Hello and welcome to this week’s weeknotes. It’s been a busy week.
Ed and Josh were both in Cardiff for a CDPS board meeting, we launched our comms framework, ran our monthly comms show and tell and also a show on tell on our website project. We were delighted with the turnout from people outside of CDPS.
Finally, we ran our first retro of 2023! The goal of this sprint was to get back into the swing of things… and we’ve learned lots. More information on all of the above, can be found below.
What’s your favourite biscuit? Following on from our comms team charter, we’ve been trying some fun ‘getting to know you’ questions on Slack. This week’s focus was on favourite biscuits and virtual coffee runs:
We’ve been working hard over the last couple of months to produce an events planner at CDPS for 2023 which is varied, has purpose and is accessible and inclusive.
2022 was our first full year of events, both physical and online. We wanted to start 2023 with forward-looking plan and events strategy which was owned by our team. With multiple teams planning events, we want to make sure things don’t become disjointed and overcrowded. We also are mindful that we run the risk of marketing to the same audience with similar themes and formats which could be damaging to the CDPS reputation and brand.
As you can see from this screen grab of our events planner (designed and produced on Mural), we have split our events into specific types, including workshops, webinars, communities of practice and in-person meet-ups or conferences. Some of these repeat month on month, others are one-offs delivered by a guest speaker. By sharing this plan with our staff, we hope to make it easier for colleagues to plan their events, spot gaps and identify opportunities to add value.
We also hope this planner will make it easier to unify our events offering, keep everything on brand and ensure every event is aligned with our CDPS mission, vision and values. Over the coming weeks, we will be announcing some exciting plans we have for regular hybrid networking events in Wales for all those interested in digital, so stay tuned!
The eagerly anticipated communications framework launched this week. It was the perfect opportunity with 5 new members of the user centred design team joining us. It will be a living, breathing piece of content, which we’ll update and iterate based on user need.
We aim to publish this framework wider and are looking forward to discussing it at the communicating digital community of practice next week. If you’d like to join the session, email [email protected] - all are welcome!
At this month’s community, we discussed how we talk about content design at our organisations. It was a challenging and interesting conversation. Content colleagues from other organisations highlighted that the context of each organisation makes it very difficult to have a common approach. It depends