Comms team away day reflections

• Edwina:
• Gemma: I love meeting up in real life! It’s so nice to have human connection and to interact without a screen! I think our in-person meetings also help me understand how, what we are work on, fits together. Although we have many digital tools to keep track of what we are doing, there’s nothing like seeing a wall of physical post-it notes all grouped and organised. I’m excited about the actions we’ve divided up too!
• Charlotte: I love our team awaydays, they feel super productive and we always have new ways to improve and work on after! Also fun bumping into new CDPS members at sparc too!
• Mike:
• Alaw:
• Catrin:
• Elise:
• Josh: Our away days are always fun, but my biggest take-away each time is how relieving it is to put together longer-term plans and ideas as a team. There’s something that sparks in my brain when looking at ideas of how to do things better or things we can try, especially at a strategic comms level.

Communicating digital community of practice – Gem/Josh

This week saw the Communicating Digital community come together for their monthly meeting. The session was themed around digital accessibility in Comms and Josh did a sterling job in delivering a short-notice presentation on his top accessibility tips. We had attendees from Velindre NHS trust, Carers Trust, Audit Wales, Welsh Revenue Authority and Cardiff University. Questions focused on how to approach Welsh ALT text and also whether we could circulate our style guide as an example of best practice. It’s great that other organisations are looking at the things we produce as ‘best practice’.

Content design course – Mike

Content

Leading in a bilingual country

Gem here! This week I took part in the second session of the Academi Wales / Cymraeg 2050 ‘Leading in a bilingual country’ programme which is designed to encourage Welsh speakers in public services to promote the use of Welsh within their own organisations. (I don’t think I did the description of the programme justice as it’s much much more than that!)

I enjoyed it so much I posted about it on LinkedIn:

Gemma Murphy on LinkedIn: I spent the morning on day two of the Academi Wales / Cymraeg 2050…

The challenge now is to make sure I am putting my learning into practice. The sorts of things include introducing Cymraeg to every day work (which I try and do now but want it to be second nature). Myself and Poppy are working on getting a Siarad Cymraed working group together to start to pull together a vision for CDPS, which is really exciting!