these types are given prominence.
• Gather quantitative data from the councils such as visitor figures for news / press releases.
• Gather qualitative data from councils such as what feedback do they receive on news / press releases.
• While we looked at whether there was an obvious subscription method I think this would bear further investigation – not only into subscription by RSS or email but also how shareable this type of content is.
• Investigate the impact of news / press releases on top tasks from a usability and funneling / customer journey perspective.
• How does the type and placement of news correlate to offline publications by the organisation and the availability of community (hyperlocal) websites and local media (if it correlates at all).

It was interesting to carry out this small-scale study and has answered some of the questions we had about what we were doing compared to what other, similar types of organisation were doing.

While we now know broadly how we measure up on frequency, type and placement online what we don’t know just yet is what that means in success – of course users have the real say here on whether something works or doesn’t but it’d be interesting to know if user opinion differs between council’s taking a similar approach.

Related posts:

1. And here’s the news…
2. Web Content Gov Camp – Coventry
3. Content strategy in local government

As part of trying to get to grips with how we handle news within our new site design the content team (that’s me and Dave Serjeant)have been asking each other some questions about how we manage the flow of news onto our website (the other questions, about agenda have been answered by others within the organisation).

The obvious next stop on the thought-train was ‘what do other people do?’ Are we publishing more than other counties, or less? Do other counties have it on their homepage? Can you subscribe to their news feeds in some way? Is it press releases, informal news updates, events, a mix?

And so we embarked on a small piece of benchmarking research to take a look at how English county council’s present and publish their news. I emphasise here the word small – we don’t have huge amounts of time to look into this and so the research is intended to be a very high level overview of a specific sample of types of council.

At the moment we’re doing gathering this information a couple of councils each day, looking for:

• Name of council
• URL
• Do they have features on the homepage? How many?
• Total number of news stories published online in November 2011
• Average number of news stories published online each day in November 2011 (total number divided by number of working days)
• Is the news on the homepage or only in a sub-section of the website?
• Where it is a sub-section at what level in the structure does it sit?
• Is ‘news’ made up of press releases only, informal updates and events, or a mix?
• Can you subscribe by RSS or email?
• Any other notes

We’re definitely not looking to judge whether a council is doing it well or badly, or whether they have taken the right or wrong approach. I think those questions are best answered through user research with a sites real visitors rather than a quick and dirty peer fact-finding mission.

We’re aiming to have gathered this by Christmas and to have summarised our results in a short paper. It could, of course, be exapanded to cover more questions or define the news type more specifically. It would be interesting to do the same for other types of council or to include other parts of the UK.

Is anyone else doing small bits of research like this? Is it to answer a specific question or just to benchmark? Would anyone find this snapshot useful when we’ve done (if we’re able to share)?

Now, here’s Tom with the weather…

Related posts:

1. Read all about it
2. CitizenSarah reports
3. Do councils need websites?

Now I’m out the other side I’d have to say perhaps bad idea is a bit strong, naive may be nearer the mark but boy, part-time postgraduate study, a full time job, two kids under 5, plus, you know, life – that’s a surefire way to learn the art of time management!

But nearly four years down the line I am out the other side and I can finally say I hold an MA in Online Communications. Go me! Go Derbyshire County Council for supporting me through it and being my case study! Go family for being patient and kind!

Enough of that though. What did I actually learn? Well, as you’d probably hope, I learnt LOADS. A lot of it built on the knowledge and skills I got from my undergraduate degree and 10 years of working as an online content monkey of one breed or other. But I also learnt lots of new stuff – some of it directly relating to the subject and other bits general study skills and improved critical thinking.

Let’s get to the bit that you’re really interested in (and I think if you’ve read this far you must be at least a little interested) – the dissertation.

“How does evaluating web content and creating web content strategy help local government to meet the principles of eGovernment and achieve organisational goals? A case study of Derbyshire County Council’s website ‘derbyshire.gov.uk‘”

I think there is bit much for one blog post so I’m going to round-up what I did and what I found in this one. I’ll follow up with a post about where I’ve ended up and what my feeling about next steps are.

So…what did I do (and what did I want to do if I’d had more time / a bigger brain)?

• I did a sort of hybrid content audit / heuristic evaluation of a content sample of the website. This was about 350 page in total. Three hundred made up one complete section (Your Council) and the others related to the top tasks (most visited areas) of the site.
  I audited against ten heuristics and the Your Council section I did on my own, while I enlisted the help of a few kind localgov peers to review the top tasks alongside me to increase the validity and reliability of the study. Ideally I would have had three reviewers take on the whole site.
• The heuristics analysed the content against three eGovernment principles – access to information (how easy was it to find); transparency (how easy was it to understand or use); and efficiency (does it support channel shift and efficiency in terms of cost and resource). I heartily recommend Jakob Nielsen as a starting point if you’re not familiar with heuristics.
• The heuristics also looked at elements of user-experience and usability (hello Neilsen again) and standards the council already had in place such as a style guide.
• Ideally I’d have collected other data during the audit so a content gap analysis could be carried out and in some sort of time-rich brainiac utopia I would have pulled other data in such as that from our contact centre, the user feedback we gather, results of usability testing labs etc
• I looked at what strategies the council already had in place and what their own objectives were. The council plan objectives broadly matched the three themes of eGovernment and added detail at a local level.
• I threw it all together and with a lot of inspiration from people forging ahead with content strategy (hat tip Kristina Halvorson here) came up with a draft web content strategy for Derbyshire County Council.

This is something we’ve started to tweak within my team and use as a working document (I’m sure my long-suffering tutor Anne-Florence DuJardin will be pleased to know the action research paradigm paid off). We’ve added detail to the strategy in terms of documenting governance of the web content and setting a roadmap with SMART objectives.

And as my findings coincided with a refresh of derbyshire.gov.uk we were able to use the issues uncovered in the audit / heuristic evaluation, alongside usability testing and other research, to really tighten up great swathes of the content so it was more UX / customer focused (and we also had a clear view of some areas which needed ditching entirely).

I think that gives a very brief summary of what was done and what was found. I think the what it means is best left for another day but my conversations with Devon County Council’s Carl Haggerty (although they came after my dissertation submission date) summed up how local gov is (or needs) to move away from thinking about web as a platform and toward letting the content and customer access be at the forefront. You can read his excellent blog post on his thoughts here.

I’ll finish with a few thank yous to people who really deserve it for either putting up with me studying, actively helping with the research or just giving me some encouragement when I whined on Twitter about how hard I was finding things. In no particular order:

My husband and our two wonderful little boys; Derbyshire County Council but particularly my team (eContent, yeah!) and the rest of Public Relations; local government epic visionaries Al Smith, Ally Hook, John Fox, Carl Haggerty, Martin Black and Charlotte Stamper; Anne-Florence DuJardin; the Thumbs Up Girls (and Take That); Janet Davis; Nick Hill; pretty much my whole Twitter timeline; and fellow local gov academic types Michele Ide-Smith, Liz Azyan and Simon Whitehouse.

*dragged crying from the podium Oscars acceptance speech style*

I’m really excited about developing the content strategy further alongside other existing and new strategies for the council and making the derbyshire.gov.uk content really hit the mark for visitors. Two years of hard study and I feel like I’m only just starting to scratch the surface…and that is *really* exciting!

Related posts:

1. Content strategy WTF? session at UKGC12
2. Content strategy linkapaloosa
3. LocalGovCamp – an unconference for local government – Birmingham 20 June 2009