What government problems are caused by broken content?

When you show up at the doctor’s, you don't usually say, 'Doc, I have a greenstick fracture in the first metacarpal." You say, "My hand hurts." This is the presenting problem: not the diagnosis or the remedy, but the pain as experienced and described by you.

Content is like that. There's a gap between the presenting problem and the diagnosis. When an organisation's content is broken, it's usually only the content team who sees the problem in terms of content.

Outside the content ward, business areas are hurting too. But they may never connect their pain to broken content. Their problems—a stream of enquiries, a suspicious public, a mountain of writing—feel inevitable. Just a part of the job they have to put up with.

Let's take a few minutes. Put the hand under the x-ray and see what's going on in there.

Where does it hurt?

1) Losing trust: Is your agency's work perceived as obscure or threatening because you don't clearly explain what you do and why? This introduces friction. One agency I worked with—ACT Courts—had just sent all their staff on conflict resolution training. Because by the time members of the public hit the enquiries desk, they were fuming.

So now we're creating content that explains what to expect. How to find your way around. How to make the court experience less daunting.

2) Losing credibility: Is your website letting your reputation down, with out-of-date content or broken links? So often in government, published content is like an untended garden. We plant it then walk away.

Users will judge your credibility harshly and fast. Every time they hit a broken link, your reputation slips. But without a strong content hygiene program, these errors can go unchecked for years.

3) Losing influence: If your agency can’t clearly explain what it does, private-sector brokers may come in to exploit the gap in the market. They offer information and services at a premium, whereas your agency provides them at a low cost or for free.

Your agency loses its standing as the authoritative and trusted source.

4) Wasting time: Bad content wastes your agency's time in three main ways:

a) Needless enquiries: Staff's time is chewed up answering repetitive enquiries because users can't find information online. Of course, not every user will want to self-serve online, but many will. These are the people we want to help.

b) No ready reference: Even when staff are answering complex enquiries over the phone, they often use web content as a reference to direct people to. Staff waste time if they can't easily find a reference.

c) Producing content for no reason: From my own experience working in government, I know it's very easy to fall into an output mentality: producing content to demonstrate activity (e.g. our department 'must' be on social media).

But this leads to staff spending time creating purposeless content. It isn't aligned to a strategy. It isn't measured.

Overproduction isn't just a resourcing issue. It's also about engagement. When your staff are tasked with creating purposeless content, their work feels purposeless.

4) Not getting the right outcomes. What do you want people to do? It could be a compliance outcome: building in line with a code, or reporting business activity. It could be a behavioural outcome: getting people to exercise more, smoke less, and stay out of hospital.

In either case, there're costs when people don't do that thing. Staff overheads to investigate incidents or chase up paperwork. And social costs in delivering healthcare and other services where our best scenario is that people use them less.

5) Not serving your users. I've worked with and for the Australian Public Service for almost 15 years. I've come to believe that the role of the public service is not just to put things out there—policies, programs, or funds. It's to serve people by meeting their needs.

When people visit your website (or read your brochure, or contact your call centre), they're coming to get something done. To do that, they're consuming information. And that information is content.

How can we design better experiences without designing the content that goes with it?

What's the remedy?

There’s no one remedy for every content ailment.

But we do know where to start. First, we'll need to run a few quick tests. That could be sending your website off to the lab for a content audit. What content do you have? Is it working? It could be talking to your users and checking the analytics data. Does your content have a pulse?

Once we're talking, a content strategist will know pretty quickly what the next step is: what's broken, and how to fix it.

These problems might have been part of your organisation for a long time. They may seem inevitable. But with the right help, content problems are very treatable.