It's an ongoing process, but we have, over the last year or so, been trying to improve the way we communicate with our customers. Whether it is via our webpages or social media (it's incredibly easy to make a mess of 140 characters!), we've been taking steps to make what we write easier to read and understand, which will help to enhance the level of online engagement the council has with Shropshire residents.
Using our style guide as a central point of reference, we've been overhauling our content to make it softer, more informal, less officious, less encumbered with impenetrable jargon and abbreviation, and written in short sentences with simple words (you know, like encumbered and impenetrable). This informality needn't be as extreme as lurching into text 'spk', indeed we outlaw that in the style guide, but is merely us trying to recreate online how a face to face conversation would be.
Just about the most straightforward example of this tone is the simple device of using contractions as much as possible, for instance 'can't' rather than 'cannot', or 'we'll' rather than 'we will' etc.
And talking of 'we'll', using 'we' rather than 'the council', or excruciatingly 'the Council', makes us sound more human, more caring, and less like an all-powerful Big Brother.
This is an oft-used but nevertheless definitive example:
Good - ‘We’re asking people’.
Bad - ‘The Council (sic) is conducting community engagement and consulting with stakeholders’.
Similarly, we will always refer to our customers as 'you' - a dead easy way to enhance a tone of informal inclusivity.
Formality is still needed of course, depending on the subject matter, but formality shouldn't go hand-in-hand with pomposity, and we'll use plain English on the pages requiring gravitas just the same as for those promoting half-term bouncy castle activities.
We're acutely aware of the importance of how our content is presented to the way we're perceived as a council.
Stats from Google Analytics show that people spend, on average, an incredibly fleeting amount of time on any of our pages, finding the information they need and moving on. This is in line with other authorities. What our customers want, therefore, is clearly laid out, simply written information and, where applicable, instruction, rather than an essay on some highly technical aspect of the council's work.
Centralised editing team
Probably the single most beneficial factor in being able to present our content in the way described above was the decision we took in March 2013 to move towards a centralised editing structure. We previously had around 350 editors across the council, a figure now reduced to not many more than 10. This gives us the control over content we need to pursue this quest for consistency in how pages are presented across the board.
The previous devolved model of editing had its advantages, but caused us to have such a diverse range of styles and substance across the website that, if you'll forgive just one somewhat cliched phrase, it didn't look 'joined up'. Some pages were well written, with clear details, others were long-winded essays, and some were just a few short lines of text to introduce a slew of attachments that didn't really provide any useful information. Centralisation has resolved this inconsistency.
As I say, this process of moving away from some of the copywriting, and specifically writing for the web, traps local authorities have fallen headlong into in the past is ongoing, but hopefully soon we will be able to confidently claim that all of our content is written in a modern, simple, inclusive way, allowing our customers to use our pages for what they need, confident that they won't be sucked into a black hole of 'councilese', never to escape.
And yes, I know that last sentence was quite long!
Gov.uk's content style guide is good on this sort of thing - as is the LocalGov Digital Content Standards.