The challenge
Varying child welfare policies across the United States
There are very few federal mandates that standardize the child welfare system across the United States. Counties, states, territories, and tribes have their own unique policies and practices. This makes it difficult for child welfare professionals to develop a shared approach to their work. And it results in inequitable outcomes for children and youth in the child welfare system.
Child welfare advocate Marina Nitze launched The Child Welfare Playbook in 2020 as a way for child welfare professionals across the country to share innovative solutions. She partnered with child welfare agencies and Bloom Works to help research these approaches, document them, and make them available for anyone to adopt and adapt.
By 2024, the playbook had become an essential reference tool for the child welfare community. But as it grew to more than 100 strategies, several problems emerged.
Successful strategies getting buried by outdated content
Explanatory pages made it difficult for users to find strategies, stories, and resources. Users had to navigate through layers of pages, read a long list of alphabetized pages, or use a search function without any filters. The page templates were too rigid to adapt to unique content, and many pages were missing entire sections.
New content was consistently added, but old content was infrequently updated. And web admins had to make direct edits to the codebase, which contributed to inconsistent designs and outdated content.
A few years after publishing the playbook, it had become a disorganized folder of reference materials that was hard to navigate and understand—and even harder to maintain.
The project
At the beginning of the project, we originally planned on migrating the content to a new content management system. But, as we learned more about the challenges admins and users faced, we rethought our approach.
Instead of just migrating the content, what if we rebuilt the playbook to be an emergent resource? If it were clear and concise, easy to navigate, and quick to update, perhaps the playbook could help child welfare professionals test and refine their strategies over time.
So with this in mind, we set out to rebuild the entire backend and frontend of the website.
Understanding user needs
We started our work with discovery research. We conducted interviews and facilitated surveys with child welfare professionals who used the website to better understand their needs.
Based on our research, we learned that users valued the playbook's practical guidance, but they struggled with difficult navigation, unclear organization, and limited search functionality.
Auditing the content
Then, we audited all of the existing content in the playbook. And we audited the long list of new content that needed to be written.
We learned that we needed to make the content more accessible and clear, and define consistent content standards and styles. We also learned that we needed to add blog posts, case studies, and research findings from child welfare agencies across the country.
Testing the prototype
We created a clickable prototype of the new playbook based on what we learned in our research and content audit. The prototype reorganized strategies around topics, rather than in alphabetical order. It also streamlined page templates, and simplified explanatory content to make it easier for users to find the guidance they needed.
We tested the prototype with child welfare professionals, including people who had never used the playbook before. We learned that we needed to make strategies more actionable and pair them with resources that support implementation. We also learned that some of the strategies were inaccurate and outdated.
Rewriting the content
Based on what we learned in prototype testing, we worked with 11 subject-matter experts to rewrite every page on the website. We also worked with them to make sure the content was actionable and easy to implement.
We used formatting standards, plain language guidelines, and short paragraphs to make the playbook easier to scan. We created flexible templates to accommodate different types of content, while maintaining a clear structure for each page. And we combined related strategies to improve findability and reduce redundancy.
Reviewing the design
We added visual attributes, like pencil sketches, to convey that the site is a work in progress. This helps reinforce the idea that the site is a meeting place where ideas continue to develop—not a static, authoritative document.
