What Northern’s Yellow Pencil Acquisition Means for Your Public Service Digital Strategy

Need to Know 

• Northern's acquisition of Yellow Pencil expands its capabilities in marketing, CMS and DXP development, eCommerce, and analytics, enhancing services for all of our customers.
• The addition of Yellow Pencil's team adds twelve new content management experts to the Northern team, who bring advanced expertise in AI-powered managed services, content operations, and conversational design.
• With new managed services, OnPoint Search, and AI conversational agents, Northern offers comprehensive solutions to optimize Public Service organizations’ digital presence, improve content management, and streamline service delivery.
   

You may have heard that Northern has acquired Yellow Pencil, a leading Canadian agency known for its exceptional work for Public Service organizations.

As the largest independent Public Service agency in Canada, Northern has consistently delivered robust service offerings for the Public Service sector. With the addition of the Yellow Pencil team, we’ve expanded our capabilities to better meet the diverse and evolving needs of our Public Service clients.

This acquisition has not only grown our team, but also broadened our expertise in marketing, Content Management System (CMS) development, Digital Experience Platform (DXP) development, and Business Intelligence practices.

The Yellow Pencil team brings an open-source toolkit, along with advanced capabilities in AI-powered managed services, conversational design, performance measurement, and content operations.

With twelve new dedicated content management experts, we can now take a more holistic approach to your content strategy, managing it throughout its entire lifecycle from creation, to distribution, editing, curation, and removal.

Yellow Pencil’s founder, Paul Bellows, has also joined the Northern team as our Senior Director of Public Sector Strategy. Paul brings with him his extensive Public Service expertise, having led provincial and municipal governments through digital transformations, ground-up builds, the creation of communication strategies, digital office setups, and more.

Keep reading to learn about our expanded content operations capabilities and how our larger content strategy and content operations team can help you enhance your communication strategies.

While managed services provide the necessary infrastructure and support to maintain and optimize content systems, content is the substance that drives engagement with students, patients, and citizens. 
Effective content is key to great customer service, fast communication, trust-building, search engine rankings, chatbot accuracy and search experiences. It must be well-crafted, relevant, and continuously updated to maintain its relevance. 
Our content management services ensure that this material is organized, accessible to the right users, and aligned with your strategic goals.

Content Operations

The health of a web system is often measured by the quality of its content and the capabilities of the teams behind it.

In addition to filling key roles on our User Experience (UX) team, we now have dedicated experts in content modelling, planning, ideation, generation, and Public Service SEO.

We can help your team develop a robust content approach, ensuring your omnichannel communications and service delivery are backed by effective strategies that fulfill your obligations to constituents, members, communities, students, and patients.

We've also expanded on our CMS and DXP development capabilities.

The first step in CMS or DXP development usually involves some combination of content cleanup, auditing, and generation. With the addition of our experts dedicated to content strategy and modelling, we can take a more hands-on approach, working with you to optimize your content to better communicate with constituents, students, and citizens.

Content Modelling

Having high-quality content is important, but to make sure your users see it, you’ll need a larger content strategy to determine how it’s distributed, edited, and curated.

Our content modelling capabilities allow our team to quickly understand your content types to form an organizational methodology that will be intuitive for your audiences.

We can use this information to improve your information architecture (IA)  and navigation, streamline your workflows, and increase your overall efficiency. We can also ensure that your content is effectively populated, managed, and updated, and adhering to best practices.

Additionally, we offer tailored omnichannel communication strategies, which are crucial for Public Service organizations to fully utilize channels like social media, newsrooms, and emergency notification systems. 

Managed Services

Northern is now providing fully managed hosting services to our clients. Through our OnPoint Suite of products and our partnership with Google Cloud Platform, we create high-performing, secure, accessible platforms and support our clients through comprehensive service level agreements.

OnPoint WebOps

We can now provide optimized Drupal hosting in-house for our clients across Northern America through our OnPoint WebOps managed service.

This integration allows us to provide seamless support and management, giving us the capacity to take on greater responsibility for hosting and maintaining our client websites.

WebOps is equipped to handle very large sites. Our close relationship with Google Cloud Platforms ensures that our technology is consistently up-to-date and leading in the industry.

All of your data will remain within Canada, removing the data management and security concerns that come with hosting sites that route information through multiple countries.

We now offer more hands-on and direct access to security versioning and SLAs for websites. An advantage to managing all of your services within one digital agency is that you can eliminate the need to engage with multiple companies for hosting and support.

This consolidation allows us to scale our services to accommodate our clients effectively.

OnPoint Search

OnPoint Search is a robust solution built on Apache Solr that helps non-technical users find information quickly and efficiently. It provides departmental leaders with admin tools and dashboards, enabling them to improve search performance and manage search features without solely relying on IT teams.

If you’ve never invested in search and you’re tired of Drupal’s basic search, OnPoint Search could be the perfect solution for your organization.

OnPoint Suite

The OnPoint Suite of products has been designed to solve real Public Service challenges. It includes AI enablement and content editing, auditing, and bespoke solutions, offering customized tools without high monthly fees.

If you’d like to learn more, chat with one of our experts about our wider selection of AI and content auditing tools available through OnPoint Suite.

AI Conversational Agents

Managing high traffic efficiently is twofold: provide clear answers to common questions, and give  your patients, constituents, students, and citizens multiple avenues to find the information they are looking for.

In cases where there are clear answers to frequently asked questions, conversational agents are an incredible tool for easing administrative burdens, reducing costs, and accelerating service delivery.

Northern now has a team specializing in building conversational agents using multiple tools and digital platforms.

With our new capabilities, including high-performance hosting, tailored search solutions, and dedicated content management expertise, Northern is well-positioned to help you optimize your digital presence and service delivery.

Connect with us to explore how our expanded services can drive success for your Public Service organization and enhance your ability to connect with your students, patients, and constituents.

Let’s discuss how we can leverage our expanded expertise to meet your Public Service organization’s needs and achieve your strategic objectives.