How we use data to prioritise new content
As a content team with limited time and funding, how do you make sure you’re focusing on the most important thing?
Parent Talk supports parents and carers around the UK, when they need us. This happens in two ways — via our online advice content and a live 1:1 chat service. Both exist thanks to the expertise of our parenting coaches, who have years of experience working with families.
We know from our research that parents and carers need support on a wide range of issues. But we’re a small team with only one content designer. This means we must think carefully about how to get people the support they need, and prioritise hard when planning for new advice content.
Data-led content design
Since the Parent Talk service started in March 2020, we’ve been refining how we use data to make decisions about where to spend our time.
To ensure we’re producing content that will help lots of people in a meaningful way, it’s helpful for us to know:
- What parents and carers are talking about with each other right now.
- What people are coming to our live chat service for help with.
- What parents and carers are searching for help with online.
- Where the gaps are in our existing advice content.
We bring this data together to understand where the biggest needs are, and what we can help with.
What people are talking about
To get an idea of what your users care about, you need to go to where they are. This will mean something different for every content team, depending on who your user is and what you’re trying to do. For us, it means looking at what parents and carers are talking about online (on social media or forums, for example), and what’s happening in the news.
We don’t have any automated tools to help us with this, so it’s a manual process. But even a small amount of regular data allows us to see what challenges people are facing. It also gives us some insight into the language they’re using to talk about the topics that are important to them. This helps us think about how to frame our advice.
What people are asking us for help with
Our 1:1 live chat service is safe space for people to talk to a parenting coach about any worries or concerns. Our parenting coaches are also important contributors to our content meetings and drive the content creation process. Each month, we meet to discuss the most common support needs on the chat.
If we’re supporting lots of people with a particular topic on the chat, this tells us that our users may benefit from online advice. We also look at whether we’re seeing the same topics appearing in other online spaces.
The right advice content not only helps our users but also gives the parenting coaches somewhere to signpost people to for extra support. In some cases, a strong piece of content means that users don’t need to come to the chat service at all. For more complex issues, people may need to talk to someone about their specific situation but will also find it useful to have advice in writing.
What people are searching for online
Search data is another important tool for informing our priorities. We know that if lots of people are searching on Google for help with the same topic, there is a need for support here. And it helps us further build our understanding of the language people are using.
Looking at this data alongside the data from the chat and social listening gives us a pretty good indication of whether we’re prioritising the most urgent content. But we also need to consider this in the context of where we can add value. Are we the right organisation to help parents and carers with that issue? For example, a question about a child’s health might be better handled by the NHS.
Useful tools for this research include AnswerthePublic, Google Trends and SME Rush.
Where the gaps are in our existing articles
We collect data on how people interact with our existing articles and whether they found what they needed. Their feedback helps us spot gaps in our online support. We can see where we’re helping, and what’s missing. We use a tool called React & Share to gather this information.
The data we collect includes:
- How engaged people were in the article (ie reading time, and whether they left a reaction or shared the article).
- If people found the article helpful or not.
- Written feedback on what they found useful or what was missing.
- Satisfaction score (the percentage of people who found the article helpful out of the total number of reactions).
Sometimes, this leads to an update on that existing article (which we have a separate process for). Sometimes there will be a need for a new article — if this data confirms what the other data is telling us.
Criteria for publication
These things all feed into a criteria for publication. We use this to make decisions about what should — and shouldn’t be — on the website. The criteria also considers audience, and what we know our articles need to do for parents and carers, based on user research.
This is especially helpful when we’re having conversations about why we might prioritise one article over another. It helps us stay focused on the user need as the most important thing, and reach as many people as possible with the resources we have.
Ruth Stokes is a Senior Content Designer at Parent Talk. You can find her on LinkedIn.
The Parent Talk service supported just under 470,000 parents and carers in 2020/21, but we urgently need funding keep going. If you could help us fund more advice content, please get in touch by emailing parenttalk@actionforchildren.org.uk.
