Our provision for prospective students is changing across 2025, starting with undergraduates next week. The way we approach content management is changing too, ensuring a more sustainable and proactively curated service.

Our new service to the University student recruitment community launches soon in early March. But the step change is not coming from the technology. It’s from how the team functions, and there’s a lot here that they’re rightly proud of.

I’ve just spent a couple of days observing University College London (UCL)’s quarterly IT and digital planning process – Termly Increments or TIs. The experience was inspiring, with colleagues across a wide range of service areas contributing to an approach to setting their priorities that is inclusive, collaborative and transparent.

Many of our team attended a mini-conference recently, organised by colleagues at the University of Dundee. We all have personal highlights arising from a busy day of presentations and networking.

The Public Sector Digital Meetup is a community-organised regular event in the Edinburgh area bringing together colleagues from government, councils, universities, museums and other organisations. This November, we’re taking over the agenda to showcase our work and the value of a multi-disciplinary approach.

Last month, Lauren and I attended this year’s Content Ed conference in Liverpool. We were both speakers, but had plenty of opportunity to learn from others and network too. These are our highlights.

We’re fortunate to have Tracy Playle visiting the University for a content strategy talk in November. This is a great opportunity for digital content professionals to learn from a leader in our sector. Book a place to join us in person or online.

I had the honour of presenting a keynote at this year’s ContentEd Conference, held in Liverpool. This blog contains a transcript of pretty much what I said, plus links to many of the resources I mentioned.

As we are about to embark on our final round of software development, leading into a launch of the new service from March 2025, I thought this was a good point to look back on what we’ve achieved so far and what’s coming next.

In the behavioural economics book Nudge there’s a beautifully simple example illustrating the importance of feedback. It’s a great way to explain why it’s so important for content designers to actively engage in hypothesising, prototyping and testing with users.