SSC issued the 2006 Update to the E-government Strategy yesterday and, while not something that will be widely read by comms people, I wanted to share some insights round the creation, or rather the recreation, of the key messages in the Strategy.
The last version of the Strategy, the June 2003 update, was I thought, underserved by it’s key messages (if you click through, you will see what I mean: there are ten of them, and, overall, they are the curate’s egg) - so for this version I was particularly keen to see that we put quite a bit more effort in to making them work.
The first thing I noticed was that, in an inspired Spinal Tap moment, we had ratcheted up the number of messages to 11. One more than last year: it must have been better, right? I will spare you the gory details, but if you want to get a feel for these eleven little pearls I have uploaded -in a nod to Nigel’s amplifier- key message number 11. Take a breath before you click…
Was it good for you? Because, after reading the first ten, when I turned the page and saw that little baby, I started to bleed from the ears [note to non-comms professionals, a key message is not a diagramme...].
So, in order to whip them in to shape, we asked eight stakeholders from across government (and from different disciplines) to come along to a workshop where we tested the messages for usability. Working on the principle that these people represented the audience for the messages, so why not involve them?
We then whiteboarded the process, going through each of the messages individually and testing them against the ACME™ matrix.
It very quickly became apparent that most of the messages failed in at least two of the four categories and that there was an awful lot of redundancy - perhaps what you would expect with eleven of them. It was also obvious, and this will come as no surprise to anyone who has been involved in website usability testing, that many of the messages reflected an internal SSC perspective that was quite removed from the audience’s understanding.
After a couple of hours, we emerged with six new messages that I think mark a significant improvement on our previous attempts — but I would say that, wouldn’t I? What do you think?
Why six? Originally, I was shooting for five, so that they could be rattled off as you unclench your fingers from a fist (a powerful mnemonic), but added number 6 to complete the first six letters of the alphabet - and ’cause I didn’t want to leave the ‘f’ hanging.
