Using content skills to make a better world
In March 2022, I spoke at the Utterly Content conference about how I have used my content skills for good and how you can use your own skills for causes you care about. This post contains the video of that talk and the transcript.
Video
The talk is 25:55.
Transcript
Hi. I’m Lauren Tormey and I’m a Senior Content Designer at the University of Edinburgh. I’m here today to talk about using content skills to make a better world.
First, a note about the title. Yes, it sounds a bit cliche. ‘Make a better world’. That’s not what I originally wanted to call this presentation.
My original title
I originally wanted to call it ‘Using content skills to take down evil in the world’. But I showed it to a friend, and he suggested I should try and make it sound more positive.
I thought, yeah, he’s probably right. And I changed it.
But I think the fact that I wanted to make it so negative sounding really reflects the place I’m coming from when giving this talk. And what is that place? My life.
My life
This is my life. Well, this is a simplified Venn diagram of the things I am or do in my life. In my career, I am a content designer. Outside of work, I’m a runner. And an identity label that has really permeated every aspect of my life for the past decade is being an immigrant in the UK.
This talk comes from this starred intersection of the Venn diagram of my life, the part where I experience life as an immigrant through the lens of a content designer. And the part where I approach content design as an immigrant.
Going through the immigration process in the UK has brought a lot of pain, anger, stress, isolation, and many more negative experiences to my life. So if this talk gets intense, just know I’m carrying around all these emotions and experiences when I’m delivering this talk.
What I’m going to talk about
And on that topic, let’s get in to what I’m going to talk about.
First, I want to tell you how this talk came about. The first Utterly Content conference in 2020 intertwined with a pivotal moment in my immigration experience that has given me new purpose as a content designer.
Before I get into using content skills for good, I’ll give some real-world examples of content that leads to people getting hurt.
I’ll then get in to some of the ways I’ve used my content skills for good and how you can use your skills for good too.
I’ll finish by talking about how conferences can serve as a time to reflect on your career and what you want, and how content skills are a powerful toolset.
Why I’m giving this talk
So first, a bit of background about how this talk came about. Let me tell you the story of my 2020.
What happened in 2020
I spent June to October 2020 researching and compiling a bunch of news articles and other sources of every terrible thing the UK immigration system does to people. Why did I do this? Because my experience of the system was terrible, but the coronavirus pandemic opened my eyes to how cruel this system truly is. I won’t go into specifics because I could talk about this forever. But long story short, during an international health and economic crisis, the UK government was still putting anti-migrant policies over helping people and keeping people safe.
I reached a breaking point. I wanted to speak out, to let my British friends and coworkers know how truly inhumane this system was. But I didn’t feel safe enough to do so because I was about to apply for permanent residency. I feared this government so much, I kept my mouth shut because I thought it might jeopardize my application.
While keeping silent, I used my time to research all these sources for a Twitter thread I would write on the UK immigration system. I chose a thread because Twitter seemed like the best way to reach my connections, and easily gave them the ability to share it with others.
The day finally happened. On October 2, I got permanent residency in the UK. I could now publish what I had been working on.
I decided that I would wait until October 21 to publish. I had taken the week off, but I was first attending the Utterly Content conference on October 19 and 20. Once the conference was done, I’d have the space to publish and deal with any subsequent reaction to it.
I don’t know about you, but I love conferences. I walk away from them feeling reinvigorated and excited about what I do and the sector I work in.
But that’s not how I felt after Utterly Content. Going into this conference knowing I was about to publish my most important piece of writing about a human rights topics, I didn’t leave the conference thinking, oo, I can’t wait to get back to work and apply what I’ve learned.
Instead, I thought, I don’t think I want to work in higher education anymore. Heck, I don’t even think I want to work in content anymore. I had spent the past 4 months reading the works of journalists, politicians, and human rights lawyers fighting the injustices of the UK immigration system. And here I was doing content design for prospective university students.
At the conference, I just couldn’t engage with the talks I was watching or the topics people were presenting about. Content work didn’t feel fulfilling anymore. I felt like I was at the start of this mission to tear down the cruelty towards immigrants in the UK, and what I did for a living wasn’t in service of that. How could I possibly care about editing a university course description when there were so many more important issues to fix in the world?
On October 21, as planned, I published my thread. 114 tweets in total. I centered it around the different ways the UK immigration system hurts people, with a call to action at the end to write to your member of Parliament with a list of immigration reforms.
I learned an important lesson after publishing that thread. I thought I was wasting my time away working in content. But what I came to realize is that content skills are in fact a powerful toolset. So today I want to talk about the ways I’ve used that skillset since in service of my immigration reform mission, and how you can use your skills to support causes you care about.
Content that hurts people
Before I get into using content skills for good, I want to talk about content that hurts people. I said content skills are a powerful toolset, and power can be used to do both good and bad. I want you to understand what I mean by ‘the bad’ before I get into ‘the good’.
All the examples I’m about to give are about the UK government. I’m sure some of you attending this conference work for the UK government. I’m also sure some of you will work for big organizations frequently in the news for unethical practices.
To be clear, I’m not trying to shame anybody for the work they do or the organization they work for. I think any of us who work for a big employer will disagree with at least some of their practices. But sadly, we live in a society where we are forced to make a living to survive. Making our workplaces completely ethical and good-natured can be far out of our control, and also can’t always be the priority when we need to feed and shelter ourselves and our families.
I’m sharing these examples as someone whose life was negatively impacted by the UK government, and as someone who wants to create a better world where governments, organizations, and individuals aren’t inflicting harm on others. I’m sharing these examples to show the reality that we all need to recognize: content can be used in service of hurting people.
Misleading wording meant a woman was denied permanent residency in the UK
In 2021, a woman went to apply for indefinite leave to remain. She had been in the UK for 13 years and for the last 4 years she had been on the 5-year spousal visa route while married to her British husband.
She went on the UK government website to see about the process and came across this content in the red box about who is eligible for indefinite leave to remain when you’re on a spouse visa. Being on the 5-year route, she reads this first sentence to answer her question. It says: ‘If you’ve got a family visa as a partner or spouse on the 5-year route, you must have been living in the UK for 5 years.’
From that wording, it seems clear it applies to her. She’s on the 5-year route and has been living in the UK for well over 5 years. She applies for indefinite leave to remain as the spouse of a British citizen. Her application is rejected because she is told she is ineligible to apply under that category.
Why is that? Because she had to have been on that spousal visa for 5 years to apply in that category. But the content didn’t say that. I’ll note it does say this in the content for the 2-year and 10-year route directly below the sentence about the 5-year route.
But because it didn’t for the 5-year route, her application was not only rejected, the Home Office (which is the government department responsible for immigration), placed her at the start of the 5-year route again, which would have forced her to pay thousands of pounds of application fees for the next 5 years and still be considered a temporary resident.
And not only that, the Home Office did this when she had actually been eligible for indefinite leave to remain under a different route. She had been in the UK for over 10 years, which made her eligible under the long residence category.
This woman requested her application be reconsidered because the website was misleading but the Home Office refused. Only when the couple brought this story to the attention of UK media outlets did the Home Office finally budge and grant her indefinite leave to remain.
And they updated the website, as you can see under the revised wording heading, to make the wording clear you had to be on the spousal visa for 5 years to apply.
A misleading piece of web content severely affected this woman’s ability to live in the UK long-term. A few missing words had devastating consequences.
Now I’m not trying to chastise the person who put this misleading content up on the website. I highly doubt the web person had such malicious intentions like the government does. But I’m trying to point out how if we’re asked in our jobs to work with content in service of harmful systems, I really hope we can do our best to shield our users from the harm that is outside our control.
And bear in mind this woman was lucky enough for media outlets to take her seriously enough that this could get resolved. Others won’t always be so lucky and can be placed in much more vulnerable positions.
UK Government created a fake website to discourage asylum seekers from traveling to the UK
Take, for instance, asylum seekers. An asylum seeker is someone who seeks refuge or protection in another country. Once they are granted protection, they are considered a refugee.
In UK politics, there is currently a lot of backlash against migrants who cross the English channel to enter the UK. The government is even in the middle of passing a bill that would effectively criminalize and/or strip rights away from people seeking asylum in the UK.
As part of their efforts to deter asylum seekers away from the country, the Home Office set up what was essentially a fake website geared towards migrants and giving them misleading information.
The website did not disclose its government affiliation in any way. The web address ended in .org and there was no government branding.
It invited asylum seekers to email questions, not knowing they would be emailing the government. The website claimed it was a crime to steer a boat to cross the English channel, when it wasn’t.
When I read this story in summer 2021, I kept thinking about how it’s someone with my skillset that would have been able to put this website together. Content was used to keep vulnerable people away from seeking protection.
So clearly, content can be used to hurt people. But as I said, the power of a content skillset can be used for good. So let’s get into some of the ways we can use our skillset to truly make a difference in the world.
Using content skills for good
In this part of the talk, I’m going to share how content skills can be used for good, using examples from my experiences, what I’ve read from others, and ideas I’ve had.
Since publishing my Twitter thread on the UK immigration system, I’ve realized that I don’t necessarily need my 9–5 job to be fighting for human rights. I’m not saying I wouldn’t like that, but I’ve learned there are other ways I can use my time to support my cause, and that I can make the most of my content skills to support that cause.
Some of you may be working in jobs where you do get that opportunity to get paid to work in an area that matters to you most. But for those of you who aren’t and who think you’d like to spend at least some of your time using your skills to make a better world, here are some ideas.
Write
First, write. There are a vast amount of skills across content professions, but many of us are good writers. Specifically, we know how to write and structure content in a way that makes it easily readable and accessible to our intended audiences. Better yet, we even think about who our audience is before we write.
These skills are crucial if we’re trying to communicate important information. For me, writing is my main route for campaigning for immigration reform. It’s something I’ve always enjoyed, and I know my skills as a content designer give me the power to get my messages across effectively.
That’s why I chose to make my first ‘tell-all’ piece after becoming a permanent resident a piece of writing. It was the medium I could use to achieve my goals best.
My first goal was to make people understand the cruelty of the immigration system. I knew there were a lot of different aspects to this system’s cruelty I had to communicate, and they differ in severity of the hurt they cause individuals.
Just like I do at work, the best way to check how I was communicating this information was to test it. I had 3 different people read a draft of my post, all representative of the audience I was trying to reach.
The feedback I got drastically changed the order I presented the issues of the system. I moved what was perceived as the most heinous examples to the front of the post to create the most impact. And of course, like the good content designer I am, I divided those examples up with subheadings to make it easier to read through the different examples I was giving.
My second goal with this post was, once knowing about the system, get readers to write to their member of parliament calling for immigration reform.
That required all the lessons I knew about writing effective calls to action and the user stories related to it.
First, if I want someone to write to the member of Parliament, I need to link them to where they can find out who that is and their contact details. If I want them to write, I need to tell them what to write. I wrote out the 15 reform points I wanted mentioned in their letters so I wasn’t making readers think about what they should say. If I wanted people to follow my call to action, I needed to make it as simple as possible for them to follow.
This all might seem second-hand to us as content professionals, but consider that not everyone campaigning for important causes knows how to do that. Think about that power we have. We can get people on board to stand up for what’s right because we know how to write the content that motivates people to. That’s amazing.
After I published my thread, someone came up to me and said they liked that I told them what to write to their member of parliament because they never know what to say when others post similar calls to action about their causes but with no template to follow.
That comment solidified for me the important place content has in making a better world. My training as a content designer gave me the skills to do that. I didn’t have to be a human rights lawyer or politician to effect change.
As someone who only had 100 Twitter followers at the time, I was amazed to see I got over 600 likes and 300 retweets. I know that sounds like reciting vanity metrics, but as someone who felt silenced by the UK immigration system for years, to see people engage with a 114 tweet thread I wrote, it felt incredible. Both friends and complete strangers got in touch to tell me they had no idea what the system was like until they read my post, and that they had followed the call to action to write their member of Parliament.
I put this piece of writing out into the universe, and people took action because of it. Writing had power.
Of course, writing isn’t the only skill content professionals have to offer.
Edit
If you prefer not to create content from scratch, you know how to edit content to make it readable and accessible. You know what questions to ask to get writers to think about how they need to present their content to achieve their goals for their audiences.
For me, I was able to do this as part of fundraising efforts I did throughout 2021. I teamed up with Thia, a fellow immigrant in the UK and runner, to do a monthly running challenge while fundraising for JCWI, which is the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, a migrants’ rights charity in the UK.
Part of our fundraising efforts involved communicating about them through our personal blogs and fundraising webpages. This was something that was almost entirely new to Thia who works in healthcare. I helped her learn how to use some of the functionality on her Wordpress site, looked over any content she asked me to before publishing and provided my feedback. I also let her use the structure of my posts as a guideline for how to communicate her running journey.
At the end of our year of fundraising, Thia and I both wrote blog posts reflecting our experiences and thanking each other. She mentioned being able to learn from my content design skills and had this to say: ‘The success of a running fundraiser depends more on how one articulates and shares than on the actual running!’
This is so true. How can we know of anything worth knowing in life unless someone communicates it in a way we can understand. Again, it comes back to power. We have a tremendous amount of power in even just being able to edit someone’s content so it can best reach its intended audience.
Volunteer your time
You can also use any of your content skills in a more formal way by volunteering your time. If you work for a company, check with them if they provide you with any volunteering days. In my case, the University of Edinburgh provides employees with 1 day of volunteer leave. In 2021, I used that day to help out JCWI.
Their team had an idea to do a fundraising challenge around the idea of ‘People move’ — a theme that both plays on the idea of migration and exercise. Given that Thia and I were in the middle of running challenges in support of JCWI, they let us come on board to help plan the event.
I offered to run a co-design workshop for them that would help us explore different ideas for the event and how it would work in practice. I drew up a workshop plan and set up a Miro board that went through different activities. This would start with ideation — brainstorming different ideas of how people could get involved in a People Move challenge. We would vote on those ideas and expanded on our favourite ones with even more ideas related to it with an activity called Sunflowers.
We would then use those ideas contained in the sunflower activity to create what’s called a planning pizza, a sort of prototype for the event where we had to answer different planning questions related to it, like how does a participant complete the challenge, and how can we make it inclusive to all.
That was the workshop plan, but there were some lessons learned along the way worth sharing in case you decide to do something similar. This was my first design workshop I ran with members of the publish. An invite went out to the JCWI mailing list. We only allowed 24 people to sign up, planning for a 50% drop out rate. However, on the day, only 3 people showed up, and none of them were specifically interested in creating an athletic challenge, they were more keen to get involved with and do something for the charity. None of them had used Miro before, and none were interested in learning how to.
This made running the rest of the workshop challenging and required some last-minute shifting of plans to make the workshop run smoothly and still produce meaningful outputs. I had to shift to both facilitating the conversations and filling in the activities with people’s responses. The prototype we produced ultimately didn’t factor in to how JCWI ultimately presented the challenge concept. But the workshop did give JCWI extra clarity of what they wanted to do with the challenge, and we all left the workshop feeling invigorated and excited about getting to work putting this challenge together.
So in short, if you’re running a workshop for members of the public who are volunteering their time to be there, be aware that you might have issues ensuring the right audiences come along and how willing or not people might be to learn a new digital platform for the workshop if you run it remotely.
Running a workshop is what I did with my volunteer time, but there are of course other ways you can use your volunteering time if your company offers it.
You could conduct some user research for a charity or organization that could use some extra UX skills, like conducting user interviews or running usability tests on a current product or service.
You could also provide training to staff, upskilling them in content or digital skills, whether how to create effective digital content or even more technical training in how to structure content in the CMS they use.
(Before I get to the next slide, if you’re interested in the techniques I mentioned in my workshop like the sunflowers and planning pizza, they’re from the Service Design Academy in Scotland, so you can check out their website for more details.)
Volunteer with others
You don’t have to just volunteer on your own. You can do it with others, including your coworkers. Here’s an example outside of immigration and from someone else. The Service and Experience Design team at Nationwide worked with the digital team from Shelter, a housing charity in Great Britain. Nationwide’s team spent 2 days with Shelter’s team to run a hackathon which was a combination of a workshop, a design sprint and a brainstorming session.
The teams worked to help explore: How might Shelter support website users to find the answers to their problems on the Shelter website and reduce the pressure on contact channels?
The hackathon’s activities ranged from sharing previous user research done, generating how might we statements, and sketching solutions to the defined problem statement. The hackathon ended with new ideas generated that Shelter could take back to explore further and possibly implement.
So human-centered design skills were volunteered to contribute to Shelter’s mission of ending homelessness and bad housing in Britain. Pretty cool thing to do as a team.
Speak up about something that does not seem right
The examples I’ve been giving have been about helping other organizations, or using your own time to fight for a cause important to you. But you can look internally to your own organization to make a better world for the people who work there or use their services.
Because chances are, there are mistreatments and injustices going on in your workplace, and content can play a part in carrying that out.
I’m about to share an example of something I haven’t taken action on yet, but it’s on my list of things I’d like to investigate about our immigration-related practices at the University of Edinburgh.
This is a screenshot shared by the University’s Staff-Student Solidarity Network. On the left it shows the wording sent to a student not on a visa if they missed classes. It says ‘I’m writing from the Student Support Office. Our records show that you have missed a lot of classes recently. Is everything okay? If there are any issues impacting your attendance, please get in touch with us and let us know, so we can help support you.’
The image on the right is what a student on a student visa receives for missing classes. It’s a very lengthy, very formal reply. I’ll only read some of it to keep it brief: ‘The Terms of your Tier 4 visa require that you fully engage with your studies, including all classes, lectures, and tutorials. Failure to engage sufficiently will result in escalation under the School’s Student Engagement and Monitoring Plan, with the final stage resulting in students being referred to College for potential exclusion from the University under the University’s Withdrawal and Exclusion from Studies Procedure, and their UK visa being curtailed.’
That’s a mouthful.
The University provides similarly formally, lengthy, harshly worded messages for staff on visas about to expire. I understand my employer is legally obligated to make sure visas are in date and that sponsored staff and students are fulfilling certain conditions, but I strongly suspect it’s not a legal obligation to communicate these messages in hard-to-read and threatening ways.
So it’s on my to-do list to speak with the relevant department about why they word things they way they do, and can we work on changing the wording to not only something more caring and compassionate, but something that’s easier to read and does not require an extensive cognitive demand to be able to understand it.
Have a think about practices in your workplace that are similar and that you can help bring about change to. Bear in mind, you might not be aware of some practices because they don’t directly affect you. Don’t let that privilege shield you from finding out about the way others are treated, and make a point to say something when you notice something doesn’t seem right.
The people writing these messages to students and staff at my University aren’t human-centered content designers like me. I have a skillset and lived experience I can share with them to not only help rework their messaging, but even to just start a conversation to question why we do things the way we currently do.
Time to reflect
Those are all the different ways to use your content skills I wanted to go through. Let’s now wrap this talk up and reflect.
Reflect at Utterly Content
First off, use this conference to reflect.
I think conferences are inspiring. As I said at the beginning of this talk, going to a conference can reignite you. When workdays feel mundane, going into conference mode can make you look at things in a new light.
My first Utterly Content came with some pretty deep reflections about what I wanted to do with my career. I’m not saying you have to question the field or sector you’re working in, but when this talk is done, take some thinking time for yourself that you might not have taken otherwise.
Ask yourself:
- What in my career do I find fulfilling?
- What are the gaps, and how can I fill those?
- Who is one person or what is one organization I can lend some of my content skills to to help out?
- What can I do at my current workplace to make it a better place for all?
You might not be able to think of answers to these right away. You also might not want to answer some. But if there’s any part of you that feels like you could use your content skills to make an even better world, then do. Because remember…
Content skills are powerful
Content skills are powerful.
Good content is care.
Good content is compassion.
Never devalue your skills. They can truly make a difference in the lives of others.
Take, for instance, this final content example I have for you from the legal word. This picture is a letter written by a judge to a child at the center of a court case. The judge writes the letter because they acknowledge they wrote a long judgement about the case and it’s full of legal language. But they want to give the child a letter telling them what the judgement means for them in quote ‘simple language’.
What a difference for that child this letter must make. To show enough care to someone by telling them how an important legal decision affects them in language they can understand.
That’s the better world I hope we as content professionals can help create. A world where we are using our skills in service of helping those in vulnerable or challenging situations. A world where we know we play our part in doing what’s right.
And by playing our part, I mean by recognizing this final important point.
Working together is even more powerful
Working together is even more powerful than our set of content skills alone.
We, as content professionals, form one part of a collective effort to make a better world. Because of course it takes more than just the words people. We need those human rights lawyers, and politicians, and journalists, and activists to help fight injustices. We also just need people who care about other people.
I want to end by sharing what was probably the best piece of news out of the UK in 2021 and showcases the power of what a group of good people can do.
On May 13, the Home Office attempted to detain two immigrants living in a neighborhood in Glasgow, Scotland. Word about the immigration raid spread on social media, and soon, hundreds of protestors started pouring onto the street and surrounded the van that was meant to take these two individuals away, chanting ‘these are our neighbors, let them go’. Under mounting pressure, UK Immigration Enforcement released the individuals back in their community.
The power of individuals using their bodies to stand in the way of injustice protected two people from being detained.
So if you ever get down about the world and think everything seems bleak, remember that we, as individuals or collective groups, as content professionals or even just as human beings, have the power to make a better world.
Thank you for listening
Thank you so much for listening to this talk.
If you would like to connect with me or ask any questions, you can catch me on email at lauren.tormey@ed.ac.uk, on LinkedIn or on Twitter at ltormey.
And if you have any interest in reading the 114 tweet thread I wrote on UK immigration, you can find the blog post version of that at bit.ly/uk-immigration-hurt.
Now stop this video and take some time to reflect.
