Content design and strategy for Natural Resources Wales

Natural Resources Wales (NRW) advises the Welsh Government on the environment, particularly on how to best manage the government-owned woodland estate. It produces advice and regulatory guidance for businesses, landowners, farmers, schools and policy specialists.

Its digital team is relatively small compared to the content they publish and the variety and number of their users, stakeholders and subject matter experts. A history of using the website as a library had led to customers not being unable to find what they needed online and having to phone in to get the information. This put a strain on NRW resources and was an issue too large for their small digital team to handle alone.

NRW needed help to create user-centred content for its woodland creation project and also a strategy to embed content design practices throughout the organisation to make scalable and lasting change. Providing content resource is where Crocstar excels.

NRW needed a range of skills - user research, content design, content strategy and service delivery - so we teamed up with our good friends dxw and Basis. They were also keen for us to improve how their digital team approached agile working so we embedded ourselves within the organisation and established a fortnightly cycle of sprints to effectively manage the project, increase transparency and build a continuous learning environment.

Crocstar provided content designers and content strategy for the project, making sure user needs were met across NRW’s woodland creation services. The need to publish in both Welsh and English meant we needed to adjust our way of working.

We made sure all user research and content design activity was carried out bilingually to meet the needs of both Welsh and English speaking users.

Often content is designed or written in one language and then translated, often to the detriment of the second language. To counteract this, we developed a new approach to creating bilingual content which we called trio writing.

Trio writing is where we created content with a team of 3 people - a content designer, a user researcher and a translator. This allowed us to address issues that had come up in research where translated content hadn’t resonated with Welsh speakers and use the right words in both Welsh and English.

To help embed good practice in the team and wider organisation we developed a content and publishing manual including how content should be created, signed off and managed. And to make sure standards were kept up, we trained subject matter experts and internal content contributors in content design.

By working openly and collaboratively we built up trust within the organisation in the benefits of the work we were doing and in the agile way we were doing it. This allowed us to lead by example and give the digital team in particular, but also other teams and stakeholders, the skills and confidence to put users at the centre of their content.

We delivered user-focused content for the woodland creation project, trained the digital team to improve their content design skills and created a new way of writing bilingual content which we called trio writing.

The Natural Resources Wales digital team has gone from strength to strength. They consistently champion and share content design and agile best practice amongst the Welsh digital and content creation communities, and have even released a book on trio writing to help spread the use of the practice across the public sector in Wales.