ING Design Blog: Purpose and history
My name is Thomas Kos, I work in the design department of ING and I am one of the editors of this blog. In this article I will share our editorial principles and it’s (brief) history. See it as a design case study, with the design outcome being a blog in this case. Read along especially if you are looking into starting your own blog. You might find some useful tips.In a brainstorm we figured out that the design department could use a blog. A blog where designers from different countries that ING is active in can write about design related subjects.
Before we start, a bit of context. Besides designing for the different business units within the bank, every designer spends roughly 20% of their time in improving our design department. Some people improve the way of working, some people improve the design tools that we work with, others work on internal and external communication — like this Medium blog as one example.
In a brainstorm within our communications group, we figured out that few of the goals of our department can be met with a blog. A blog where designers from the different countries that ING operates in can write about their projects and reflect on design.
This might lead you to the question: Why a design blog for ING?
We want to do this so all ING designers can improve their skills:
- With +250 designers around the world, we want to strengthen local and global ING design communities. We are all confronted with the same kind of challenges and we want to inspire each other with experiences.
- Designers can work on their storytelling skills. Designing top notch experiences is great but being able to explain them meaningfully is one of the essential jobs of designers nowadays.
But also important goals are:
- Share our experiences beyond ING to the whole design world. Why would we be shy? We are proud of our work and we think it can benefit a broader community. We might even spark some ideas in the heads of talented new designers who want to come and help us in our beautiful design department.
- The message of the Medium articles but also working together in creating articles might create some new links between people and departments. The links will cause new conversations that might bring some fresh ways of looking at existing problems.
Other reasons to start a design blog
Before the ING design blog started, one of the designers, his name is Filip, wrote a design blog that kind of went viral, it is read tens of thousands of times. How awesome would it be if we could repeat that success? Even with much smaller numbers it is still worth the effort.
Designers are sharing stories all the time in presentations within ING anyway, so it should not be so much effort to create a blog version of these stories.
Ok, at this point it was clear we need a blog, now let’s go and create one.
What and how to write?
So what are the subjects to write about? Of course you can think of examples that are not nice or interesting to share on a blog. To make sure we don’t cross the line we needed a system to check if the information in a blog is okay to share. We created a framework with practical rules and guidelines to help writers in choosing their subject and writing their articles. We also consulted our communication and PR departments and we designed an easy and effective way to check stories.
Writing rules:
· Use your common sense — don’t share secret information and show respect for your colleagues
· At least one manager needs to check the blog before you go live.
Thats it!
It makes sense to not be too scared to share. Every large company knows stories about failed projects or the frustration of slow progress because of bureaucracy. Those are no real secrets. Sharing that there is room for failure within a company even tells something positive about the environment that you work in.
If you need to share something that is negative, the challenge is to give it a positive twist. What did you learn? What did you put in place to improve? Just telling about something negative is not an interesting story anyway.
Besides the check of the manager at the end, every writer would get a buddy. Most of us don’t have english as our first language. Buddies can help each other by checking and improving the drafts for language and story telling.
How to get writers?
To kickstart our content factory our design communication team should lead by example. We should write blogs ourselves. In that way we could show that it is not hard, that it is fun and that we were not asking something of other people that we did not want to do ourselves. We showed that you can write an article about a subject that you worked on yourself, or you can interview someone else and help them telling their story.
The next step was to communicate internally in different countries that our company is active in that we were looking for writers. At different design meetings we presented the idea and asked for help. Also we approached design managers in different countries and asked for help. And even though some designers approached us to offer their help, it was always more effective to just ask colleagues with a good story to write an article.
How to promote?
We knew that in the beginning it would be difficult to reach a big external audience of designers. We did not have plans to do paid promotion yet. Our plan of promotion was this:
- Promote new articles internally on intranet pages, within meetings, in whatsapp groups
- ·The writer and the communication team would promote a new article on Linkedin by sharing, commenting and liking.
By reaching our own designers we would reach their external network, especially on Linkedin. With every new visit to our medium space the visitor would see and hopefully read some other articles as well. With this organic growth Google should be picking up the content a little bit better each time.
Learnings from starting a design blog
At the end of 2021 our own Medium space was born. We started by including ING design articles that were existing on Medium in other publications or only on the authors blogs. We approached colleagues to write articles for us. Since it was not the main activity we could not ask our new writers to hurry up. We had to be patiently plan articles to release in 2022.
And it is working! As I write this we have seven articles live. Some articles have less than a hundred reads, but some have almost a thousand reads. But even if you reach 50 designers in the first weeks with an article, I would say it is worth the effort.
What we learned is that the buddies system of two new writers helping each other is not working (yet). Someone from the blog team is the buddy that helps writing for most of the articles. For now this is okay. Once so much articles are written that we can not handle it within the team we have to come up with a new system.
Another thing we learned is that gathering idea’s is not difficult, but for every idea for an articles that pops up maybe 1 in 5 will turn into an actual blog. So we don’t have to put much effort in generating idea’s, we have to put effort in finding people to actually write about the idea’s.
There is another important learning. Even though we can not rush people to write their articles, time is not always our friend. Some articles that were almost done were cancelled because writers move to new jobs within or outside of the company. They didn’t feel comfortable sharing their old story anymore.
Last but not least we learned that our organic growth is working! Each story we publish generates a reads for the existing stories as well. And even though we only have seven articles, we can see some progression. That should mean that as long as we keep publishing our blog keeps growing. Pretty cool! The goal for 2023 is to publish more articles than we did in 2022. That should be feasible because we have a lot of new articles in the pipeline. If we can keep this pace of growing we are happy! Slow and steady wins the race is what they are saying right?
