For the Ceremonials team at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, my small team has built and supported a WordPress site to house community engagement activity around the Coronation in May 2023.
As an extremely high-profile digital campaign, the site has been extensively tested for accessibility, security and data privacy compliance. It was delivered in three iterations:
Launch: the initial site designed to present announcements and capture community events via an online form and basic toolkit with an interim design, pending the final release of brand guidelines.
Map release: extension of site functionality to include a searchable map of community events and extensions to the toolkit of resources.
Event support: map iterations to display partner organisation events and facilitate two-way data sharing, alongside additional safety content for the event including a ‘visual story’ to help neurodiverse attendees in the crowd, and downloadable film for school use.
By being flexible and responsive, we sensitively navigated stakeholder input on design, data and content. We also took on moderation responsibility from DCMS, saving their team hours of work checking and approving community events.
The site served nearly 600,000 users and delivered 1.4m pageviews in its six month lifespan, with 160,000 toolkit downloads and 133,000 event searches and over 4,000 submitted events. The organic search keyword ranking for the site was above that of the Royal and BBC sites for the Coronation weekend.
“Steph prides himself on delivering public facing products that have been focal points for national and international moments, where quality, resilience and trust in those products from audiences is vital for a campaign to succeed. He is a delight to work with, always approachable, calm under pressure, hugely experienced and has a keen eye for problem solving, because he is skilled at identifying issues and a solutions early on, to help less experienced clients navigate through them.
Andrew Simpson, Head of Digital Communications, DCMS