Featured TC: Nicola Cogswell

November 2016

Nicola Cogswell is Portfolio Content Manager at New Zealand Trade and Enterprise. She spoke to Jim Costello a couple of weeks ago about being flexible, enjoying the variety in her job, and changing her job title from TC to Content Specialist, Information Designer.

Tell us a little about New Zealand Trade and Enterprise

NZTE is the Government's international business development agency and has about 500 staff globally. Our purpose is simple: to grow companies internationally — bigger, better, faster — for the benefit of New Zealand.

And your role at NZTE?

My role is to look after the content across our portfolio of services for both internal and external audiences, and how we articulate how we can help our customers grow their businesses.

The main problems I solve include ‘How do we message what those services are?’ ‘How do we articulate them to an internal audience?’ and ‘How do we develop customer-centric collateral to support our services?' I work across a variety of channels to get these messages across that include digital platforms and the more traditional print and production processes.

Can you describe a rewarding project you have been involved in recently?

Probably one of the most interesting projects I’ve been involved in recently was developing a sales tool for our customer managers to support them in their conversations with our customers. We have published this tool using Showcase, which is a New Zealand company, where you publish directly to an app that our customer-facing staff can take with them on their mobile devices so they have the information at their fingertips when they need it.

We tend to use InDesign for the graphic element so it is visually appealing. We also can include interactives – so case study videos with shared learnings from customers create high impact in the messaging. The advantage of us doing it that way is we can keep it current. When you do a print production run on a brochure, it is usually out of date by the time it goes to print, and then you end up with stock. Using the app we publish in real time and I can update the content without having to use a third party.

What is the biggest challenge of the role?

We have a whole lot of different stakeholders across the business who need to get their message across, however they often have their own style of saying it! So trying to corral that into a consistent voice, tone, and customer-centric language can be difficult.

To help us develop our customer manager sales tool we used the principles of service design including customer empathy interviews, asking questions like: What do you want to know about us? What do you want to hear? What details you want to know? What’s working for you, what’s not? These are the customers we have had interactions with for quite some time, and they were really honest with feedback. Mostly, they wanted to know: How much is it going to cost us? What time will it take? What is the effort we need to put in?

My role is in the middle making sure the customers get the key information for them, but also we need to stay true to our stakeholders’ message. So that is quite a big challenge, particularly on a digital platform.

How did you start as a technical communicator?

When I first graduated from Information Design, I worked for the Foundation of Science and Research. I took 40 content-heavy papers and was tasked with turning them into one-pagers, pulling out the stats, and making them clear – in plain English, appealing, and easy to read for your average cabinet minister. So that’s really how I carved out a role at NZTE as well – by taking the less-is-more philosophy and bringing in a visual design aspect.

I have moved into this role as I like to do quite a bit of visual stuff - I’ve done a Lyn Cazaly course and have always tinkered away with visual design – I believe the words are important, but how it looks on the page or screen is equally as important. One of the coolest uses of this was when our CEO, Pete Chrisp, wanted to convey a message to staff and I got to draw, literally with pictures, his vision. He did the voice over, and we drew everything that he talked about. That’s what really interests me – different learning styles and different ways of looking at things!

If you could give a piece of advice to a new TC, what would you tell them?

I would say "go in without any pre-conceptions – just be adaptable to deliver what the business wants". You might go in thinking, technical writing, but that might quickly morph into something quite different. So I think just be flexible, and also be open to where your skills and interests lie. My strengths were around visual design and clear plain English. But being open to something else that the business needs gives all sorts of opportunities for growth. And there is no typical day. I could be working on a PowerPoint one day, or running a workshop trying to untangle what a commercial team does for our customers – you need to be able to build rapport and trust quickly.

Most importantly make sure that you are enjoying what you are doing. For me, it is the variety that I like, as I work across the whole business on some great projects – I’m encouraged to prototype, or try things and either fail fast or create a nugget– how lucky am I?!

Also in my role, the technical communicator title is not well understood. That is why I changed my title to Content Specialist, Information Designer, because that resonated more with the space I work in. So flexibility is really important, and a good dose of being business savvy goes a long way.