Aberdeenshire Council blog

In September 2008 Aberdeenshire Council's web team set up a blog in order to communicate with the public and their own staff during the redesign of their corporate website. They asked for comments on the Public Sector Forum and I gave the following feedback:

This is a very interesting approach to gathering user feedback, and also interesting that you have used just one platform for both staff and the general public. It would be interesting to know how you are promoting the blog to the two groups, and whether your rules for comment moderation reflect those potentially disparate audiences.

The most attractive thing for me is that the blog has a very clearly defined raison d’etre. The fact that it will have a finite lifespan (i.e. until the delivery of the new site) means that you’ve set a realistic premise – most open-ended blogs die a death sooner or later which can look very bad for an organisation.

I do wonder whether it might be wise to offer more traditional ways for users to provide feedback as well, though. The blog itself offers no other method of contact - was it a conscious decision not to encourage that? Many users may not have the confidence to submit a comment, to be read and scrutinized by the public at large, and past studies have suggested that about 95% of blog users are ‘lurkers’, never contributing to discussions. There is also a risk that only the more technically-proficient will find and engage with the blog, excluding many of the users for whom your website improvements could most benefit. Perhaps you are planning other forms of outreach to counter these issues?

All in all, though, this looks like a great effort to involve your users from a very early stage of development, when significant change can still be effected without significant cost.

The response to my feedback was positive and very pro-active, with a Contact Us section appearing the next day. I look forward to seeing how this blog develops over the coming months.