Cicely Oliver Email & Phone Number

United Kingdom

Researching and writing articles about Scottish canals and waterways for Towpath Talk, a popular monthly UK inland waterways publication. Delivering copy and images to deadline. Communicating with a wide variety of individuals and organisations to discover and write accurate stories.

Overall delivery and performance of domestic content. Remotely managed and led an engaged, cohesive and confident content team. Communication and collaboration across multi-disciplinary teams, in-house and external. Led Complete University Guide Editorial Board. Managed the compilation, publishing and marketing of the annual UK university league tables, achieving organic traffic growth and national and regional coverage, providing lasting SEO value from an increase in referrals and more keywords ranking more prominently. Managed change, adapting to changes in content priorities and ensuring traffic KPIs were met.

Freelance until 2016, editorial and content strategy and standards, planning and implementation, ensuring content was relevant to user segments, optimised for SEO and supported business goals, while maintaining the guide’s ethos of ‘independent and trusted’. Led content ideation and delivery, including copyediting and proofreading, and collaborated and liaised with internal and external teams to ensure the success of key campaigns, meeting user needs and business goals. Managed the CMS (Umbraco) alongside external development team, including access and training and using basic HTML. Led a successful school outreach project, creating an annual poster campaign to provide physical assets for display in schools to enhance engagement and competitiveness. Grew user engagement and increased traffic and brand recognition, with an awareness of changes in user expectations and behaviour, external forces, innovation and activity within the Higher Education sector and online publishing. Managed the successful migration of content to strict deadline, when the site was replatformed. Contributed to the guide’s growth from its online beginning in 2007. This was key to its successful sale and subsequent investment to re-platform the site.

I freelanced after leaving HarperCollins Publishers as Managing Editor on leisure, reference and cartographic titles. Content creation and delivery of online, reference and non-fiction book projects. Delivered projects to deadline and budget. Accurate and efficient management of copy, images and maps from ideation to print. Communicated and collaborated with commissioning editors, authors, contributors and other freelancers across editorial, design and production teams. Favourite titles... all of them, from cycling, walking and boating, to Scottish tourism. Biggest wins: pulling together The Times Waterways of Britain (304 pages of text, images and maps) in just 12 weeks from start to finish; successfully publishing the first Complete University Guide league tables online.