Been in the office a fair bit this week which has been great for seeing my team and meeting new colleagues to explain what I do. When I tell people I’m a content designer, they either think I’m a graphic designer or a TikTok creator so it’s good to be able to explain it.
I reached out to an old GDS colleague this week, mostly to ask when we’re next going for a beer but also to discuss digital stakeholder management, which is something I’ve been thinking more and more about lately. In GDS, we had a big spreadsheet (which we called ‘SPOC’ for Single Point of Contact, but I like to think it was a Star Trek reference) that we used to keep track of digital stakeholders across different departments. This was so that we could:
Before I left there was also a push for regular (quarterly or six-monthly) meetings to encourage earlier conversations about upcoming work and to have mini-retros about work that had already happened.
I think this sort of relationship is really important for content and UX design work generally, so it’s something I’ve been working on.
Since starting at the BFI in February, I’ve been dedicating a lot of my spare time to fund guidelines. There had already been a great amount of work done on these before I joined, so it seemed like a good place to start as the foundations had already been built.
I’m always trying to think of better ways to lay out content so it makes sense to the users. I tried to demonstrate this need in a draft of a fund webpage to my team in our bi-monthly UX meeting.
A suggested new layout for funds on the BFI website
On a larger scale, I had a great kick-off meeting with two colleagues from Operations, Partners & Projects about getting content design integrated earlier within the fund guideline process. It was great to dig into the minds of the subject matter experts and get to the root of their problems.
I was able to bag myself an invitation to a regular catch-up with TAPE, an organisation that helps us with offering access support to fund applicants. This will definitely be a worthwhile meeting to go to and I think we’ll find a lot of common ground.
Overall it was a collaborative, conducive and very honest meeting that felt positive for all parties involved and I’m really excited about where this work is going.
Watch this space.
I didn’t plan my Thursday correctly at all. Booked a training session at Stephen Street in the morning, the Red Shoes exhibit (Southbank) over lunch and an in-person meeting back at Stephen Street at 4pm. Nothing life-changing, but I do annoy myself. I wish there was a way I could merge my personal TimeTree calendar with my work one.