Our blog

At dxw, we encourage people to blog regularly. Both on the dxw blog, and on personal and community blogs.

Why we blog #

We blog because we want to share what we’re doing and what we’re learning with the public sector digital community. We work in the open and are keen to share our knowledge, express our values and get people thinking about how to improve services for the public sector.

When we’re hiring, we also want potential new staff to be able to get to know us beforehand.

When we blog we use the dxw tone of voice.

What we blog about #

We blog on a range of topics: all aspects of our projects, our people and what it means to be an employee-owned trust. We also blog about our perspective on things that matter (thought leadership).

If you’re having a hard time coming up with ideas, this bikeshed has some suggestions What should I write about?

Blog length, structure, and format #

Our blog posts are usually between 800-1,500 words and are usually written using ‘I’, or ‘we’. There’s no strict structure for blog posts, though they’re usually blocks of text broken up by subheadings. But don’t feel constrained by this. Your post could be a list, series of images or an infographic.

It’s usually helpful to start by thinking about the one thing you want the reader to take away - what’s the purpose of this blog? For thought leadership pieces, you can then build out the context from there - why should the reader care? What detail do they need to know to get on board with your idea, theory, thoughts? For more project-based blogs, it’s more about digging into specific challenges, nuances and/or learnings - what happened? What was the impact? What did we do? What did we learn? What’s next?

Support for blog post writing #

The comms and marketing team can offer help and advice on ideas and support with writing if you need it. Get in touch through the #dxw-marketing channel on Slack if you:

• have an idea for a blog post
• are struggling to come up with a topic to write about
• would like feedback on an outline or draft

Publishing process #

Once you have a draft, the comms and marketing team will:

• upload any images and add them to the body of the text
• write captions and alt text for images
• add a main image
• add a strapline
• write a meta description
• write an excerpt
• add a social media card
• proof the post

After they’ve done that, they’ll add your post to the publishing schedule.

Your blog post might not be published straight away. We pick from the list of posts that are ready to make sure we can prioritise topical content, and that we’re publishing posts on a mixture of topics.

Last updated: 8 August 2024 (history)