Users need the emails they send to have appropriate branding

[quis]

At first all Notify emails had GOV.UK branding, because Notify was initially built for transactional central government services, which should be on GOV.UK. It looked like this:

Screenshot from alphagov/notifications-api#173 (March 2016)

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Special thanks to Hong Nguyen for helping write up this work

[quis]

Adding different branding options (July 2016)

If a recipient’s experience of a service includes the organisation’s own branding then we think the emails they receive should include that branding too.

We added parameters to the email template that allow our users to specify branding. There are three parts to branding:

• a colour
• a logo image
• a name

Only the logo is required. Name and colour will be shown if they are provided.

alphagov/notifications-utils#55

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The banner option (added later):

[quis]

Let users ask for custom branding (May 2018)

Branding is still an undocumented feature. We get a bunch of support tickets from teams asking if it’s possible.

Adding this page:

• lets people know it’s possible, and what the options are
• is the first step towards making this process more self-service

In some cases we will be able to infer a user’s organisation from their email address, and grab their logo from their website. So the experience for them is that they press a button and government just sorts it out for you – also known as "the dream":

(credit Mark Hurrell/Ben Terrett)

In other cases we will have to get back to people asking for a copy of their logo, or to find out about their service, but this is what we have to do at the moment anyway.

Here’s how the ‘your logo on a colour’ option looks for a local government organisation:

[quis]

Look up branding based on user’s email address (September 2018)

If someone from, for example croydon.gov.uk, creates a new service, and we have already got the Croydon email branding, then we should automatically set that for them as they add the service. This will save them and us time.

In order to know if we have the brand already, we'll need to store the domain with it in the admin interface so we can look it up.

This should only be for new services at the time of service creation.

All other services will get GOV.UK by default.

– https://www.pivotaltracker.com/n/projects/1443052/stories/159623304

Anyone that creates a service who is from the NHS (they nominate this when they create the service) will need the NHS branding.

We already have this, so let's default it instead of GOV.UK for these all NHS services. It'll save them and us time.

– https://www.pivotaltracker.com/n/projects/1443052/stories/159623188

Adding a domain looks like this:

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Then when a user with an email address from that domain creates a service, this happens automatically:

So when they send an email:

– alphagov/notifications-admin#2282

[quis]

Say what the current branding is (April 2019)

We keep getting people requesting branding when they already have the branding they want set. Seems like they don’t realise we’re doing it automatically. This might help.

– alphagov/notifications-admin#2886

[quis]

We start to see email branding taking up a significant amount of our support effort (August 2019)

We do analysis of support tickets. We want to keep the blue line as low as possible, while the red one keeps going up.

At first the 2 lines track quite closely. The point where they diverge is around the time we started doing more support ticket analysis.

This chart shows that branding accounts for 20% of our support tickets:

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Analysis of branding (August 2019)

We identified four types of support ticket that were taking up a unnecessary time:

• A local authority asking for GOV.UK branding
• A team asking for branding when they already have it set up
• Teams asking for branding where we have to reply asking for details of what they were looking
• Teams asking for branding with banner, where we need to also get a hexadecimal colour code in order to set up the branding

We also tried to formalise our rules about which organisations were allowed which types of branding. Previously this existed as a sort of folklore within the team.

Organisation type	Appropriate branding
Central government	GOV.UK, GOV.UK and Government identity system logo, GOV.UK and other logo, Government identity system logo only, Other logo
Local government	Your organisation, Other logo
NHS – central government agency or public body	NHS logo, NHS sub-brand, Other logo
NHS Trust or Clinical Commissioning Group	NHS logo, Trust logo
GP practice	NHS logo
Emergency service	Other logo
School or college	Other logo
Other	Other logo

We took this table and turned it into a matrix on the wall:

The matrix showed what a potential interface would look like for each of the combinations:

[quis]

Let users give us better requests for email branding (September 2019)

We shipped some of the options from the matrix.

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For central government organisations:

For local government organisations:

For other types of organisation:

The big differences from the previous page are that:

• We let users choose the name of the branding, rather than the style
• We filter the list to only the applicable options, based on what we know about the user, service and organisation
• There’s a text box where users can give extra details about what they’re looking for, so we spend less time going back and forth

[quis]

Things we talked about but didn’t do (as of November 2020)

• Giving users a preview of their selected branding
• A way for users to upload images or specify hex colours