Robert Mills
Welcome to the Fourth Wall Content Podcast. I'm your host, Robert Mills.
Actors address the audience directly by breaking the fourth wall in theatre and film. This podcast explores the fourth wall in a different sense.
We’ll share techniques, strategies, and tactics to forge meaningful connections with audiences, users, and stakeholders.
Our conversations with experienced and innovative content, UX and research practitioners will uncover the details of real projects with lessons learned along the way and outcomes of the work too.
Each episode will provide you with practical insights and actionable takeaways to help you meet user needs, connect with customers in a genuine way, or engage stakeholders meaningfully. Let’s get to it.
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Fourth Wall Content Podcast. I've got a bit of a sore throat today so do bear with me but there was no way I was going to delay today's conversation because I am chatting to Erin Schroeder. Erin is a content strategist with a rare combination of strategic prowess and a background in journalism. Organisations such as IBM, the State of Iowa and Massachusetts and Dartmouth Health and Geisel School of Medicine Giving have all benefited from Erin's ability to make content easier to find and understand while aligning with organisational goals. She's led her projects and clients through the creation of content style guides, taxonomy, journey mapping and usability testing. Erin holds a BA in journalism from St Ambrose University and an MA in professional journalism from the University of Iowa. She's also certified in content strategy by Northwestern University and has a certificate in UX writing fundamentals.
Safe to say Erin knows her stuff and I'm so pleased she's here today. Erin welcome to the podcast.
Erin Schroeder
Thanks for having me.
Robert Mills
So excited we're going to dig into some of your work today and I'll start with the first question I always ask and that's who is the audience or the user that's going to be the focus of the conversation or the project that we're going to talk about today.
Erin Schroeder
So for the past year and a half I've been working with the state of Iowa which is where I live. So this is an interesting project for me. We are doing content strategy for the state of Iowa and it's many state agencies. So while each state agency has its own website they're all coming under one single design style and this has been an important project for the Governor who wants to streamline government access on digital. She wants to see more continuity and more ease of access for state agencies and so we've been working with each and every state agency to help them structure their content in their website, structure their navigation in a way that's usable and help you know move the needle a little bit toward more accessible content. And it's been a really interesting project for us because it was around 80 agencies. Some of them are combining and coming together. Some agencies have absorbed other agencies so there's been some restructuring on the client side as well but for us it's been really an important exercise in moving them not only to a new platform into Drupal 10 but helping them actually structure their content in a way that's focused on the constituents rather than the organisation. And so it's been a long time coming for some of these groups.
Robert Mills
From those 80 plus agencies and that figure is wild. Are they all already on a version of Drupal and they go into a newer version or for some of them is it like a brand new platform or like is it like I'm just trying to understand how how broad and different each of those agencies starting point is for the project I suppose.
Erin Schroeder
It's a very mixed bag. So some of them are coming from a very much previous version of Drupal you know Drupal 7, Drupal 8 in some cases. Some are coming from WordPress. Some just redesigned their sites in the last year or two and they just got told by the state agents you know by the state government that hey we're moving to this new platform. Some of them were on websites that were old that they couldn't find manpower to fix and update and so they were over the moon that they were getting their new website done with this you know with our agency coming in to help them. So it's been a kind of a moving target. Every agency is kind of coming at this from different levels of skill, different levels of resources within you know some people are not really webmasters and they're tasked with doing this website project. So we're leading them through it. Some people are very good at Drupal and webmaster skills and they're, you know, hitting the ground running. So it's been a varied set of skills and varied set of previous CMSs and technology behind them.
Robert Mills
And the mandate you said has come from the Governor?
Erin Schroeder
Yes.
Robert Mills
Yeah so it's not an optional thing. It's a mandatory thing that they have to go through regardless of where that starting point is.
Erin Schroeder
Correct.
Robert Mills
What's the sort of, you touched a bit on on the reason that this work is being commissioned and needs to go ahead, but what is the kind of purpose I suppose of the project and the sort of overall reasoning behind that decision to move everybody over and kind of get that alignment?
Erin Schroeder
I think there was an effort, a real solid effort by the state government, excuse me the Governor and kind of the technology offices to see more, like I said, continuity within the design. So all of the websites are designed differently right now, some better than others, some older than others, again just based on the resources within the offices that we're working with. And the governor really wanted to see some kind of common thread for the state of Iowa to represent itself. The state of Iowa just went through its own kind of a little bit of a rebrand with its logo and with its tagline too. And so they wanted to see something that kind of represented that. And so part of that was to really make these sites, the big the big ask is to make these sites more accessible because they were all on different platforms and all in different kind of stages of development and maybe haven't been audited or reviewed in quite a long time in some cases. They wanted to see some accessibility really come to the front of this so that the content would be more accessible so that the content would be easier to find. Yes, the search engine benefits are great too but they really wanted to make these websites better for the constituents in Iowa. And so that was really the goal of the Governor and then to have the solid single design system so that there was ease of use across them. So no matter what agency you went to there was some kind of familiarity that this is a state of Iowa website beyond just a tag in the corner that says it's a state of Iowa website. They wanted to see that kind of come to life in the design.
Robert Mills
So they're being more user-centered rather than opposed to these different agencies doing their own thing and being a bit more organisational focused.
Erin Schroeder
Correct. Yep.
Robert Mills
And where did you start? Where did you start with that? Yeah, once you kick off the introductions and you understand that you know the scope and the landscape and all that kind of stuff, what sort of, where did you go from there?
Erin Schroeder
So it was really, it was actually a really good process because we started in August of 2022. We went to Des Moines which is about a two-hour drive for me because I live in the state but we all flew to Des Moines. We went with the state agencies and primarily the technology officers and what they wanted to do was they wanted to start with the state of Iowa's website so that you know kind of the first iowa.gov and then the Governor's website. Those were the two websites we wanted to start with and that was really important to us because once we got those up that was kind of our selling point and our template to show the agencies hey this is what you're going to look like now and it kind of showed us all the different components we were building and we got to show them all the features we were building because they would have access to those same features.
So we started with those two websites and got those launched in a fairly short amount of time. I want to say four or five months and they're fairly small. The Governor's site is small. It's a lot of news, a lot of announcements, but you know her bio and information on the first family and things like that but then you also have the state of Iowa website which is kind of a launch pad to get around the state. So it's kind of a lot of how to information, how to do certain things, how to renew your driver's license. They're trying to build this kind of repository of information that constituents really look for a lot.
So we got those two sites up and then we went into this we had this huge list of agencies and they had to be launched by you know they kind of all had different timelines for launch and so we as a content strategy team sat down and said take a breath where do we start with this and so we sat down and said okay what can we deliver in X amount of weeks and so we kind of worked backwards. I sometimes call it the Quentin Tarantino effect like start with the finale and work backwards and so we were kind of working backwards saying if this is a launch date what can we do in these you know four to six weeks and so we came up with a process of a workshop with each agency where we talk about their user needs, talk about their navigation and taxonomy. Then we would in that time they would also be working on an audit. In some cases they've maybe never audited before so they got to see the benefits and the heartache of auditing which is a hard process but one everyone should go through and then from that audit we started building them a matrix and a structure and a navigation to show them where all their all their pages lived.
Some of these agencies were on these different CMSs where they had pages that were just floating without any kind of connection to anything else. They were lacking breadcrumbs, they didn't really have a structure so it was really not faring too well for their users to be able to easily click through and find what they're looking for and so we really wanted to change that experience and so that matrix really helped us set the blueprint for each site. Granted in those four to six weeks some of these sites are thousands of pages so we couldn't get through all of them but that matrix structure was a start for them and so we basically gave them tools to keep going.
After some of them got through that process, that strategy process, we would go on to the next group. There's usually like three to four agencies per group so we're working in tandem. I have a couple of other strategists that are working with me and we're working together as a team and then they move into content migration and we've been helping them place their content and make some content design decisions. So rather than just going copy paste, copy paste from their old site to their new site, helping them understand the value of structuring their content and their content design in a way that helps people easily access that information.
So throughout this whole process the thread for us has been yes, accessibility, yes we're designing an accessible site for you but we are not going to just recommend that you plop your content in the way it is. Like accessibility also means how the content is structured, how the content is written. So we talked a lot with them about simple language, plain language, you know breaking some concepts down, maybe breaking up pages. Some of these agencies have these long like essay long pages on their sites and we're like you can break those up, make it simpler, they'll be easier to find in search, they'll be easier for people to find on your site. So we've been really working with them.
Then in between all of this, all of this is going on, twice a week we hold office hours, kind of like college. So we have an open door policy, we have a set office hours time on Tuesdays and Thursdays and anyone from these agencies that we worked with can come in and ask questions and they do. And they can pop in and pop out, they don't have to stick around but they come in and they ask questions, well I'm kind of stuck on this page or I'm trying to do this thing or I'm trying to add this component, how do I do it? And so we can show them and answer questions. Other agencies like to hear what other agencies are asking because some of them have the same questions. So there's been a lot of learning and introducing between agencies too in this process. So it's been really interesting to watch them learn and grow and even with some trepidation. It is a huge project, a lot of them are doing this on top of other responsibilities but to be there and help them has been really great and to see them kind of work together has been really great too.
As a constituent of my state, it's been interesting to watch and learn about what my state agencies do. That's been hugely influential to me and some of them I've used, some of them I haven't but now I get to know all these incredible public servants that work really hard at what they do and they care very much about this project and making sure it works out for them and the people they serve. So it's been really rewarding in that sense.
Robert Mills
Really interesting approach to it with the having the you know the two sites to kind of start with so you're showing as well as telling. I think that can go a long way with the kind of advocacy and buy-in and things like that because people you know even if they're like yeah we know it needs to be better, we want it to be better but we just can't quite we don't get what it's going to be like and how it could be better. So I really like that approach to it and you know starting there and then kind of building and bringing people into that and that collaborative transparent working out in the open. I think there's not a lot to be said for that especially when it's such a long-term project and such a vast amount of change. I love the fact that you've got that as kind of a standard practice as well.
I could only imagine how what it was like when everybody's at a different state so you might have some people who do an auditing and some people who might be you know a bit further along the workflow in the process and that must have been really just hard to manage the all those kind of milestones and steps and processes with all those agencies. And you touched on a few things in the answer there that I'd like to kind of come back to around like language and style guides and things like that but you also mentioned a bit earlier in the answer about in the workshops kind of working with them around user needs. Is there anything more you can say about that process and how you kind of define those needs especially when like you're also the user? Was that kind of was that beneficial or a bit of a conflict? How was that you know in the process?
Erin Schroeder
Yeah sometimes it was. There were a couple agencies that I've worked with. For example I have you know my father is ageing and my mother-in-law is ageing and she's in you know specialised care so I used the HHS website a lot in the last couple of years and so working with it which HHS is Health and Human Services so getting to work with them was really interesting because I had feedback as a constituent to say hey I found this content really hard to find. Oh we never thought of it that way and then the content strategist be like I know where it belongs I can help you play that too was really fun but the workshops were great.
Every group of agencies that we start with we start with a kind of a kickoff where we introduce ourselves what we're gonna do, our goals, what we will and won't do because yes we're here to help you but we can't do all the work for you so it is a partnership. So we start with that kickoff and then we go into the workshop and the workshop is a digital whiteboard so we use FigJam as our digital whiteboard and sticky notes and things and it's just kind of a freewheeling conversation we come in and ask them hey who are your audiences who who really uses your who really uses your agency's services who's coming to this website what are they looking for.
It's funny because sometimes I go in with preconceived notions that every agency is trying to reach constituents, not necessarily, you know for example the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy I assumed was trying to reach out to people who want to be police officers and peace officers. No, they're actually working to work with local sheriff's offices and local police departments to try to recruit people who want to get their ILEA certification. So I went in with preconceived notions that were then broken which I actually really love, I love that part about the workshop.
Then we go through the workshop process we ask a lot of questions we have them kind of talk amongst themselves I give them that space that's where my teaching experience comes in I don't mind the silence I let them kind of talk it out and then once they kind of come to a consensus of what they're trying to do with this website and what they'd like to see change with this website we move into the structure and we talk about the navigation and I come in with some suggestions already and then they talk amongst themselves some more. The big change in these workshops has been some of these agencies getting away from org focus so taking their organisational tree and making it their website structure which some of them have done and saying nobody knows what that i,s let's get this back to a place where the words and the navigation make sense to people who are coming here for the first time. I haven't been met with any resistance there's been a lot of support of an acknowledgement of yeah we have it structured this way for the last seven years you know so and so director who was here wanted it structured this way we know it needs to be structured for people what can we do and so we sit down and we tease it out and talk about what those main pages are in the navigation what pages fall underneath that and talk about the relationship between content.
We also talk about home page priorities because some of these some of these places have never built a home page before and now they're going to get this great component that we built for them in Drupal 10 where they can kind of drag and drop different blocks of content and they don't know where to start, so we talk about home page priorities and you know what's on your homepage now that you like what do you not like what do you want to see on it and then our designers help them kind of come up with a concept to guide them.
So a lot of this has been you know you teach a man to fish type of thing because we really want them to have the tools and feel the power and the ability to take these on and make these changes in the future for themselves versus us just doing it for them and handing them a turnkey website. We really want to see them be involved with it and so again it's a big responsibility for a lot of these agencies who are on top of other responsibilities and day-to-day tasks but they actually have been very, you know there's been a lot of a lot of authority that they get now that they maybe didn't have before, to see the website through this process and so that's been really great.
That workshop is really paramount to that and I found that those workshops because they're very freewheeling, I don't go in with a lot of structure, they build a really great trust relationship between myself and the agency or my team and and these agencies because they are looking to us to help guide them but we're also making sure to step back and let them guide themselves and I think they really appreciate that. Part of this project and being told your website's going away we're going to have the single design system. I think there's a fear that they're losing the power of how they communicate on online and we didn't want to see them feel that way with us guiding this project project so by letting them have those conversations and by guiding those conversations with them I feel like we've built a really good relationship with them too and so that's why those office hours have been so great. They're not afraid to come in and talk to us and ask questions because we've been there the whole time letting them ask questions and helping guide them so that's been a really really great process for us. The workshop is really really important to the rest of it on top of them auditing their content which is a very big task but one that they get through and they go whoa we didn't realise how much stuff we had that was so old or I didn't even know some of these pages existed or whoa we didn't know we didn't have a page for this at all so that's that's been really big for them and really big for us and it helps us guide them through the rest of the process.
Robert Mills
I'm really enjoying hearing just the process side of it really and how and how you kind of handled that given the scale of the work and how you've built that trust with and it's a very hard kind of balancing act with needing to sort of control things and guide things but not overly controlling the guidance so they just feel a bit repressed or frustrated or worried or you know like they're being told off and things so getting that balance between we can guide you and we can show you but actually you also need some freedom to you know to to be creative or to be able to respond and share and and and feel safe enough to kind of ask questions as you say in things it's not an easy task. So it's really interesting to hear how you how you kind of yourself and a team have managed to do that with so many people who I’m sure have lots of different you know levels of experience and knowledge and things related to this work. So just as you talk to the process it's really fascinating. One thing i definitely come back to is like as language and you mentioned it a couple of times you know part of the mandate for the this work in the first place was kind of consistency and you know bringing people aligned around things such as language and you you know you mentioned the words they have to make sense, which of course they do. How how did you understand like what language to use what was again what was your starting point for that was there like is there style guide for the state and what considerations were made uh with that style guide in mind?
Erin Schroeder
There wasn't a style guide for the state.
Robert Mills
Okay. Take it back.
Erin Schroeder
Some agencies had their own. It was really interesting there were a couple agencies that had former journalists so we clicked right away and they knew how to write with certain style and use AP Style Book, which is a pretty big standard for journalism. Then ones that we often see on the web and so some of these agencies were like we got it and then the whole state really didn't have one at all and we were kind of shocked by that but they were so open to the idea of having one.
So at Lullabot we had kind of created a kind of a shell style guide that we could provide clients as a starting point if they didn't have one. What I did was on the on-site visit that we did in August of 2022, when we met with the state and the technology office, I sat down and we did a voice and tone workshop and we talked about what is the state of Iowa. I know what the state of Iowa is to me but I wanted to hear from the people who are doing this project what the state of Iowa is to them. So what does that voice sound like you know Iowa there's a whole thing in Iowa called Iowa Nice the Midwest kind of nice tone very well mannered that's nice but that's not really enough to build a voice and tone, so we used all these different cards had them make decisions had them talk about what they meant, had them talk about the different definitions and we identified what that voice would be for them.
Then from there we talked about what don't some of these webmasters know. Well again some webmasters have very few journalism backgrounds but some of them know how to write for an audience and write at say an eighth grade level, but some of them don't. Some offices are run by lawyers who are doing cases part-time and then they're also updating the website, so web writing and writing with style and writing at an eighth grade level is not something they're they're privy to. We built some you know some simple like how to write for the web guides, we created some very high level accessibility information for writing, we created this you know the style guide itself which is like words we use and phrases we use or don't use and so on and the state adopted it. We went through some iterations and some rounds of it and now all the state agencies have it as a reference. The next step for it right now, it's in a kind of a Google Doc format and it's shared as a link to everyone in the state, but I think in the future they'd like to digitise it to their training site that they're building so that the agencies can have access to it in a digital way.
The style guide was not as contentious as I thought. What's been interesting though is once you get in with these agencies you start finding out why some stuff is written the way it is. So you'd be nice to say you need to write this at an eighth grade reading level, here go use Hemmingway, here's how you can do it, you know here's some tools you can use, great great great. Yeah, this is all legal stuff and it has to be written this way for the courts. Okay, so there's some things you can't change because legally speaking you sometimes can't change some legalese. So there are places where we're finding that there aren't there's just some places where you're not going to be able to do plain language for legal reasons. So we let that go. Iowa code is another one, legislative code is written, I would love to go to the legislator and say no write it in plain language but that's not part of this project but so right now Iowa code is Iowa code it's written the way it is.
For the most part the content on the sites that these webmasters can control, that these teams and agencies can control, they are starting to simplify by quite a lot. Once they saw the style guide and they use tools like Hemmingway App and things like that, they were blown away at how much better they could make their content. So it's been a really really great exercise and again bringing in the content design aspect of it, you know, hey this content's really good but you could probably break it up, it could probably use some structure here, maybe an accordion maybe you could pull this out into another subhead. So even showing them things like that has been huge for them because maybe the system they were in before didn't allow for that kind of formatting and now we have it. As we've been going through this project too, as our agencies are getting in there and starting to build their sites, they're bringing up things that are like well I kind of wish it could do this, X Y or Z and we could go oh we hadn't really thought of that and then we hear another agency say it would be really great if it could do X Y and Z, oh now we're hearing more of that. So we've been kind of adding features to the system as we're hearing agencies exercise their needs and tell us what they need that system to do for their content.
It's been really interesting and overall I think it's been giving more autonomy to the agencies to be better with their content they notice how important it is now that they're ripping out that org structure as their navigation and thinking about the constituents first they're kind of seeing oh then we need to think about the constituents first in the language we use too. It's been a really great learning process and again as a constituent of my state, to watch these agencies recognise and make these changes has made me really proud because I'm a user of this content. Yes I'm a content strategist, yes I know how to get around websites maybe a little easier than others, who knows, but the fact that they're trying and they're seeing the places it needs to improve has been really really huge. And so even if they can't make all the changes they want to make for the day of launch, the fact that they're trying and they now have the tools to do so has been really really special to me I would say.
Robert Mills
And even understanding and learning what can't be changed and why is worthwhile in itself right? Because then you're not like, you don't just think this is content that somebody's not bothering with, you understand right we can't change that for this reason and we know that so we can document that and share that and maybe it's something we can come back to but even those learnings where you can't change maybe what you'd want to, it's still time well spent to kind of get to that point.
Again the way you're describing how the agencies have responded to the work, it's credit to the Lullabot team because everything you're describing is very pragmatic and empowering. So it's not like we have to do it this way for this reason or else and you know get it down and it's very much like hey this is why we want to do it like this and this is the benefit and here's some tools you know and the fact that they can use the tools themselves and see the change themselves is such a, well yeah empowering I suppose to use that word here, such an empowering approach to take to the work because there's again that kind of balancing act. I think it so easy could have been met with so much fierce resistance if you had approached it in a different way and you mentioned the style guide wasn't contentious and you thought it might be, was there anything that you didn't expect to be contentious that maybe was a little bit challenging and what sort of you know we've talked a lot about the the positive side of it but were there any challenges that you kind of came up against during the process?
Erin Schroeder
There were a couple, surprisingly. So for example we had an agency that had a hamburger menu on their desktop version and they really wanted to keep the hamburger menu and I've never seen someone fight so hard for a hamburger menu on desktop. So there were little things and then once we explained it you know and we we also you know I think I think what's really great about the content strategy community is you know we all have lots to say on what we do and how we do it but we also have a lot of resources we also rely on testing and research and things to back up what we believe or what we want to understand.
We did pull out some, you know we found some studies there's some really great research around out there about user experience and hamburger menus and things like that so we showed that to the agency and explained why you really want to get away from this and they understood and they agreed. But it's just there there are little places like that where you go, really. Some agencies have images with text on them and we were trying to explain you know accessibility wise that's not great there it's often not easy to read it's often if you don't have alt text you really don't know what that says for people who are using screen readers and again they came into it really like we like this we've worked really hard on this graphic design and we're like this is, and we understand, that's the other thing too it's really easy when you see these these things being done on a website and you want to make assumptions and just say why would they do that. We didn't do that. We understood that these websites were really important to these agencies they were you know sometimes years in the making they were they're maybe the only thing they knew, the only system they knew for all these years that they used to communicate you know to the web, and so I wasn't going to come in there and insult what they were doing we just wanted to show them how they could do it better.
That was really important and that's been important and the way we communicate with all of the agencies we work with is we're not coming in there to scold you. We want you to work with what you're comfortable with, but we want you to understand the implications of some of the things you're doing. So if you really feel passionately about keeping that picture with the words on it, just add alt text please. You know like we're not trying to rip the pacifier away all the time and I've told all my agencies I don't want to shake your trees too much. This is a huge change, a huge load of tasks on top of things you're already doing in your day-to-day, I do not want to shake your trees. I want you to have the tools you need and I also tell them which sometimes makes them furrow their brows, the web is never done. So once we get this launched, it's not something you just publish and walk away from you're going to want to continue to audit that content and review your content and make changes and we're going to continue to roll out features for the site that you might want to use in a different way in the future.
But that's been a really important piece of this too and I think it's one that it's easy to forget, that there's real people on the other side of this work whether it's the constituents that are being served or the people that are actually putting these sites together and so leading with empathy in this project has been really important even when they're contentious I always want to listen to what they have to say and why it's so important to them because there might be a reason and maybe we can work with it and maybe we can't and maybe they're coming from a place where they just don't know the better way to do it. So leading with empathy in this project has been really important, I think that's why it's gone as well as it's gone. I know we've had some bumps here and there with our launches and things but most of the agencies have been so open to listening and learning and trying to work with us and leaning on us when they need to but still giving them the power to run what they need to run on their own and that's been a really interesting balance for us but I think it's worked really well in the long run.
Robert Mills
I mean leading with empathy is such a like a brilliant way of describing it and I think no project is without its challenges and from what you shared in this conversation so far it sounds to me like this project had the potential for a lot more challenges and bumps in the road than you actually experienced because of your approach to it and because of the team's approach to it. From your side of the project, how did you work and collaborate to make sure you were hitting those deadlines, but more importantly actually having confidence in where all those agencies are at and you know you were hitting those deadlines with the right things at the right time?
Erin Schroeder
Part of it was working in pairs. There were usually a couple of us working on a set of agencies. We called them cohorts, so cohorts were four to six weeks and maybe three or four agencies per cohort. So if there was more than one agency in a cohort, and it usually was, one of us would take a couple, one of us would take a couple and we would kind of meet in the middle and review each other's work. So that was a really great teamwork effort for us or this person would take two agencies and do their two workshops, this person would take these two agencies and do their two workshops, and we would kind of just switch off and on and review each other's work and pair up.
The cohorts have gotten smaller, thankfully, so it's gotten to a point where only one of us needs to really be doing this, but we still have a team of strategists on the Iowa project doing other tasks. We still will work on stuff together, so a matrix for example, which is basically the blueprint of the new site structure. I could, you know if I have a cohort of three, I could probably do all three or get them started but what if I get sick or there's a family emergency or something. I have team members who can pick it up and run with it. One of the big pieces of this and I'm not going to hammer this too hard because I think a lot of us know about it, but like having templates going into this project you know before we started these agency projects we said we need templates we need a template for the audit we need a template for the matrix we need a template for the workshop like, so if something happens to one of us, somebody wins the lottery and moves to a tropical island, I don't know, but if something happens somebody can pick that up and run with it and they have it'll look the same no matter what agency they're on.
So templates have been really important for us and it makes it really easy for us to kind of have kind of equated our team to being like Lego pieces you can kind of swap any of us out and you're gonna get the same message and you're gonna get the same template and the same deliverables from us because it's templatised and we all kind of we're sharing knowledge as a group on the Lullabot side. We're all in tune with what's going on, some of us a lot of us are attending workshops and sitting in the background even if we're not leading them, so there's shared knowledge among our team. You can swap us out as you need to whether there's you know for whatever reason and so that's been really huge for the collaborative piece of it.
The timeline, you know if we had it our way as content strategists we would have like six months per agency, but that would mean this these 80 sites won't get launched until 2080 or something like I don't even know. For us it's been really important for to be aware that what we're delivering isn't perfect, which is hard for some of us because we really like to live it it's done and it's perfect and I won't change a thing, but we really want to live in a world where this is the starting point we've gotten them improved we've improved the site we've improved the structure it's not perfect, they still maybe need to do user testing again in the future or maybe they need to reevaluate some of these pages they didn't get a chance to edit in the future, but for now they've gotten an improvement you know a 25 improvement. They've eliminated 20% of their pages from the old site great that's a huge improvement, they've restructured the navigation from organisation-based to constituent or you know user-based, great, that's an improvement, so taking those wins and not just needing perfection to be the the sort the the sole source of hey we succeeded. Success in this project is small steps and one of the things I like to preach about is small step content strategy, which is even if you take one little section of your website and improvement and improve it, that's that's better than it was and that's a success. You don't have to improve everything at once, it's really hard to improve everything at once to be perfect, so we've been taking really small steps. And as so as a team, all of us in different levels of our kind of strive for perfection have been kind of aiding each other to remember that any improvement that these agencies make to their site is an improvement for the end user and we're helping to aid that and the site is not done and maybe these agencies will come back to Lullabot in the future and say hey now that we got it up in the new design, now we really want to rip it apart and get that content up to par the way we really want to see it, we didn't have time to tackle word for word content in our project but now we want to. We expect that to happen and we hope it does because that just shows that they're investing more into how they communicate on the web instead of just you know agreeing to this okay fine we got in the new design system let's go. They are all very passionate about continuing to make changes in the future and so that to me is a win even if I'm not the part of that the fact that they see the value of the work we've done and they understand why it's important to communicate the way they do with their constituents, that to me is a huge huge win. So our team has been learning a lot about what success means in a different way to keep us collaborative and keep our eye on helping these agencies do their job better even if it's not perfect when it goes out the door on the day of launch.
Robert Mills
Small step content strategy, I mean please write the book called that. I love that again that kind of that approach and that idea because what's the in some cases what's the alternative you say we have to do you know we have to go big and do everything and then they just freeze and they don't want to do anything and they don't buy into it so it's much better to kind of chip away do those iterations, you know build build build, totally agree especially when you've got this kind of volume. I don't think you could go in and just be like, right everything all at once. So I think that's such a logical pragmatic approach to the project again. Is there anything else you can talk about around governance and maintenance, you know, because these people you said they are kind of are empowered now they're passionate about the future they care about the content. I'm not saying they didn't care before, but they really care about it now, and they kind of want to keep building on this work, but mindful that maybe some of that support will have to fall away as time moves on. Have there any kind of conversations and considerations around governance and maintenance on such a such a large scale?
Erin Schroeder
Yeah so part of the process of building the back end of Drupal for them included you know content types and components and micro content things they can use interchangeably throughout their site. But also teaching them about how to use the revision you know notes box and that you could set up a draft process and a review process. The matrix is a spreadsheet, it's not a perfect solution, but it's been really to me to watch them get their matrix. For me to say here's your structure it's not you know maybe it's not done but here's how it works here's how to do it and then go in pop into that matrix you know it's like a shared document and see them colour coding lines and assigning people to work and leaving notes to each other and tagging people and commenting and then changing it to red when it's published and changing the status column. That to me, again it's not a guarantee that they're going to continue with governance, but to watch them in their own project govern their work govern who's you know who needs to approve this page, is it published, it is live, you know comments here hey write me back are we going to keep this page are we not? That to me is such insight into they're really communicating together in a way that maybe they haven't before and if the matrix is the first tool to do that. great. If they take it outside the matrix into their own Trello board or whatever tool they want to use, great.
We don't have the luxury on this project to be able to help them post-launch set up a maintenance and governance plan, but we definitely have a web guide that we've provided every agency, that we've put our kind of our top tips and tricks in. You know stuff we all in our industry have learned over the years about how to handle the web and how to write for the web and govern your content and so we have some information there in governance to help them understand why this is important. But once they get that matrix and I start seeing them do that, I'm like they're getting it. I hope they do it post-launch, but they're getting it, they’re understanding why this needs to be reviewed, who needs to publish it having some kind of place where all this type of information lives whether it's in the back end of the site or whether it's on a spreadsheet. To me again I'm taking that as a win of they're they're using this tool. I hope they continue to use it. I may not see that they continue to use it but they've learned something and so that's a win for me.
Robert Mills
Huge win. So many wins. I know that some articles have been published about the project and things so we'll link to those in the show notes, so if anybody listening wants to kind of find out more about some of the details that we're not able to cover then we can definitely point them in that direction.
I always ask, can you think of a time when you've been the audience or you've been the user and what have you maybe watched or read or listened to or interacted with or experienced that might have provoked a reaction or stirred in emotion and it could be work related or otherwise? Now I know you have been the user of this whole project we've talked about but is there anything else that you might want to share um in relation to that question?
Erin Schroeder
What I really enjoy, okay so I am a crocheter, I love to crochet very simple things, scarves hats but my friend for Christmas bought me these things that she found on Instagram targeted ads ,what can you do, called Wobbles. They're like little foil packs of yarn and of crochet hook and buttons and things and they're like little creatures and figurines and things like that to even crochet and I've always wanted to learn how to crochet figurines and and like toys and stuff I just think that's really cool. Don't know how to do it. Tried to watch YouTube videos. YouTube videos are great for crochet sometimes sometimes they're a little too fast for me I really need to go slow when I'm learning new stitch. These wobble kits blew me away ,like there were some things that were I was like all right I get it I know how to do a chain stitch you know next video, but I learned so much from these these help videos and they use the right color yarn against the right color background so there's no like sometimes the contrast ratio of yarn to background is hard on YouTube. These videos are plain slow, you can slow them down, you can speed them up they walk through very slowly how to do different stitches they explain what some of these things are. I've never used stitch markers when I've crocheted and this kit that I have has stitch markers I'm like now I know what they're for. So for me it was really interesting as someone who knows some of this skill but not a lot and I've been trying to learn and now I have this fantastic tool and they send you the whole kit, so if anyone out there wants to start to crochet and you don't know where to start start with these Wobbles because they will teach you all the basics and you'll get to make something really cute in the end it's very fun. But I really really love that because crochet and knitting are so great, they're such fun activities but it's I mean, it's hard to watch someone else do it and then understand how to do it. It's the thing you got to really learn by doing but these videos are the closest I've seen to me getting it the first time through rather than having to watch a video four or five times before I understand it. These videos nail it, so Wobbles, I'm giving them some free PR because thank you for helping me learn how to stitch a tiny dinosaur.
Robert Mills
Which is a sentence you may thought you'd never would say.
Erin Schroeder
I never thought I'd say that.
Robert Mills
We’ll link to those is in the show notes as well and it's you're going to think I'm making this up it's really interesting that you said crocheting because I have been targeted by crocheting on Instagram out of the blue literally in the last three days right and it's not anything I've ever searched I don't ,well I didn't follow anybody doing it I've now followed a few people, because it's really mesmerising watching people doing it. I've been thinking I need a new hobby that's not screen related and things and I've been, could I stitch a tiny dinosaur maybe? Maybe I'll get a Wobble and I'll give it a go.
Erin Schroeder
I just got back from our company retreat and I took some yarn with me and I made some hats and I was making a hat for a friend of mine and someone else saw it and it was kind of chilly that night and they said can I borrow that hat and I said sure. So I let him use it and then he's like it's really nice I said you can just keep it because it's not hard hats or ones that I can do just like sitting down watching tv but yeah these Wobbles you know, they're little figurines they've always wanted to make figurines but they're so easy these kits are so easy you learn so much because it's a hard skill to pick up and what's funny is I know people who knit who are like I don't know how to crochet and I'm a crocheter and I'm like I can't figure out how to knit. So like we pick up what I don't know anyone who can do both well somebody can only do one or the other better, but I am definitely a crocheter and welcome to the yarn world my friend it's going to be a fun ride.
Robert Mills
I've got a feeling you can expect lots of emails from me that are not in any way content related, well it will be content related but a different type of content. YouTube's are really interesting. You mentioned that because I find I'm turning to YouTube more for help with things so I had to put a bike together at Christmas time and the instructions were just, they were useless, absolutely useless. I managed to find a video on YouTube of someone who had bought the same bike and put it together so I did like pause do it pause do it and that's how I put the bike together.
Erin Schroeder
Totally.
Robert Mills
I'm going to YouTube more and more for that kind of tutorial help type of content.
Erin Schroeder
I’ve like learned how to change the faucets in my house at YouTube. Like YouTube plumbing has been so huge for me for DIY in my house and then sometimes it's almost misleading because I'll watch a YouTube video for plumbing and I'll say oh I can do that and then I'll go try to do that I'm like I can't even get the nut and bolt off from under the sink, like I can't do this I can't do this so I'm sure there's plenty of plumbers out there who have lost business to YouTube but also gained it back because people realise there's no way I can do this on my own. I have definitely called plumbers when I think I can do it but there are things I have fixed on my own because of YouTube and I'm so grateful for that.
Robert Mills
It's definitely a hit and miss mixed bag but there's so much good stuff on there.
Erin Schroeder
Yeah absolutely. I'm grateful for it in a lot of different ways.
Robert Mills
For sure. Well I'm grateful for this conversation because you and I we were chatting the pre the pre-chat chats where we were saying that we've not actually ever spoken like directly before we we followed each other on socials for a long time and I thought maybe we'd been at the same events I don't think we have. So it's been just so much fun and so insightful and interesting to chat to you and I'm really pleased that you made time for it so thank you for spending a bit of your time with me today and with the listeners and talking through that incredible project and that work
Erin Schroeder
Thank you so much for having me .Yes I agree. I think we all that's what's nice about the internet right we kind of all feel like we know each other in a way even if we've never heard each other's voices but now now we know what each other sounds like and it's even better so I'm so happy to have been here it's been really lovely thank you for having me.
Robert Mills
You're welcome, although I’m normally a bit less croaky. Well thank you so much Erin
Erin Schroeder
No problem, thank you.
Robert Mills
Thank you for listening to the Fourth Wall Content podcast. All episodes, transcripts and show notes can be found ay fourthwallcontent.com. Good luck with your content challenges and I hope you can join us next time. Bye for now.
