Robert Mills
Welcome to the Fourth Wall Content Podcast. I'm your host, Robert Mills.
Actors address the audience directly by breaking the fourth wall in theatre and film. This podcast explores the fourth wall in a different sense.
We’ll share techniques, strategies, and tactics to forge meaningful connections with audiences, users, and stakeholders.
Our conversations with experienced and innovative content, UX and research practitioners will uncover the details of real projects with lessons learned along the way and outcomes of the work too.
Each episode will provide you with practical insights and actionable takeaways to help you meet user needs, connect with customers in a genuine way, or engage stakeholders meaningfully. Let’s get to it.
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Fourth Wall Content podcast. I'm super excited as always to introduce my guest today. And that guest is Iain Broome. Iain is a freelance copywriter and content designer. He founded Very Meta his freelance studio in 2017, and has worked on a wide range of projects for a diverse collection of clients. Most recently, he has taken senior and lead content design roles working on projects typically in the public and charity sectors.
Iain enjoys making complex things sound simple and is a plain English specialist. More on that later. He also has plenty of experience working with multidisciplinary teams on user research, prototyping, journey mapping, and all the other gubbins needed to make services work well.
Earlier this year, Iain launched Plain English Weekly, a newsletter for people who love clear language, and he's also the founder of Sheffield Content Club and author of the novel A is for Angelica.
Firstly, that's the first bio I've read with the word gubbins in. And secondly, welcome to the podcast.
Iain Broome
Thanks, Rob. Thanks for having me.
Robert Mills
Every time I've worked with you, and it's been quite a lot of instances of the years where we have collaborated on projects together, you've written some stuff for me in the past and there's some webinars, etc. You always throw in some words to just make me smile. Gubbins is one there. You love a bit of a crikey and things like that don’t you.
Iain Broome
I like a crikey. I don't mind. I don't mind a cripes. Even yikes, if I'm feeling particularly surprised by something.
Robert Mills
Yeah, well, hopefully there won't be any yikes today in this conversation. Right, I'm going to start with the question I always ask. And that is, who is the audience or the user that is going to be the focus of the conversation or the project that we're talking about today?
Iain Broome
Yes. So I've worked with, so I'm freelance, so I don't work with the same audience all the time. Obviously, I switch between projects and switch between clients. But I did spend over a year actually working on a project that was specifically, it's a website specifically for special guardians. So a special guardian is someone who has long term legal responsibility for a child that they already have a relationship with. So that's often a Special Guardianship Order or an SGO can often be like the best option for a child when they're not able to live with their pet, their birth parents, but adoption or fostering isn't quite right either. And they're not able to live with their birth parents typically because of alcohol problems, it could be drug problems, they may be in prison, there's usually something like that, not always, but often that is the case. And a special guardian is often grandparents. So it's often a child's grandparents, but it could be uncles or aunties. And in some cases, it could be like a family friend or something like that.
But crucially, a special guardian has parental responsibility until the child is 18. So it's a really long term commitment. And you can become a special guardian when the child is a baby, or it could be when they're a teenager. It can kind of happen anytime. But it's a really long term commitment and you're responsible as a special guardian for day to day decisions, you're effectively they become into your world, they live with you. And so it's like a really crucial role and a big change in a person's life to become a special guardian. And obviously a huge change in the child's life too.
Robert Mills
That's really fascinating. Thank you. I'm already sensing things we can talk about in relation to the need for considerate language and vocabulary, which we'll come on to. Can you just tell me a little bit more about what the project looked like, what your involvement was and what you're actually tasked to do for this work?
Iain Broome
Yep. So this is a project that was for FutureGov at the time who have since become part of much bigger company called TPX Impact. I did quite a lot of freelance work for them. And the client I suppose was Buckinghamshire Council. So they have, they had already worked on a website for adopters. So called Adoption Ready, and that had gone really well. And they were now looking at trying to create a similar sort of thing for special guardians. We quite quickly found through our initial user research that it was obviously very quite a different audience.
Some of the principles are similar, long term commitment to looking after a child, but actually, as an audience group, they were pretty different. And we also found through working with the team at Buckinghamshire Council, so there's the kind of a two teams actually, so they have a team, which is responsible for the process before a person becomes a special guardian. So getting them through the process is a very challenging process, by the way, to get to become a special guardian. And then there's another team that kind of deals with either support once they become a special guardian. But what they were finding was that very few special guardians were actually accessing the support and a lot of them didn't even know that it was available.
And then at the time where we were starting this project, the number of new special guardianship orders had actually surpassed the number of adopters. So it was like 31 to 22 or something, some kind of numbers like that. But a lot of the post support referrals, so people actually asking for support were 82% from adopters. So like a real, a real difference. And so special guardians were not accessing support, even though it was available, they didn't know about it. And yeah, disproportionately, people who had adopted were kind of coming forward and asking for support. So we felt like there was a scope for a kind of a bigger, more detailed site, I think than Adoption Ready, which was quite a little bit smaller in terms of content. And we thought we were what we suggested was working closely with special guardians, doing lots of kind of hands on user research to try and find out why this was the case, why they weren't accessing support, what were the problems. And it eventually became the guardians guide, which is what it was called. It's a standalone site.
In the end, there are I think there's over 70 kind of guides that are on this site organised into themes and categories. They're all aimed at encouraging people who are special guardians to get support, but also the information is there online too. So there's kind of a two prong thing we wanted to encourage them to try and get reach out to the team because the sport was available. So lots of calls to action. But also if they wanted to, they could get a lot of information just from reading the website.
Robert Mills
What you've just outlined there is a lot of work, right in terms of it was a whole site. So there's information architecture, there's obviously there's content, there's design, there's research, perhaps some testing, you know, dev work, I mentioned in your bio that you work with multi disciplinary teams and sounds like that was certainly the case here. What was your specific role within this project? And the kind of main remit for what you had to do?
Iain Broome
So I mean, I was content, content designer, I guess. But we were actually a really small team. And I was working with just me and two other colleagues from TPX Impact. I was only on it a day and a half, which is why it took so long to do. This wasn't our full time thing, we went on it five days a week, the three of us. And I was the content person working on it. And in some ways, I think that kind of helped. There was no pressure from Buckinghamshire like there often is with a client quite reasonably. So there was no kind of right this needs to be done by next week, it was all like we want to get this right, it's fine, you can take your time. And we did. And I think that allowed us to speak to the right people, get the right kind of user sessions in and it also allowed us to really get to know the the two audiences, I suppose we had special guardians themselves, but also the team at Buckinghamshire Council, who were going to be crucial to actually kind of delivering the support. We were going to be trying to encourage people to go and ring them up more and get in touch. So they had to know they were quite, it was quite key that this all kind of did the job for them as well. And also, one of the key sort of problems, I suppose, we also found that many guardians had quite a low trust in the council, the people we work with were great, and they were lovely. So that there wasn't they had no need to not trust them. But as is often the case, people who have been through difficult and challenging situations, councils don't always get it right. And there's often quite low trust. What we found that special guardians would do is that they would find someone at the council, who was great and worked with them, and they would really trust that person. But in general, as an organisation, as a system, there's kind of a low level of trust. And the circumstances in which they find themselves are challenging naturally. So it's kind of makes sense. Yeah, and they were also special guardians also really not not aware of their rights. It wasn't just that they, I mean, some didn't know what a special guardian was, I didn't know what one was until I started the project, kind of a really, really low awareness generally, I think of, of what is like a really crucial role that people are playing like thousands of people are doing playing in children's lives like across the country. They're just like a real low awareness of what their rights are, what support is available. And like so inevitably, it ends up that people aren't asking for support, they're just kind of muddling through or struggling or struggling and not able to kind of give the care that they would want to or that kind of the child needs.
Robert Mills
That's really interesting. Because I've had a conversation, I think it was earlier this year with somebody who was a carer for a relative. And they just didn't class themselves as a carer. Because they just thought, well, I'm just looking after my relative because it's what you do. And just didn't think of themselves as like, in that particular role or with that label. So therefore didn't seek to look for financial support or any like kind of emotional or other type of support. So it's really interesting that you mentioned that there that you know, that kind of self identify and all that awareness, that's quite a big problem or challenge, I suppose to try and overcome.
Iain Broome
And the results of that is that people were when they did get in touch. So when someone finally gets in touch with the council, it's usually when they've got to a point of crisis. So they are missing, through no fault of their own, they kind of missed opportunities to get support and get help that is available. And then it gets to a point where they are in crisis or the child that they're responsible for is in crisis. And that's the point at which they get in touch. That was one of the aims of the project was to try and try and kind of encourage people or get or make them aware that they could get in touch and get support earlier on in their own kind of journey, I guess.
there isn't an awful bit before this website, there wasn't there isn't an awful lot of information online for special guardians. So it's not as if we were replicating for a specific council information that was available elsewhere, we kind of did a lot of desk research as well. And there are some great sites, there is a charity called Kinship, who I then went on to do some work for, which also supports kinship families. But nothing at the level of detail that was required really, there's no kind of manual almost for a special guardian, which I think is what we ended up trying to create.
Robert Mills
And if people are coming in a time of crisis, that also adds an interesting dynamic to the work, and perhaps even like a bit of a subconscious pressure in the sense that you know, they need if they're coming in a crisis, then their emotions are perhaps heightened, or they're in the negative frame of mind, or they're just, they're panicked, they're worried, they're stressed, they're burnt out, all of those things. So that puts even more emphasis on the need for clear content and information obviously that they can understand and they can use. Are you able to talk through what your process was for creating content with all those things in mind that you've shared so far?
Iain Broome
So a team of team of three, me and two others, I'm the only content person. We spoke to special guardians, a group of special guardians from Buckinghamshire before we did anything, and we would repeatedly go back to them. So we started off by just having relatively informal conversations. So no detailed discussion guides at first, just like just chats, we knew that we were going to be able to, you know, they'd volunteered and said that they were happy to speak to us again in the future. We knew there was no time pressure, no kind of eight week schedule, no kind of like quick alpha project or anything like that. So we started out sort of just getting to know them a little bit so that they felt that they could trust us. We explained clearly what we were trying to do and why. Those conversations were hard. Like I think all three of us found them really difficult. Some of the stories were difficult to listen to, but it really made us feel aware of the responsibility we had to kind of get it right. It gave us like a level of empathy that you don't always get time to generate or to develop. So those are the kind of initial conversations.
We did a similar sort of thing with the team too. So with the team at Buckinghamshire Council, both the pre-placement team and the kind of support team afterwards to try and understand like their problems. And then we would all, we'd go back to them. So we would, we did some, some initial thoughts around themes. So if, if you have all of these different things that you told us, all these problems, all these pain points, can we put them into themes? Is there a way of kind of grouping them? And we would do that with them. So kind of, kind of co-design sessions, but we would, we would go back to them with a lot of what we'd done and show them and get their thoughts and feedback. And they were brilliant, like extremely frank and very kind of clear about where we got it right and wrong, which is what you want.
Then we would go back again sort of later on when we were starting to get towards actually building stuff and we showed them prototypes and we actually did, I've not done this since and we hadn't done it before, but we kind of had a license to approach it however, however we wanted, which was nice. So we did prototypes in Notion. If you don't know Notion, then it's, it's kind of a, it's kind of a, like a all-in-one do kind of anything note-taking tool and do all sorts with it. But you are able to kind of just pop text all over the screen. So we were very keen to not show them anything worked up. We hadn't got a developer on our team, by the way, but maybe I'll come back to that later. And so they were kind of able to see those themes and some of the content that would go around it and get, we would get feedback from them just using Notion. Then they were able to like add feedback to it too. And we just sort of left it with them and said, you know, here it is, it's open. It's, it's open as in the sense that it's like, it's on the internet and you can access this whenever you want. So we were able to gather sort of comments and feedback on those kind of prototypes at that point. So that was really useful too.
Then in terms of sort of written content, when it came to that, we did lots of plain English work, obviously. So there's, there is, there was a real kind of desire to write in plain English. But there were also a couple of things that I wanted to do that I felt, not that they were controversial in any way, but I was concerned about them. I was really aware that a lot of the people that I was writing for were vulnerable. And I was really aware that I felt like a responsibility to, to kind of get some of the phrasing rights. So just as a couple of examples, one of the things that we wanted to do was to make a person reading it. So a special guardian reading it or someone who's about to become a special guardian reading it, not feel like they were being talked down to or that they were being taught at. So if we were to provide an example, if we were to say for something along the lines of that, I'm making this up, I should have prepared something. But if we were trying to explain to them, like the process of going through assessment, which is quite challenging and quite difficult, we didn't want to kind of sugarcoat that didn't want to kind of just like pretend that that's easy. We thought this is going to be difficult. We want to acknowledge the challenges that they were going through and that this is difficult.
But rather than just saying, yeah, this is going to be really difficult, or going the opposite way and just having this really kind of sort of distant voice that just explains the facts without any sort of personality whatsoever. Instead, we tried to phrase it in terms of ‘special guardians tell us that it can be challenging to do this’. So we would try and always make sure that they're aware, even just a short sentence like that, which isn't perfect. But even phrasing it like that just says to them, there are other special guardians. Like just even that alone is the start, special guardians have told us that this process can be difficult for whatever reason. So they're immediately like placing themselves alongside other special guardians. Or we might we might phrase it slightly differently. So from from speaking to other special guardians, we know that it can be it can be difficult to care for a child who's been through trauma, that kind of thing.
I guess the another approach might be sort of our experience working with special guardians means that, etc, etc. So there, you're kind of writing it from the team's point of view, and saying like, we know this because we work with special guardians, we're not just saying it, because we're telling you what to do, we know this from our experience. So that kind of phrasing, I went back and tested with special guardians and tried to explain my rationale explained to the team too. And there's lots of that kind of thing all over the website.
Robert Mills
Twice in that answer you mentioned a responsibility to get it right and like having a level of empathy. That's been a running theme in the episodes of the podcast so far. So speaking to Citizens Advice about people designing content for people who are affected by the cost of living crisis, and another episode which focuses on designing content for people experiencing grief. It also came out in those conversations about that kind of the way to that responsibility to get it right. And language is being such a huge determining factor and whether or not it's been right or not, or whether it's been almost right and needed to be kind of iterated and refined. What you've just shared that I know you made up those examples, but they were really good and they show the power of language. Before I kind of move on to plain English specifically, were there any other considerations that had to be made in relation to the language and the vocabulary that was used throughout the content?
Iain Broome
Well, it had to be accurate. I know that sounds like a really obvious thing to say, but there is some legal stuff. There's some legal stuff that had to be right, and had to be phrased in a specific way, if you become a special guardian, that is a legal, that's a legal thing. That's not just a, you know, it's not to be taken lightly. So there were some things that had to be really clear. And we tried to set them out in a specific way. So for example, the assessment process, we broke it down into or explained it by saying this is a five stage process. In reality, there is no you don't get a form at the start that says this is a five stage process, but to try and explain it and to break it up and kind of explain how it worked legally, we did that.
I think the other thing was this, trying to centre the child. So this is a website for special guardians, primarily, they're the primary user. And at times, we are frank, so something around behaviour. So it's quite typical for children who have been through this process to show challenging behaviour. And so we want to part of the site's responsibility is to help her special guardian with that there is a page for behaviour section, a theme for behaviour. But there came a point where I was just thinking to myself, some of these children are teenagers, or seven, eight, they can read, there's every chance that they might read this content, they don't want to be read that they should not find themselves reading content about themselves in this position that they're in, which is through no fault of their own, they're in this position and feel like they're being told off on a website, that's not the right approach. So getting that kind of language right on those types of pages was quite important to me. Also just always remembering that yes, this is a site, this is a site for special guardians, but actually the important people in this process are the children
And finally, one other thing. Again, I mentioned trauma a second ago. Sometimes we can wash over things like trauma when we're writing difficult subjects, subjects that are quite hard to think about, hard to phrase, especially if you're coming at it from the position of an organisation, in this case, a council. So we could have phrased and I think I probably did originally phrase like the kind of the guides around trauma or the more difficult things by saying things like the child that you care for may have been through trauma. The more I read phrases like that, I thought, I'm pretty sure that any child who's been through this process has gone through a level of trauma. It will vary, lots of, lots of children who live with special guardians are happy, their lives are absolutely fine. I don't want to make it sound like you know, this is the worst thing in the world, but they no longer live with their parents. And that is a traumatic thing. So I wanted to try, and this was all tested, of course, this is not just me making up, we went back and tested it. Which is that change of phrasing from the child you care for may have been through trauma, just to say the child you care for has been through trauma. And it doesn't sound like much, but in kind of trying to reflect like the real world experience, it felt more right, if that makes sense.
The feedback was all, you know, no one disagreed, everyone was kind of like, yeah, we've all we've all been through something, we're going through it. And just having that little moment of acknowledgement whilst reading this guide is an important thing.
Robert Mills
Another great example that just shows the power of each and every word in the content that we write and how, as you say, it might be a small change, but actually the impact that can have can be significant in terms of how it makes somebody feel or how it makes somebody relate to the content. And the other thing that really struck me as you were talking there, you know, we started off the conversation with who is the audience, the audience is people who are or may become special guardians, we've also uncovered the audience is the children in these circumstances, and the people within the organisation. And that's always really interesting to me, because there's, you know, rightly so there's a lot of focus on the end user as such. But so much of the work we do involves an internal audience within the organisation before we can even get to the point of creating content for the end user. And so it's really interesting that you mentioned, I probably wouldn't have even considered actually that the children may be consuming this content themselves. I was, you know, I was aware that there was an internal team you're working with, of course, and there was that side of the project. But that was really interesting. I think a bit of a reminder, when we work on things to think about, even though we've got this specific user, will it actually be received by others and what considerations do we need to make for that?
Iain Broome
That was one of the advantages of working with the team really closely, though, because there was this disconnect between these lovely people doing this brilliant job, really knowledgeable, caring, empathetic people, and this lack of trust or lack of awareness of this team's existence from special guardians. And so, yes, lots of plain English, lots of trying to make legal terms clear. But what we really wanted to try and do as well was replicate the team's voice. So it felt like the stuff that they were saying to us, that kind of empathy was reflected in the web content as well. Iit wasn't especially kind of easy to do that. But yeah, making sure that their voice or the kind of care that they would get or the support that they would get if they did get into it was somehow reflected in the kind of even the structure and the language of the website. The website itself was consistent.
The final thing we did to try and replicate that was do some relatively low, just the three of us, none of us are videographers, was to do some videos with the team. So we spent a couple of days in Buckinghamshire. And you can see that there are videos dotted throughout the site. And so those people that are on that website, doing these one minute little videos, they're trying to explain topics, they're trying to talk about the support that's available. They are the exact people that they will speak to if they get in touch. And the captions to the videos say stuff. I can't remember how I got the website up. But they will say, you know, this is something I didn't say this is but Sandra who is a member of the support team, you know, it's clear that these are the people you will actually speak to. So we were trying to build that connection with the team and just try and make a person come into this website feel like the information is here. I understand the information. And I can get in touch. So lots of calls to action on most pages like we're a team we're here you can ring us like we're here just ring us please get in touch we're here for you. This is a service you can use.
Robert Mills
The way that you're explaining the work, the level of consideration is incredibly impressive. And I definitely want to come on to maybe the impact of the outcomes of that work. But before we get to that, I do just want to come back to plain English. You mentioned there about you know, the language had to be clear. Were there any other plain English principles that were applied to the work?
Iain Broome
All the greatest hits Rob short sentences, everyday words, the usual stuff. I suppose the only way to easily and consistently put the team into it so that the booking machine team was to make them the subject so that they were in sentences. So lots of active phrasing so that the team could easily slot into their sentence. So lots you know, we, for example, so lots of subject verb objects. So you know, the two without that, the team don't get involved without actually writing those sentences in that way. So yeah, lots of lots of kind of active verbs, lots of hopefully sensible headings, structured pages. And yeah, just everyday words trying to explain stuff in words that most people would understand. As I say, a lot of it, a lot of it, especially the process of becoming a special guardian is quite technical. There's like a legal element to it. So trying to explain that stuff clearly was important. But yeah, plain English all the time, Rob, everything and everything should be plain English.
Robert Mills
Absolutely. I do not disagree. And we'll link to the website and the show notes so people can actually see all of this in practice and see the final outcome. Speaking of which, were there any metrics for success that were defined? Or have you become aware of any outcomes of the work that kind of tell you about the success and the impact that the project has had?
Iain Broome
Yep. So I've obviously moved on to other stuff because I'm freelance, but I'm still in touch with the two people that I worked with on the project. And they have been in touch constantly, it seems, with the Buckinghamshire team. So they went on to work on another website called Fostering Ready. So the three websites now, there is one for adopters, one for foster carers, and then we have the special guardians website too. So this suite of websites for carers of different types has been kind of continued to evolve and be worked on. So they're in touch. So one of the things that we wanted to do was to try and increase the amount of people who get in touch. So this kind of gap between people getting in touch and the support that actually was available to try and close that gap. So I messaged to find out if we had any sort of evidence and stats and apparently the team itself has seen a fourfold increase, not my favourite phrase, but I can't think what's another way of saying fourfold. I couldn't work out like a plain English way.
A fourfold increase over the last year. So I guess that that would probably be the first year that it was live in people seeking support via the team. Four times as many that'll do. Four times as many people get in touch. And the people that do get in touch are apparently asking about a much wider range of issues. So I think that there were quite specific things that they would get in touch with before. And they would tend to relate to the services that were kind of more obviously available. So I know that they do sessions around play and story, what it's called, sort of telling their life story, like a part of therapy that the children do. They advertise that stuff more. So I think a lot of their contact was about the things that were more obvious, but now they're getting calls and questions about, excuse me, questions about a much wider range of things. I think really importantly and one thing I'm really pleased with is that they are getting not only more people getting in touch, but they're getting in touch much earlier in the process. So because there is like an online place that they can go and find information and presumably because they're reading all my ridiculous amount of calls to action to get in touch. It turns out that that is leading to them getting in touch much earlier. So basically before they get to crisis point. Some quantitative feedback there, but some really nice qualitative feedback too, which was like really nice to hear when, when I got that message back.
Robert Mills
You mentioned earlier that when you were working on this project, there wasn't really anything out there to kind of replicate or to draw from. But interestingly, now if others go down this path, I've no doubt that the site that we're talking about today will be the inspiration for that work. So it could have even wider implications and positive impact without, without you being aware of.
Iain Broome
Well, I could, I can also give you another small bit of, well, the positive side of having a client who kind of lets you sort of trust you and lets you kind of take the lead. This wasn't supposed to be a, it's quite a big website in the end. It wasn't supposed to be a sort of a 70 guide website. Initially we thought it would be something a little bit more Adoption Ready, which is much, much smaller and Adoption Ready and I think Fostering Ready too is kind of a, I don't know if it has a CMS attached to it, but it's bespoke. It's kind of a bespoke kind of microsite.
We managed to persuade, not managed to persuade, we kind of suggested that they, it's a very low digital maturity in the team as well. I'm sure they wouldn't mind me saying. So there's no kind of techno whizz here. And they would need to update the sites of legislation changes. They would need to make changes and they have made changes all over the place, which is absolutely what they should do. But we persuaded them to use Squarespace, which was kind of a joke suggestion at first, because not many council websites or any government websites use Squarespace. And it's not perfect. I'm sure there are people listening going crikey. That's there are some problems there. And I know there are particularly around accessibility in some parts of it, that kind of thing. I know it's not perfect, but what it did allow us to do is to go from a project which would have had a lot of budget spent on developing a bespoke website to pouring it, pouring it all basically into making the content better and having more guides, covering more themes, do more user research, more user testing. I think the end result is probably more what the audience needed and now all that content is created, at some point, they could, I think, relatively easily decide to change the CMS or just change it if they felt like it wasn't working for them. But yeah, it's actually built on Squarespace. So me, I don't think I can call myself a web developer. That's not what Squarespace is. I can't. Can I do that?
Robert Mills
I mean, I would.
Iain Broome
You would. I don't think I'd get away with that. But the three of us, same team, we didn't have to spend a fortune on getting a member of the team to come in and build a website, we were just able to sort of put it together ourselves just through experience of sort of general good practice on how to build websites and kind of put it together from a kind of a technical perspective relatively cheaply and quickly.
Robert Mills
Well, you mentioned earlier that there was no developer on the team. And you said, I might come back to that. And now you've just mentioned there was no techno whizz, both great job titles, is that is that the reason why you mentioned that? The fact that, you know, you kind of did it yourselves with Squarespace?
Iain Broome
Yes. So no developer on our team. And no techno was in the booking share team. So the support team. So there was no but they didn't, it's not like they had an IT, I suppose they had the council IT team. But I don't know if you've ever worked in local government, it's not straightforward to get any kind of, well, not always, sometimes it's some of those teams are great. But it's not always easy to get, you know, a website built up, you'd be talking potentially years for something like that to happen. Whereas we work kind of just for all this, all this kind of activity, all this, let's be honest, money into the content and the research, and then put much less money into the development, because we were able to spin up a Squarespace ourselves in a couple of weeks.
Robert Mills
It's pretty amazing how much freedom you had on the project. I mean, in my experience, it's quite rare to have that amount of autonomy in, you know, not just the process and the content, but also the technology that's used.
Iain Broome
Yeah, yeah, we were surprised as well. But, and I'm sure it's not always a good idea just to be allowed to kind of do what you want. But I suppose the crucial thing is that we were, we went back and asked. So even for Squarespace, we had like a couple of pretty lengthy meetings with the kind of technical team at FutureGov, now TPX Impact. It wasn't that we just went, yeah, we'll just do this. It's fine. We had lots of sort of conversations on whether it was a good idea. We had lots of conversations around accessibility and the usability of Squarespace as a back end for the team. We had, we didn't just sort of, you know, make it up as we went along and the change with the team with Buckinghamshire Council too, that kind of we discussed all of the changes or kind of all about thinking with them and explain clearly what we meant and what we thought it would mean, for example, to use Squarespace or even to kind of change direction slightly with like kind of the scope of the site. You know, we think this could be much bigger and much more detailed, but that's probably what should exist as opposed to the thing that we were initially thinking would exist. So yeah, it wasn't done in isolation. It was like, it worked because it was done through constant iteration and consultation and research.
Robert Mills
I'm in the position I always find when I have this conversation, I've still got about 392 questions I'd love to ask about the work, but I do need to start thinking about bringing it to a close. And there's two things I desperately want to ask you. And the first is I am a subscriber to your newsletter, which is Plain English Weekly. And it is genuinely one of the best things to arrive in my inbox every week and I read it without fail. And that's the truth. Can you just tell us a bit about Plain English Weekly?
Iain Broome
I mean, the newsletter itself is relatively straightforward. It's just five links that I found every week with a little bit of commentary from me as to why I think they might be worth reading and useful, sent out to anyone who wants to get that. But this is something that I've been meaning to do for, I mean, years, possibly even decades. I'm a kind of a plain English advocate. I've been kind of doing plain English stuff since I started working. Basically, my first job I was made to go on a plain English course with the plain English campaign within my first week. And I've been sort of advocating for it since then. So I've got lots of resources myself that are kind of part of workshops that I've done and talks and that kind of thing. So I've always had this idea that I should probably turn that stuff into an online course or maybe there is an online community, maybe other people are interested in this kind of thing.
So I've always had this idea that I should create a website that is about plain English, and it should have stuff of my own on it. And maybe I could even ask people to pay money for it at some point, that kind of thing. But I haven't really tested it. I didn't really know whether there was a market for it. And I know lots of people agree with the principle of plain English. But do people you know, is there is there a market out there for something, a website like that? So I've basically done what you would do in most projects these days and started started small obvious thing, Plain English Weekly, here's a newsletter, five links related to clear language and plain English every week. And I've sent eight now in the last two months. And we're, we're about three or four people away from 500 subscribers. I've done minimal promotion myself, mostly because I'm busy doing my actual job. It's been through kind of not quite word of mouth, but word of LinkedIn, people just sharing it and saying nice things. So I think that hopefully shows that there is a bit of a demand for plain English related content. So I will try and work out what people actually want, maybe send a questionnaire out and see how it can kind of grow and be something a bit more substantial. And hopefully something a bit more informal.
There are plain English resources out there. It's a bit stuffy, and tells people what to do all the time. It's also quite a matter of fact, it doesn't kind of a lot of content out there. It's just like, well, you must do this. But actually, it is there was always nuances to every project, every piece of work, every piece of writing. So something that is useful, but also acknowledges some of kind of the real world problems that you have as a writer or content designer. That's the plan.
Robert Mills
Well, as you know, from previous conversations between you and I, I'm all for the plan. And I look forward to seeing all the additional plain English gubbins that you may you may share with us. The second thing I wanted to ask, and it's always my last question, is putting the spotlight on you a little bit as the audience. So can you think of a time recently when you've been the audience or you've been the user, and what have you watched, what have you read or what have you listened to that might have provoked a reaction or stirred in emotion in you and it can be work related or otherwise.
Iain Broome
So a bit of work related this bit work related, but also also not. And, and it stirred up all sorts of things, Rob, I'll be honest with you. The last year, just over a year ago, I was asked to, to do the podcast. I am a jack of all trades, master of none. So I was asked to produce, I suppose the podcast for the Trans Pyrenees Race. So this is an ultra distance cycling race, 4000 kilometres across the pyrenees, no 1600 kilometres across pyrenees, 40,000 metres of climbing, unsupported, about 120 riders. And also this year, the Transcontinental Race, which is 4000 kilometres. These are like two of the most famous cycling races, ultra distance races in the world. The Transcontinental is the race. I am not an ultra distance cyclist, just to make that clear. I'm an amateur cyclist. But I have one reason that I was asked to do this. And then last year, I did it in person. So I went out and was following the riders around in the media car. I was working on my laptop, trying to edit podcasts, capturing audio from the riders. So we would spend hours just chasing them around. They've all got trackers so you can see them. It's a whole world that I wasn't aware of, but I very much am now.
I have been just, just so well, first of all, it's so privileged to be able to be the person that collects that audio of these people, men and women doing this most incredible adventure. They ride some of them 400 kilometres a day, they sleep two or three hours, then they're back on the bike. They sleep by the side of the road. Some of them sleep in hotels if they get themselves organised. But the fastest people are, they're absolutely crackers. They're just, they're just what they do, it seems impossible. But they are real people. And I'm stood there with a microphone listening to their real stories. And some of the things that they've said to me, I've been trying to hold back my own emotions, going, Oh, that's really interesting. When really they just told me something absolutely beautiful or devastating. And at the time last year, I did it, I did it from home this year, for various reasons. But when I was actually there last year, you know, being at the top of the cold Aspen, or the Tourmalet, which is the cold, the famous one from the Tour de France. And you've got these sort of everyday people doing this incredible adventure, like the privilege of being able to kind of listen and collect their stories. I've just found incredibly inspiring. So as a work project to work on absolutely amazing, but just this just the fact that there is this entire world of ultra distance cyclists, and that I now love. But also just made me realise that you know what, there are so many other worlds in our world, pardon the awful sentence, people who are enthusiastic, who, who about their particular thing passionate about a specific thing. And kind of finding the not finding the words to kind of phrase it, but do you kind of get what I mean? You just meet people who do these incredible feats. And no one knows, like it's not in the news. In fact, whoever we know, it's the biggest race in the world doesn't make the news. It's just this incredible sporting achievement. And all these worlds that are around, around the planets of people being very enthusiastic and being amazing, incredible at these very specific things. And having this, this one in particular opened up to me and having the privilege of kind of working with their stories firsthand, has been just like an unexpected treat in my early 40s, mostly doing content design work.
Robert Mills
Such an amazing example of where professional and personal talents and passions can come together. So I can, I can see why you would describe it as being a privilege. And you can tell them the way you were talking about it, how much you've enjoyed it, how much it means to you.
Iain Broome
Well, one of the reasons we did it from home this year was because we thought we're going to try and effectively make a documentary every day. So the Transcontinental lasts two weeks, and the Trans Pyrenees last about a week. And we thought, you know what, the best bit of this is when we actually get the writers, the voice of the voice of the writers. So we thought, if I do it from home and we have someone out there collecting the audio, it might make it possible, make it easier to basically create a documentary every single day. It's full of rider interviews. So whether you're into cycling or not, and whether you can bear listening to me anymore, do the narration in between and all of my bits. Like some of the stories are just incredible. And it's just this entire world. So I suppose I'm slightly biased to recommending people to go and listen to it, but it's not for me. It's literally just to listen to some of these people who are doing this most incredible adventure. It's great.
Robert Mills
I mean, you mentioned you're an amateur cyclist. Has this inspired you to maybe be a racer in it yourself one day?
Iain Broome
I don't think I'll ever be a racer, but I find it is impossible to work on those projects and not go, I think I need a new bike. And that's what happened to me. I have a new bike. And even though I was, you know, I enjoy cycling, it has made me think, you know what, maybe one day I could do like a race, you know, just a one day or something like that, not to win, but just like feel part of something. So yeah, it's very, it's definitely been inspiring in ways that are expensive too.
Robert Mills
Well, the other thing that's been inspiring is this conversation with you. It's always great to chat to you, find out about your process, your work, what you've been up to and the impact it's had. So unfortunately, we've reached the end of the time we've got today. So I just want to say thank you so much for spending time with me, sharing all that great insight and we'll definitely link to all those incredible things in the show notes too. So yeah, thank you for taking the time.
Iain Broome
No worries. Thanks, Rob.
Robert Mills
Thank you for listening to the Fourth Wall Content podcast. All episodes, transcripts and show notes can be found ay fourthwallcontent.com. Good luck with your content challenges and I hope you can join us next time. Bye for now.
