We’re back after a lovely Christmas break and raring to go. We are looking forward to sharing our learning in 2023 through these weeknotes.

December comms report

December (like Easter and the summer holidays) is a traditionally quiet period for comms with everyone getting into the festive spirit and downing tools. Our stats reflected this, but it still had some insights and positives when compared to previous months.

• our top blog post was written by Poppy Evans, our associate delivery manager, on her first three months in the role. This has given us some food for thought in asking other staff members to share their thoughts or things they are working on via blog posts.
• using social media channels differently in 2023. As Twitter continues to be a precarious platform, we will invest time in using various channels to reach the audiences we need to. This will include LinkedIn groups, organisational newsletters, SharePoint platforms, events and speaking opportunities.
• we are seeing our average view duration and hours watched per month on YouTube increase. 40 hours worth of content were watched with an average duration of 4 minutes 19 seconds. Suggested videos (videos with roughly the same topic or videos within our own channel) accounted for 36% of traffic in December.

An exciting outcome for labs!

Alaw supported the labs team with their workshops, which ran over a series of four weeks during November and December. This week, she completed the final few bits needing translation, and was able to reflect on a whirlwind two months!

It was an eye-opening experience, one that allowed Alaw to learn a heap of new information day in, day out, surrounding user-centred design, working in the open and teamwork. She was welcomed to the group with open arms and quickly reassured that she was a professional, and her perspective was valuable.

It’s often a challenge to feel confident in your first full time job. But there was never time to doubt with this lot, as she was kicked right into gear from the off! Alaw was encouraged to believe in herself from start to finish, a mindset that’s now engraved within her as she continues to support various projects within CDPS.

It was a challenge, translating many words that did not exist in the Welsh language! But it really was the perfect place to encounter this problem, being Alaw’s first experience of face to face interaction within a work environment.

Even though she was often the only Welsh speaker, which meant nobody could really help, Alaw always felt supported. That’s the best type of team!

Diolch yn fawr iawn to the labs team, and the participants from Natural Resources Wales, it was an extremely beneficial experience.

Understanding our new website structure

We took part in a content workshop with Hoffi. The purpose was to understand more about the content and structure of the new website.

In this workshop at Sbarc, we agreed what we thought the new website content hierarchy could be (that is, what’s in the main navigation menu and what content is in each section). We also saw prototypes by Hoffi to show what a some pages could look like.

We’ve realised that there is a lot of content to be sorted, prioritised and improved for the new website.

Want to have your say? Our website show and tell is on Friday 20 January. It will be an interactive session where you can also tell us what you think of our ideas and whether our menus make sense to you!