Toowoomba Regional Council (TRC) spans some 13,000 square kilometres, encompassing the city of Toowoomba, as well as small towns and villages, rural residential zones and farmland.
Located about 125 km west of Brisbane, the region has a diverse economy and is a hub for Queensland agriculture and mining industries.
When TRC needed to overhaul its website to better service plain language and user needs, it turned to True North Content as the experts in high-volume website content work, without sacrificing quality.
The challenge
As part of the website redesign, TRC engaged True North Content to edit and re-structure the council’s planning and building content. This involved working with precise technical, legislative and regulatory language.
True North Content supported the work of TRC’s inhouse communications team in meeting a fixed and urgent deadline, with only 1 week lead-in time.
This meant turning around more than 100 source pages within 3 weeks, while working in the client’s content management system (CMS) – a council-specific tool called OpenCities.
This led to several challenges:
- Subcontracting experienced lead writers and senior writers with enough capacity at only a week’s notice.
- Getting the team quickly up to speed with TRC’s content style, website goals and information architecture.
- Mastering a new CMS to deliver pages on time and in the client’s preferred format.
- Working from pre-prepared written briefs and recorded video meetings, with little exposure to the subject matter experts themselves, or to the wider UX flow.
Our approach
True North Content has access to a large pool of skilled writers, with decades of government experience between them, available to scale up and down fast to meet project demands.
With this engaged and flexible pipeline of subcontractors, True North Content could quickly stand up 8 writers and 2 lead writers with the capacity and skills to manage the project.
The writers had a range of experience in different CMSs and were able to adapt to OpenCities and begin work immediately.
To make the best use of time and resources, True North Content:
- assigned writers to multiple pages with similar topics so the writer could become more familiar with the subject matter
- assigned batches of pages to each writer, so they could work at their own pace and not have to wait for more page assignments
- regularly collected questions for subject matter experts and emailed them for fast responses
- drafted long, complex pages with multiple accordions in Google Docs, and engaged an admin resource to upload these into the CMS
- brought in a senior writer towards the end of the project to help the lead writers review completed pages and move them through the workflow to meet the deadline.
Lead writers met with the TRC contacts every Monday, Wednesday and Thursday throughout the project to ensure the project flowed smoothly and to address any outstanding questions. When needed, writers attended these meetings to get immediate help with trickier pages.
Both TRC and the True North Content project owner also gave writers free reign to recommend IA changes, such as merging or deleting pages.
The result
In just 3 weeks, True North Content delivered 71 completed pages to TRC. Writers worked on 110 pages in total, merging 23 and marking 16 for deletion.
Each page was edited and re-written according to plain language guidelines, meeting both TRC and Australian Government styles.
Most pages dropped at least 2 reading grade levels, improving readability and comprehension. In some instances, True North Content’s writers brought the reading level down by 4 or 5 grades. All without losing technical or legislative meanings.
We also delivered bonus material to TRC, including a CMS manual and updated style guide.
Throughout the project, client feedback was extremely positive, with one senior manager referring to True North Content as “experts” and “the best of the best”.
Following delivery and the successful launch of the new TRC website, the project sponsor told True North Content,
“What you did in 3 weeks and to understand our business that quickly … it felt like you were on our team. I’m bowled over that you could do that in 3 weeks”.
