Emergency responses and the website

Before an emergency response

When Agriculture Victoria is considering an emergency response, the web team will review existing pages on the website that are relevant to the likely response. We will look at appropriateness, reading level and any accessility concerns that need addressing.

For each page we will:

• contact the page owner to let them know we’re reviewing their content
• along with the page owner, assess whether the content is up to date
• assess the reading level of the content on those pages and suggest improvements
• discuss with the page owner whether we are likely need new content relevant to the emergency situation.

During an emergency response

When an emergency event is declared, we will be added to the incident management team (IMT), working with the public information officer (PIO). One of the web team will be the response website officer responsible for web updates related to the emergency situation. Our availability will scale with the IMT’s needs. This can include being on the roster out of hours and at weekends.

What we do

Our role will be to:

• add a sitewide safety alert banner if needed
• attend scheduled PIO meetings
• proactively advise on placement of content about the situation, taking into account audience needs, accessibility, analytics and continuous improvement
• advise on updating or adapting home page content
• work with other Agriculture Victoria or DEECA teams to develop content for the website and ensure message consistency across platforms
• raise workflow tasks on behalf of the PIO as needed, in view of the PIO’s typically heavy workload
• obtain approval for response-related web content from the public information function
• work with authors on draft content
• develop, edit and publish digital-first content that is accurate, current, accessible and user-focused, ensuring content is written in plain English, meets readability requirements and has appropriate approvals
• monitor and analyse website performance, user behaviour, search trends, heatmaps and audience feedback, providing evidence-based recommendations to improve content effectiveness and user experience
• identify emerging content needs, audience information gaps and opportunities to improve response communications
• produce web performance statistics for the IMT’s scheduled situation reports.

During the week, one person is typically rostered on between 0.5 FTE and full-time, depending on the needs of the business, response or Agriculture Victoria.

At weekends, we may have one team member on standby, available for activation if website work needs to be done over that period.

Meetings

During an emergency response, there is usually an IMT morning briefing around 8:30 am, which we attend for information.

The public information team also normally meets in the morning. We discuss current communications issues, suggest solutions and assign tasks. The website officer won't usually attend the end-of-day IMT debrief.

We can discuss web needs directly with the PIO.

Meetings are run on Teams, as the public information team is typically spread across the state.

Web requests

We raise web requests (known as tickets) on behalf of the PIO (or any other requesters on the public information team) for any website work.

We will add notes, comments and questions to the requester on that ticket until it is finalised and closed. This allows us and the PIO to track progress on assigned tasks.

After an emergency response

When an emergency response moves into a recovery phase, the public information function is usually stood down. Along with the return to business as usual, we will:

• audit pages related to the response, removing out-of-date material such as incident statistics
• remove any safety alert banner that may have been set up
• archive or unpublish any unneeded pages
• provide post-event feedback to the IMT.