Content in a pandemic
By: Persis Howe
Tags: City Government, Civictech, Case Study, Content Strategy, Content Design

Corralling San Francisco’s Coronavirus content

This blog is from a talk given during the San Francisco Design Week, June 19,2020

Hi. I lead the content team at Digital Services for the City of San Francisco. Over the last 4 months my colleagues and I have built out coronavirus content on the City’s website, SF.gov, to help San Franciscans make sense of the pandemic. We’ve learned that content becomes very important when people are scared. And that websites are never perfect, but should always try to be.

Stay home logo from SF.gov

Government silos

The City of San Francisco works on a federated model, rather than a top-down approach. Each agency is siloed to create checks and balances. This means it is not built to speak with a single voice.

The City and County of San Francisco has over 200 City websites. Everything from 1,000 page sites for the Department of Health to single page sites about specific health treatments. It all looks different. It all works differently.

SF.gov

My team had been working on SF.gov, a cross-departmental site for about a year. SF.gov focuses on services that San Franciscans can get, like birth certificates and permits. We had convinced a few departments to move some of their services. But the site was tiny.

And then Coronavirus happened. In February 2020, SF.gov averaged under 5,000 unique pageviews a day. On March 16, we got over 500,000 unique pageviews. That day the Health Order came out. We were all supposed to stay home. And no one knew what to do.

We could see on social media that San Franciscans wanted to know what they needed to do. What was safe? What did they HAVE to do? What businesses could stay open?

Government speak

The City released a Health Order. And FAQs on how the City is interpreting those orders.

But both are written in legal jargon, for lawyers. They make it hard for San Franciscans to understand what they have to do.

And in a stressful situation, like a pandemic, everyone has more trouble than usual understanding dense, complicated text.

And both documents are PDFs, so people using cell phones can barely see them. We were getting over 50% of our views on mobile.

Websites are for all the things

I’ve found many people think of websites, particularly government websites, as updated versions of a community notice board. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good notice board.

But websites that give you too much information, like a notice board, are crap in a crisis because they don’t help you prioritize information. When people have too much information, they have trouble making decisions. By giving San Franciscans all the information we had, we make it hard for them to do the right thing.

Our solution — build trust

So our new website was thrust into the limelight. However, SF.gov is built to help San Franciscans get birth certificates, file complaints, and get other services. It wasn’t built to manage an onslaught of PDFs, and it becomes hard to find things very quickly.

We focused on building trust, with both San Franciscans and our colleagues across the City. We posted those pdfs. And we posted them really fast. And we pulled out the most important information. At the top of the page, in HTML.

Be in the room

We’ve kept a content person at the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) for over 3 months. We could easily have done our work from home (it’s a website), but being there won us trust.

Bekah Otto started at the EOC. And she realized that San Franciscans were asking about the date the first Health Order finished. So she pulled that date to the top of a very long page. And SF.gov won twitter that week.

We kept all the information the lawyers wanted on the page, just further down. That made the page way too long, but it gave folks a sense that we were speaking to them, in language they could understand. And that we included all the things.

Because we were at the EOC, we could run a workshop with colleagues from the City Attorney’s Office, the Mayor’s Office, Public Health and 311 to prioritize and organize content on the Coronavirus page.

Agreement across departments made it much easier to push back against notice board content asks.

Work in the open

When we first started publishing Coronavirus content on SF.gov, we would very frequently (like daily) totally freak out the folks in charge of communicating about the crisis.

It took me ages to work out that we were all just really stressed. And that silo thing was a problem. There were a lot of gray areas, guidance was changing frequently.

Because content was working across departments, we needed to work in the open. So we now devote a sizable amount of staff time to sharing what we’re doing with other City folks. We write daily emails, we have a public trello board, we run daily content standups and send out weekly team updates. It’s a lot of time and effort. But, even though it feels like we’re clobbering people with too much information, it helps the people we work with trust us.

Focus on the future

Anita Cheng took over from me at the Emergency Operations Center. And her superpower is wrangling all the details. Which is great, because we made a mountain of pages that need to go on the bulletin board. NOW.

She manages the new content, reads the PDFs, and translates the Health Orders to readable, actionable content on what people and businesses need to do. And she’s developed relationships across departments, which can help reduce everyone’s stress.

Constantly make it better

In a crisis, the focus changes frequently. One day’s messaging was about what business qualified as an essential business. The next day is about face coverings, and why we’re not calling them masks.

Because the focus changes so frequently, we’re able to iterate on content that’s not working (and give up on some pages, knowing it might change in a few days).

Epilogue

Since I gave this talk, we’re focusing less on the virus and more on reopening San Francisco. We’ve added human translations on over 250 pages. A new feedback form on every page of SF.gov means we’re getting feedback from users as they use the website. The responses have been overwhelmingly positive (almost 80%). But most importantly, we’ve brought the City together on a single site, making it easier for San Franciscans to know what they need to do to stay safe.