Challenge

In 2021, the UK Government needed to safely and responsibly allow businesses to trade, as well as give the public the opportunity to travel for business or leisure. It needed to do this without creating increased risk to public health as a result of increased COVID-19 infection.

The answer was to create a simple way for citizens to demonstrate their COVID-19 status - whether when required at international borders or voluntarily at venues who were requesting it. Regardless of whether a person was vaccinated, medically exempt or recovering from recent infection, everyone needed equal access to a mechanism that would enable this status to be proven where needed. At the same time, a system was needed to enable border and venue staff to quickly and easily verify someone’s pass.

The NHS COVID Pass is a crucial public service that was created in response to this need. Our team led the service and content design of this programme delivered through multiple channels: via NHS app, NHS website, a letters service and a dedicated phone line, as well as the NHS Verifier app for businesses.

Outcome

Within days of joining the programme our team supported Service Design and User Research as they began to map out the as-is service across every digital and offline journey. We discovered and recorded every content touchpoint to find opportunities to make the service work better. We set up a weekly cadence for content creators and owners across the ecosystem for knowledge-share and collaboration in a fast-paced and unpredictable environment. We established and owned a single source for truth, content patterns and created new, faster translation workflows.

In a complex content eco-system - including GOV.UK, NHS.UK, centralised / programme content and marketing teams – plus our own content design remit for the products – we took a leading role in ensuring that content, in terms of substance and context, was at the heart of each area of the service.

By the end of our contract, the NHS COVID Pass had contributed to the NHS app being the most-downloaded application from the Apple App Store in 2021, and won the 2022 Digital Leaders Impact Pandemic Innovation award.

Process

We needed to quickly and thoroughly embrace the role of content as a means of clearly communicating complex and ever-changing policy to the British public.

As the Content Lead on a team of three, a key part of our success was achieved through developing and managing relationships across the various engineering, delivery and communications suppliers, as well as policy and legal representatives in both English and Welsh governments, ensuring that our changes to the service were approved quickly, built efficiently, and broadcast effectively.

We were required to prepare content for multiple potential future scenarios and ensure that each version was translated, approved and ready to be published at a moment’s notice. We also led on bringing the several disparate content touchpoint owners together for regular check-ins to ensure that we were all up-to-date and aware of the rapid changes occurring across the complex content landscape.