Weeknotes 7: Vanilla style (and other flavours of ice cream)
This week I’m going plain and straight-forward. I’m using the daily breakdown template.
But just because I’m using a vanilla template doesn’t mean my week has been vanilla. It’s actually been raspberry ripple at times, nudging chocolate here and there, and pistachio kulfi today…
Monday: vanilla 🍦
I got knee-deep into a funding bid. It’s a proposal to The Henry Smith Charity. My client wants to set up a new type of mental health service for young people. I love and hate this early stage of bid writing.
Love it because it makes me think hard about how to be coherent and consistent across questions set by someone else’s agenda.
Hate it because at this stage the whole of the proposal is yet to come into focus. It’ll only do that when i come back to edit later.
So for now it’s just spooning through a flat surface of vanilla, unable to really taste the bid’s texture yet….
I don’t really hate it. I just never feel happy with what I’m writing at this stage.
Tuesday: vanilla into raspberry ripple 🍦🍨
Morning: more bid work. Same vanilla and vague dissatisfaction with what I’m writing, even though its only a first draft.
Afternoon: I lift my head up to Zoom call level and talk with John at SCVO about how we’re going to complete a content design project we’re running short on time for. We have a plan, I’ve found some more time, and we have a date to launch the alpha.
The project is ‘content as a service’, delivering 3 strands of automated support to small charities to help them improve their digital security, website accessibility and understanding their users better. It’s quite a yummy little project, with both vanilla (full vision still forming) and raspberry (getting exciting now) aspects to it.
Wednesday: full ripple 🍨
Morning: ditto for Tuesday. The first draft is done. The vanilla base for all things good! I feel ripple is nearer on this project…
Afternoon: a big scoop of raspberry ripple. I interview three people at CAST about their experience of writing about their work. Its like a mini-discovery stage for a writing workshop I will deliver the organisation’s staff later in April. I learn that:
- people worry about whether their writing is good enough, just like I do, even when it totally is good enough!
- people want to write about their work, but it doesn’t feel important enough
- people feel they need to know enough about something to write about it (I think you only need to care about it, even if you don’t know much)
- people will find time to read things that help them grow their knowledge at work
By the end I feel like I am eating a mix of chocolate and raspberry ripple. I absorb it all like melted ice cream slipping down my throat…
Thursday: pistachio ripple raspberry 🍧
I do two more interviews, plan a new piece of content for DDC, talk about usability testing CAST’s Digital Toolkit and commission a piece of content for Catalyst.
Interviews: raspberry ripple, choco overtones. I am still absorbing and looking forward to analysis/synthesis next week.
DDC: ripple. I like writing content for the support guide. I like doing it even more when its with David Scurr, the CAST fulcrum of the programme.
Usability testing / Digital Toolkit: ripple. I talk about what to test with Joyce from CAST. Its been too long. We both wonder if we will be working Fridays come September.
Content: I work up a brief with Ettie Bailey-King, an expert in inclusive content whose work has really moved me. I’m confident she will bring something great to Catalyst’s resources. We don’t have a lot on how to write inclusive content. She has loads of important, progressive things to say that I think our sector needs to listen to. Catalyst feels like it should be giving a platform to this. Pistachio kulfi all the way.
Friday: pistachio ripple 😋
Friday is today. Today has been tasty 😋😋
Pistachio: researching how websites and organisations deal with industry jargon, so that Catalyst can find better ways to help its users understand design and digital words and terms (‘Designisms’). I learn that there are two main ways:
- changing how employees use words, creating consistency about what we mean by them, stopping use of some jargon
- providing some kind of A-Z, jargon buster, dictionary or other device on their website, explaining words
I spend 95 minutes researching. You can read what I found. It felt like a really valuable exercise and I learnt loads too. It should help us with our new comms strategy in the summer.
Ripple: drafting a little more of the SCVO automated support content. I feel like I am making good progress towards our April 25th launch date.
Thanks for reading this week’s notes. See you for an ice cream soon 🍨
