When I was thinking about people to approach for the ‘Content at…’ interview series, Stephanie Coulshed from Scope was right at the top of my list. Scope’s content sets the bar for clarity and accessibility, and the team’s posts on Medium are a source of so much inspiration. (See Content at Scope on Medium.) My conversation with Stephanie was fascinating – and I’m so grateful to her for telling me all about how things work behind the scenes. There’s so much to take away from this conversation, which covered everything from piloting content design to the benefits of Kanban and doing one thing at a time.
Tell me about your role at Scope: what are your key responsibilities and goals?
I lead the content design team at Scope. As a team, we’re responsible for all the support and advice content on the Scope website. That includes:
- user research
- content design
- editing
- user testing
- measuring content performance and trying to improve it
- content maintenance
My most important responsibilities are:
- Making sure that disabled people and their information needs are at the heart of everything we do. Working in a user-centred way is my passion and the thing I’m most proud of championing at Scope.
- Supporting and enabling everyone in the team to do the best job they can
- Evolving and improving our content design practice
Our goal is to design content that helps disabled people solve problems.
What does content look like at Scope?
“Our remit is the support and advice content on the website, which is considered a service at Scope.”
The content design team is within the services directorate. This is because our remit is the support and advice content on the website, which is considered a service at Scope. We’re responsible for the whole lifecycle of this content from initial research through to ongoing maintenance.
We’re part of the information and advice team which includes our helpline and our online community, so I report to the Head of Information and Advice Services.
There are currently 6 people in the team. The roles are:
- Content design programme lead
- Content design delivery manager
- Senior user researcher
- User researcher
- Senior content designer
- Content designer (vacant)
- Senior editor
How did you get started in content?
Since I joined Scope in 2013 I’ve been lucky enough to work in several different roles in digital and service design.
I joined Scope as a digital project manager to deliver a redesign of the website. The role transitioned to product manager once the website was delivered. I looked after the website, not so much from a content point of view, more from a tech and UX point of view. I was interim head of digital for a while.
Then I moved to a new role, product architect, which is Scope’s term for service designer. That was fun, because for me it meant focusing on designing stuff that worked for people. The first service that I designed was our Support to Work service.
In each role I was interested in how people experience digital products and services. So when Scope started thinking about website content as a service, I jumped in with both feet!
I started reading about content design on the GDS/GOV.UK blog. And of course, ‘Content Design’ by Sarah Winters. It made a lot of sense. So I talked to people who were already doing it. People who were prepared to share their experiences. A special shout out goes to the content people at Citizens Advice who were incredibly generous with their time. And the inimitable Kanban Dan coached us on using Kanban to visualise and manage our work.
In 2017 I pitched the idea of a content design pilot to senior managers at Scope and we were off!
I recruited a budding content designer (Jack Garfinkel) and a user researcher (Shaahin Shariat). I designed some basic workflows (research, write, test, iterate). We experimented with user research, pair writing, crits and user testing and brought Alex White into the team as our editor. The pilot ran for 8 months and we produced user-centred content about employment.
Where did the idea for a content design pilot come from?
At that time, Scope was thinking about its services in different tiers. They envisaged support and advice content as the high-reach, self-service tier. So I started looking at content as a service designer rather than a content designer.
Employment support has always been an important part of the services that we offer. We were also starting up the Support to Work service which was offered nationally digitally or by phone. We had subject experts in-house for that, our employment advisers, and we knew that they would need content to support their customers. That’s why we picked work content for the pilot, because all those things aligned.
What were some of the main learnings from the pilot?
“You don’t need a long sign-off process. A crit will do the trick.”
First of all, we could do it! And people liked working that way. The subject experts that we worked with loved doing pair writes. It made them feel empowered and that they were part of the process.
We brought our policy advisers into content reviews (crits) as well. At the end of a crit we agree the changes needed before the content is tested. So no complicated sign off processes that go round and round on email, it’s all done in one meeting. That was a really good learning, that you don’t need a long sign-off process. A crit will do the trick.
We’ve continued to evolve since then. It wasn’t as if we did the pilot and then had all the answers. And, the pilot was about creating new content. Content design is not just about creating new content. It’s also about looking after your content once it’s there.
Following the success of the pilot, content design became the way we ‘did’ support and advice content at Scope and the team grew. The goal of our content broadened hugely: to help disabled people solve problems.
How are you finding working with that goal?
The scope of what we could write about is huge and we can’t do everything. So we need to prioritise.
The way that we prioritise is partly based on demand. We look at things like search volume, but we also look at things like coding frequency in our evidence database. We’ve built the database from several primary sources, which are all tagged by theme. We use the frequency of a particular tag to help us work out relative importance.
We also weight the priority if the content is high-risk. Is it going to affect someone’s financial wellbeing, or their education or their right to social care?
You mentioned Kanban – can you tell me more about how that approach works for you?
“The fewer things you’re working on at once the more productive you are.”
I’d used Agile and Scrum before. When I started to think about how we were going to manage content design, I felt that we didn’t need to work in sprints. We should publish content as soon as it was ready. That’s one of the key principles of Kanban – deliver the value as soon as you can.
What I liked about Kanban was that you don’t impose a workflow, you start with what you’ve got, you visualise it and then you continuously improve it. That’s been really important for us. It makes everything easy to see. We can spot the blockers.
We don’t have any posh Kanban tools, we use a Trello board. If we worked without a Kanban board, we’d be lost. The content goes through so many different micro steps in its process that it would be impossible to keep track of it all.
What we struggle with is keeping work in progress low, and that’s a real fundamental for Kanban. I’ve seen data that shows that it makes sense – the fewer things you’re working on at once the more productive you are. But when people are passionate about what they’re doing, it’s hard not to start that new thing just because you’ve got a few hours free.
What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen during your time at Scope?
Quite a few big world things have happened in that time. Obviously the pandemic. Up until that point, apart from our online community and online content, most of Scope’s services were delivered face-to-face. And so Scope had to transition really rapidly to be able to deliver services digitally.
In content design, we knew we had to respond to the crisis really quickly. We couldn’t go out and do the traditional focus groups and user interviews, so we worked very closely with our helpline team. We looked at what they were getting asked about, what were the top topics that people needed to know about.
It was similar with the cost of living crisis. We started to see evidence coming through our helpline and online community about the issues people were facing. Our page about free food and food banks was a rapid response to what we could see happening.
One of the things that has changed for the team is that the content they’re writing now reflects how difficult things have become for disabled people. Disabled people are facing such challenges in their lives and quite often content isn’t the answer. It’s quite hard sometimes for the team to work continually on stuff like that.
Is there anything that helps you stay resilient in the face of dealing with such difficult subject matter?
It’s something we’ve thought about quite a lot in the team. Because most of the team have worked together for quite some time, there is trust that you can talk to your colleagues about how you’re feeling.
The other thing that helps us is that we get a lot of feedback on our pages. One thing we do consistently is share good feedback. It’s a reminder of why we’re doing it. And sometimes it really boosts you to sit in on a user testing session to hear how people respond to the content.
Who are some of your key stakeholders and/or collaborators outside of content?
- Research and test participants. All our content is based on evidenced user needs and tested before it’s published. We’re fortunate that Scope has a research panel which helps us find most of the people we need.
- Subject experts. We couldn’t create any content without them. Some work internally at Scope, usually in other services. We also work with subject experts outside Scope.
- Scope’s policy team. They review all the content we produce to make sure it’s consistent with Scope’s general policy position.
- Digital and digital marketing. These teams are responsible for the website, the content management system, and for promoting content through Google Ads.
Do you have any specific examples of how content strategy or content design has improved user experience or engagement at your organisation?
“We’re more interested in spotting what’s not working so we can try and improve it.”
Yes! We try to find ways of measuring content performance that are more meaningful than the traditional vanity metrics. To be honest we’re more interested in spotting what’s not working so we can try and improve it.
There are some specific examples in this blog post: how we improve content.
And for all support and advice content the data shows a wiggly but upward trend in ‘yes’ answers to the question, ‘Was this page helpful?’ (71% in August 2020 to 79% in September 2024).
What are some of the biggest challenges you face when it comes to content?
Like most charities, we could do much more if we had more budget and capacity in the team.
It’s often a challenge to find subject experts for areas where Scope does not have expertise.
And finding test participants can also be challenging. We test everything, but we don’t do millions of tests because we’re a small team. We usually test high-risk content with two people and low risk content with one person. We try to test our content with people who have recently experienced the issue we’re writing about, and with people who are facing that issue for the first time. Our recruitment briefs can be quite niche!
How have you addressed these challenges?
We monitor our budget really closely to make sure we get as much out of it as possible, and that we spend money where it will bring the most value. And we use data to prioritise work.
We use our networks, and those of our colleagues to find new subject experts. Sometimes we approach other organisations to ask for their support. Our relationship with Shelter is a happy example of this.
Our research panel is always our first choice for test participants. If they can’t help, we may ask on our online community, or ask other services if they can suggest anyone.
More generally, we’re good at problem-solving as a team. We like to get together and do some creative thinking to get around thorny issues!
How do you see the role of content evolving in the charity sector over the next few years?
Thinking about support and advice content specifically, I would hope to see more research into people’s information needs and the context in which they are searching for content. Content should be about what people need to know, not what we want to tell them!
It would also be great to see more focus on protecting your investment in content by:
- Using data to find out where things could improve
- Regularly checking that your content is still accurate and relevant
- Deleting content that’s no longer needed by your users
And I would love to see more collaboration and sharing of resources and knowledge between organisations.
Then there’s AI… but I think you have written about this better than I could, Lauren! My biggest concerns here are the quality and accuracy of AI generated content that people will read and act on. And the impact on our budgets and funding if the lack of attribution means that we cannot demonstrate the reach and impact of the content we produce.
Do you think there are any advantages to seeing content as a service within a charity?
Maybe it makes you think in a different way as to how you measure the performance of that content because there isn’t a typical conversion. No one’s going to buy something, download something, or join something necessarily.
We’re more interested in knowing when content is not working for people. We can never know if someone’s actually reading a page, so we use a proxy metric for that. We created a custom event in Google Analytics, ‘page read’. It’s triggered if someone scrolls to at least 75% and remains on the page for at least 30 seconds.
We also look at whether people click on internal and external links. This is because quite a few pages signpost people on to somewhere else for the next part of their user journey. If someone just needs to know where to go next, reading the whole page is not a success for them because it means they struggle to find that place to go. That’s why we use both measures.
You can’t really measure the impact of online content in the same way that you would measure the impact of a more traditional service. And you don’t know who read your content, where they were in their life and what they did afterwards. We ask on our page feedback survey ‘What will you do next?’ Sometimes the answer shows that they now know what action to take.
What advice would you give to other charities that are considering adopting content design?
- Talk to charities who are further along the content design journey. People love to be helpful!
- Start small and use data to show senior leaders that what you’re doing works.
- Do what you can in terms of research and testing. Doing something is better than doing nothing!
- Use retrospectives to talk honestly about what’s working and what isn’t. Don’t be afraid to make changes.
- Make all your work visible. We use a free version of Trello as our Kanban board so we can see where every piece of content is in the workflow. And we review the board together every morning.
Are there any books, online resources, or communities you would recommend to others?
In addition to your own blog and newsletter, here are the team’s top suggestions:
- Of course there’s our own team blog, Content at Scope where we share our thoughts and experiences.
- Content Design London, obviously! Books, courses, newsletter, blog, Content Club…
- Content Folks have had great speakers, but are taking a break right now.
- Coop Digital blog
- Working in content
- Measurelab’s training helped us work out how we were going to use analytics after the change to GA4.
- The guide to user research is good if people are looking for a starting point, especially if they don’t have a research background. It’s a repository of loads of other resources.
- Just enough research by Erika Hall
- Silktide blog (although some of the posts are about the Silktide product)
