| Name | Sarah Crundwell | |
| Education | Bachelor of Arts, Major: English 1996 Graduate Certificate in Editing and Publishing 2004 Professional Accreditation in Indexing 2004 Advanced Diploma in Photography 2009 UX Design, RMIT 2019 | |
| Nationality | Australian | |
| Security clearance | Baseline – Current | |
| Years in industry | 20 | |
Summary of relevant experience
I have two decades of experience in content management, digital content creation, service design and user-centred design. Throughout my career, I have led cross-functional teams and managed content projects, resulting in improvements in website performance and user experience. I excel in content strategy, information architecture and SEO and I adhere to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for accessibility.
Employment history
Content Designer – AGL
October 2024 to present
As a content designer at AGL, I work with the electrification project. The role of this project is to encourage customers to move to a more sustainable power source (electricity). This includes reviewing, creating and publishing content for:
- error messages
- the app that sits behind the log-in wall
- agl.com.au
- smart meter customers
- platform for A/B tests
- sales funnel.
To do this, I work with subject matter experts, design teams, legal reviewers, other content designers and publishers.
Achievement: negotiated content changes with legal reviewers, ensuring complicated content remained below grade 8 reading level, in a highly regulated environment.
Content Designer – Content Ark
July 2024 to October 2024
Content Ark is a content consultancy currently working with the Victorian Environment Protection Agency to rewrite the website at https://www.epa.vic.gov.au. As part of my role, I:
- reviewed current content and documents published on the corporate website
- restructured the content to meet user needs
- rewrote content from the website to meet WCAG
- negotiated with subject matter experts regarding content changes
- kept the information architecture spreadsheet up to date
- created pages and manage content in Bynder.
Achievement: negotiated content changes with legal reviewers, ensuring complicated content remained below grade 8 reading level, in a highly regulated environment.
Content Designer – Australian Maritime Safety Authority
May 2024 to June 2024
I was brought in after a Drupal upgrade to help remediate content that had not been migrated successfully, as well as to help clear the backlog of new publishing work. As part of my role, I:
- publish approved content using Drupal 10
- rewrite highly complex jargonistic content for http://www.amsa.gov.au, ensuring it is written in a way that the audience will understand
- ensure content published is in plain English and accessible
- collaborate with subject matter experts to ensure content is accurate and meets best practice
- create templates and guidance for content types
- ensure content meets accessibility guidelines.
Achievement: during a very short 6-week contract, quickly got up to speed on policies, processes and subject matter and was immediately of use to the web publishing team.
Content Migration Lead – Department of Defence
July 2023 to March 2024
The Department of Defence procured a new Learning Management System and it was my role to ensure the timely transfer of content learning packages from the retiring system to the new learning management system. This included:
- liaising with content owners
- creating learning packages in the system
- creating content testing plan and testing learning packages that have been created
- content strategy, including creating content governance.
Achievement: all learning packages were transferred from the retiring learning management system to the new system ahead of schedule.
Content Capability Lead – Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment
August 2021 to July 2023
The government gave the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment $328 million to transform how exports are regulated. I was a member of the Capability Team, and our remit was to ensure the capability of the team members across 38 projects. My particular responsibility was to manage the content cohort and ensure consistency and quality of all content produced in the program.
Achievement: ran the content community of practice and created voice and tone guidance for the design system for the Export Service .
Content Capability Lead – Australian Taxation Office
December 2020 to August 2021
I worked across several projects to ensure that content that is created at the Australian Tax Office (ATO) is of a best practice standard. This includes working with a team to re-write content across ato.gov.au and managing the pages on ato.gov.au that are the most highly trafficked.
Achievement: The ATO had not had a Content Capability Lead before, so I was the first to show how this role could be performed.
Content Strategy – Austrade
January 2019 to December 2020
I performed several content roles at Austrade. I was a member of several multidisciplinary teams creating a series of new digital services for Austrade, including the Global Business Support Finder.
I worked in the ‘Content and Knowledge Management’ team, which was created in response to the fact that neither content nor knowledge have been managed at Austrade before, and in the Content Strategy Team.
Achievement: We are the first team to work in an Agile and user-centred way in Austrade and are leading the way in new ways of working, and digital transformation.
Content Designer – Digital Transformation Agency
July 2018 to January 2019
I was the content designer in the Communications team.
Achievement: I was part of the team that took the website from Beta phase of the redesign of the DTA website at http://www.dta.gov.au, to Live.
Content Lead – Department of Veterans’ Affairs
September 2017 to July 2018
As a member of a multidisciplinary team called the Website Improvement Project, we were working to the Digital Service Standard and using the Service Design and Delivery Process to improve the department’s website. As Content Lead, I lead a team of writers who are re-writing the public-facing website.
Achievement: As not all of the team members had worked in an Agile way, the team relied on my knowledge of this way of working.
Content Designer – Digital Transformation Agency
January 2017 to September 2017
As a member of the Delivery Team, I perform the role of Content Designer in projects, both in house and within other Australian government agencies.
Project: Service Manual – in house
The Service Manual is a website that brings together various guides that are published by the Digital Transformation Agency. As the Content Designer for this project, my role includes:
- content modelling
- information architecture
- web content strategy
- writing content
- managing stakeholders and getting content reviewed.
Achievement: managed and performed all user research during discovery
Project: myGov – in partnership with the Department of Human Services
myGov (my.gov.au) went through a redesign during 2016 and 2017. I re-designed the content for the myGov website, as part of an Agile, multidisciplinary team. Tasks include:
- user testing
- content gap analysis
- writing content
- web analytics
- ensuring content WCAG 2.0 compliant
- stakeholder management
- running a ‘Writing for the web’ workshop.
Achievement: wrote and published a whole website in 4 months
Content philosophy 