Friday 1 November 2013

Who is reading this?

Our planned date to "launch" our new approach is looming. With that in mind, we've been working hard on writing content for our webpages. Here's a sneak peek of a draft of one of the pages:



What has been challenging about this for me is thinking about the voice of the words I use in the webpages, and linked to this, who am I writing for/to? I feel that a lot of the time I write as if I am speaking to an audience, but I think this is ignoring the fact that this is not the case. I am not speaking, and the audience is one person.

Who is reading this blog? You are. (Hello by the way) There may be other people reading it at the same time, so in a sense I am communicating with an audience, but it seems like a different type of audience, because you don't know that you are part of the audience.

Therefore, I need to choose words in the webpages that make it clear to the reader (as opposed to the audience) that the content is directed at them. This isn't going to be straightforward because as individuals we are all different, so will take different things from the content.

Another part of the communication as about who we are. We are making a very conscious decision to make it very clear who is writing the pages. A sneak peak of a very draft about the team page is below


Alongside this will be individual profiles of each of us, and the external trainers we use, so you know a bit more about us. This is important to us, because we want you to talk to us. We don't want to be faceless or unapproachable, because that isn't conducive to a supportive environment for us all to develop. We genuinely want to hear from you, because we don't want our communication to be all one way, through web pages.

A phrase we seem to be using a lot within our communications is "join the conversation". I like this phrase because it makes a clear statement that we want there to be two way dialogue between us and you. It also suggests fluidity, in that the conversation can be shaped by either side and change over time. To reiterate, we really want to hear from you about what we are doing or what is important to you.

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