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Content request forms and how to use them

It’s good practice to make sure that there is some kind of gatekeeping when it comes to your website and content workflow.

If lots of people who aren’t content writers are able to publish to a site, it’s harder to maintain a level of consistency in the language used. You also risk repetition, and information overload, when content is published ‘for the sake of it’, or because it ‘has to go somewhere’. You can also run the risk of publishing content that’s written from an expert’s perspective, which makes it hard for your residents to understand.

All the content on your website should be there because it answers a user need. This means that if there isn’t a clear need for a resident to be able to find this information, then it shouldn’t be published.

It can be hard to move towards good content practice, so a way to start encouraging people to be more user-centric in the way content is published is to introduce a content request form or process.

So for any new piece of content to be published, or any changes to be made to existing content, there are some requirements that you need to check.

How you set this up depends on whether you have an intranet, or can host a Microsoft form or Google form or similar. You may even want to keep it to an email template. There’s no right or wrong way to do it, so experiment until you find a good solution that people are happy to use.

To start with, here are some example questions you may want to ask people who want to make changes to your website. It can make sense to divide up the process for content changes and brand new content requests.

Mandatory questions have an asterisk (*) next to them, for clarity.

Changes to existing content

(*)Name:

(*)Team:

(*)Email address:

(*)Title of your request

Give the request a name that describes what your request is about. Start the request with the title of the page you want to change.

(*)Existing page website address

Give the link of the page that needs to be updated

Are there any other pages affected?

Give the link of any other pages that need to be updated

(*)Details of the requested changes

Give details of what’s wrong, why it’s wrong, and what needs to be changed. It will help prioritise your request if you can give data to back up why the change needs to be made. For example, call centre data or user feedback.

(*)Are there any time constraints?

Yes or no

(*)If yes - when do you need a response by?

(*)What’s the reason for this date?

New content request

(*)Name:

(*)Team:

(*)Email address:

(*)User need for new content:

(*)As a…

Who is the user?

(*)I need to…

What is it that the user needs to do with the local authority?

(*)So that I…

What’s the goal that the user needs to reach?

More information

Tell us if there’s any other information we need to know about this request

(*)Have you spoken to anyone in comms about this request?

If yes, who?

(*)Date this must be published by:

Date this must not be published before:

Remove existing content request

(*)Name:

(*)Team:

(*)Email address:

(*)Existing page website address

Give the link of the page that needs to be removed and redirected

Are there any other pages affected?

Give the link of any other pages that need to be removed and redirected

(*)Details of the requested removal

Give details of what’s wrong, why it’s wrong, and why it needs to be removed. It will help prioritise your request if you can give data to back up why the page is no longer needed. For example, analytics, call centre data or user feedback.

(*)Are there any time constraints?

Yes or no

(*)If yes - when do you need a response by?

(*)What’s the reason for this date?

Prioritising content requests

Once you’ve established your content request workflow, you’ll need to organise those requests that come in.

The best way to do this is to use a kanban-style list-making application like Trello. We’ve set up an example content request triage board to show you how this can be done.

The benefits of managing requests like this, rather than over email, mean that: