New project nerves and AI fears for charity content

Goal performance

I spent a lot of the week focusing on one new project. I did a tonne of background reading, ran our first working sessions, tried my best to get up to speed, and find my place in everything. I’ve also been experiencing New Project Nerves. I felt like the first working session could have gone better. I wasn’t as up to speed as I would have liked, and definitely ended up taking the team over some old ground. It’s the cardinal sin of consultancy IMO, as it can plant the seeds of doubt: ‘Who is this person to give us advice when they know nothing about us?’ Or maybe that’s just my insecure perfectionism talking. The nerves got better as the week went on, and the path forward is starting to become a bit clearer.

I also had a pitch, which went well, because I’m through to the next stage. I’ve spoken a lot in the past about how tough tender processes can be, so this was a boost.

Finally, I made some progress with my website. I got some basic design system stuff pinned down, and sent out a card sort survey to help me with the information architecture.

I’m absolutely loving the cold sunny weather at the moment – the mornings have been beautiful.

Blockers

This is less of a blocker, and more of a ‘kicking myself’ thing. Last week was the final opportunity to submit a response to the government’s copyright and AI consultation. I contributed to responses via a couple of channels, and wrote to my MP. But I wish I’d thought ahead and tried to coordinate something among the charity content community. Organisations from the art, creative, and journalism sectors have been vocal and coordinated in their response. I think the way this affects the charity sector might be easy to miss, unless you’re immersed in nonprofit content.

A huge amount of institutional knowledge goes into good advice and information content, research, and reports from charities. For example, a few years ago I worked on some content designed to encourage people to use their local ‘stop smoking’ service. I spent weeks speaking to service users about their experiences, interviewing medical professionals to get their first-hand expertise, and reviewing the organisation’s interventions and procedures. The content we created was completely unique and something that only that specific charity could have created.

The government is proposing that big tech companies should be able to hoover up all that content and spit it out without credit, citation, or payment. On the one hand, who cares if people get good information on how to stop smoking? On the other:

• People aren’t getting good information from LLMs right now. They’re getting the most common combination of words on the topic. Which is likely to include some pretty bad advice.
• The calls to action are missing. In the example I shared, that’s links to in-person services and support that are much more likely to help someone stop smoking.
• It’s cutting charities out of the picture. Many charities use content to build their audience and support base via content. Reading a piece of advice and information might lead to signing up for emails, joining a community, or getting that first awareness that might lead to a donation down the line.

I need to write something longer about this. Weeknotes isn’t the right place.

Learnings

One quick learning from my new project was: don’t cut desk research time out of the project plan to make the budget work. It’s a dull line item, but 100% necessary.

Next steps

This week I’ll be working on

• Lots of working sessions
• The next step in the tender process
• Analysing my card sort findings and designing an IA for my website

Source

I’m borrowing this term from Rick Rubin’s book for all the things I’m reading, watching, etc. It’s kind of pretentious, but I like it.

Readability: it’s not just about sentence length 
I came across this while digging into concrete tips that I can give a client on how to improve clarity when working with academic source material. I really like the example of using abstract nouns sparingly from this blog post

I read a few things about content measurement:

Guide to measurement, Abby Covert

Measuring design improvements using Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics, Dom Billington

Find out where your service content isn’t working using web analytics, Jack Garfinkel

And a few things about AI (there’s no escaping it):

Five lessons for careful AI adoption, Rachel Coldicutt

Artificial Intelligence Playbook for the UK Government

Mike Keating (Art Fund) on the collaborative development of AI policy, Digital Works podcast

In non-work reading, I just started The Secret Service by Juno Dawson.