2021 highlights: Digital experience programme update
We’ve made some exciting progress this year with the council’s digital experience programme. Here’s what we’ve been up to in 2021.
Table of contents
Team changes
We welcomed Megan O’Donnell and Joey Gartin to the digital experience team. By expanding our team, we’re better able to manage improving the council’s user experience alongside day-to-day support for service colleagues.
We partnered with Manifesto, a leading digital experience agency, for an in-depth look at the council’s digital estate: what channels do we currently have, what do our users need, and how can we make it happen? This ‘discovery’ phase has recently concluded, and we’ve now got an exciting roadmap of action for the year ahead.
We’ve also updated our ways of working by introducing the ‘make a request’ form on The Thread. So far, we’ve received over 240 requests in just two months.
- If you’d like support or advice from the digital experience, comms, design, or marketing teams, use our easy online form to make a request.
Website updates
We’ve focused on keeping our website’s coronavirus (COVID-19) information updated throughout the year. We’ve also focused on projects which support our residents during this difficult time, such as the council’s tenant grant fund, which provides rent relief to tenants adversely impacted by the pandemic.
This includes the staff section of our website. We’ve supported teams to publish content on wellbeing, working from home, staff benefits, flu vaccinations, and more.
We also helped to make our website GDPR compliant by introducing a new cookie consent mechanism.
Throughout all these projects, we’ve continually promoted accessibility to our colleagues across the council. This is essential, since we must comply with the latest accessibility regulations—but it also makes it so much easier for all users to get the information they need when content is clear, accessible, and helpful.
Preparing for a new renfrewshire.gov.uk
We’re currently auditing our existing website. This will help us prepare for a new, improved website over the next couple of years. So far, we’ve:
- fully audited 620 pages
- partially audited 813 pages
- identified some great opportunities to improve user journeys for our customers.
We’re also developing content and search strategies for the council. These will help inform our work as we continue to transform the council’s digital experience, and they will also be useful to service colleagues creating or updating web content.
Now that we’ve completed the ‘discovery’ phase of our ongoing digital experience programme, we’ll start the next phase of work in January: procuring the necessary resources, starting the alpha phase of our website redevelopment, and promoting these upcoming changes to our colleagues across the council.
See you next year
It’s been a busy year, and we’ve got much more to do in 2022. Thanks for recapping the year’s highlights with us!
If you need support or advice from the digital experience team in the months ahead, please get in touch using our easy online form to make a request.
