Identify an inventory of 1,100 pages of content.
Summary
A Scroll content designer created a content plan to move the Forestry Commission’s content to GOV.UK.
The challenge
This project required us to identify and engage with stakeholders – difficult in a organisation like the Forestry Commission, which has teams geographically dispersed throughout England. Then, there was the challenge of creating a full inventory and audit of the content, using very limited existing site metrics. Also, there was the significant task of identifying user needs, and mapping these to the audited content.
As a result of this work, we could create a comprehensive plan for the Forestry Commission’s content, showing exactly what work needed to be done to move content to GOV.UK, and creating a roadmap for the organisation’s other content.
What the client said
The Scroll content designer helped us at the outset of our transition to GOV.UK. It was really helpful to have someone involved in the project who understood the nuance and intricacies of the platform and who was able to provide advice to us to avoid some of the most common problems faced in transition. We also found it incredibly valuable having someone experienced in GOV.UK and from outside of the Forestry Commission to help explain the plans to our subject matter experts.
Rachael Edwards, Business Change Manager, Forestry Commission
The solution
Scroll supplied an experienced content designer familiar with transition to GOV.UK who could support and advise the Forestry Commission. We used agile methods and based our work on the GOV.UK design principles, including designing with data and defining user needs.
To start, we ran stakeholder engagement activities, including:
- individual stakeholder conversations
- a user needs workshop
- group presentations
This helped decision-makers to understand the problems and opportunities.
Alongside this work, we created a full inventory of the content. Then we undertook a qualitative audit and analysis, to understand exactly what content was on each page and what action was required – for example, to update or archive the content.
We also identified a full set of user needs. We did this by:
- using existing site metrics
- checking GOV.UK analytics about what people search for
- running a user needs workshop with stakeholders, backed up by individual meetings where required
Finally, we mapped each user need to the content. Then we could create a comprehensive plan for the content, identifying gaps and redundancies, understanding which content should be hosted on which website and how each user need would be met.
Defined a core set of 30 user needs.
Recommended that 20% of content (including PDFs) could be archived.
Results
We provided high-level recommendations for the Forestry Commission’s content, both the content that would go on GOV.UK and how content not suitable for GOV.UK could best be handled – providing a roadmap for the future.
We provided support and advice to enable the Forestry Commission to engage with the transition project and with the necessity for a content strategy for their organisation.
For the transition content, we created a content plan that allowed the Forestry Commission to:
- archive certain content
- see clearly which content could transition to GOV.UK
- understand how to apply GOV.UK standards to the content
- reorganise priority content to have a greater impact
We also provided a detailed presentation and slide deck that allowed Forestry Commission to review and self-support the next stage of their transition work.
