S02 E02
This #weeknotes post is the second in a series documenting a project to check the accuracy of some of the most important pages on our public site.
Accuracy: how do I love thee? *
Accuracy is hugely important to us all at Citizens Advice. It’s important because accurate, impartial, independent confidential advice is the reason why we’re here. We are here to give people the knowledge and the confidence they need to find their way forward — whoever they are, and whatever their problem.
Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height…
Our amazing data shows the depth and breadth and height of what we do. We help millions of people every year to find a way forward. In 2018/19, this included:
- 28,500,000 visits to our website
- 1,273,000 people helped face to face
- 867,000 people using our phone service
- 557,000 people calling our consumer helpline
- 287,000 people getting help by email or webchat.
I love thee to the level of every day’s most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
In 1958, Eleanor Roosevelt made a speech that celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home — so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”
Our advice reaches into those places close to home. In the twelve months to the end of June this year, our public pages had thirty -nine million page views.
We help people who face rent arrears, people who are separating from their partners, who are facing discrimination when they try to buy a service, who want to find out about debt relief orders, who want to complain to an ombudsman, who need to appeal a benefits decision, who are being told by their employer their contract will change. We help people to live safely in their homes, to live free from discrimination, to be able to go to a job where they can work with dignity, to manage their money, to live with respect for their private and family life.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right
As a subject matter expert, when I check content I scrutinise it very closely, always with our readers in mind. I strive to make sure that it is right, and that it will help our readers to find a way forward. I want to make sure that I have considered all the different questions that I can use to make sure our content is legally accurate. I want to make sure that it will help them solve the everyday problems that they face.
I have a short list of twelve questions to test the accuracy of legal content that I check. This is my personal list (with borrowings from colleagues). Others follow broadly similar principles, but we all use our own process - appropriate for our subject area and the kind of content we are checking. These are negative questions: I want them to be QTWTAIN-questions to which the answer is no.
- Is a statement about the law out of date or inaccurate?
- Does the content miss out key pieces of information, that makes it inaccurate?
- Is the content inaccurate about a process or procedure?
- Is content inaccurate about time limits?
- Are legal terms and concepts not explained accurately
- Is the content inaccurate or misleading about discrimination issues
- Is the tactical advice misleading or inaccurate?
- Is the content misleading about the law?
- Is the content ambiguous and open to incorrect interpretations?
- Does the content miss out explanations of the possible risks or detriment of taking action, or the positives of an option?
- ‘This statement is not wrong, but it’s not right either.’ Is a sentence correct on its own, but misleading for a non expert reader without more explanation or context?
If I have answered no to these dozen questions, I can be confident the content is accurate.
Update!!
Brilliantly, some of my colleagues have taken the pages they are working on through an eight step process and published new checked content in less than 24 hours from the project start. An amazing piece of teamwork. These are the eight steps in our process this week:
- Throughout: Content Designer, Subject Matter Expert and Delivery Managers attend daily stand up and log progress on a shared Trello board
- Page is checked for extent (this means, does it cover England Wales and Scotland?)
- Subject Matter Expert reviews page for accuracy
- Content Designer (with subject matter expert) drafts new content
- Page is sent for content 2i (to check for style etc) by another Content Designer
- Any 2i amendments are made by Content Designer, after discussion with Subject Matter Expert.
- Page is finally reviewed and signed off
- Page is published with new content.
* With apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
