Have you been laid off? Are you behind on your bills? Need to renegotiate a contract?

In any of these situations, you may need legal information. And if you live in British Columbia, Canada, you can chat with Beagle to get it. (Try it—click the Messenger chat icon on the bottom-right of this page.)

Tangowork is the technical partner and chatbot consultant to People’s Law School on the Beagle project, with Agentic Digital Media providing design expertise. People’s Law School is a non-profit society in British Columbia dedicated to making the law accessible to everyone.

For our chatbot technical stack, we chose Contentful to manage the content and Rasa to power the chatbot AI. In this post, we discuss the reasons we chose Contentful for content management and the way we approached integration.

Using Contentful for the chatbot

We use Rasa, an open source chatbot engine, to analyze input and decide how to respond. Rasa doesn’t generate language — all possible responses have been written in advance. Rasa simply returns the name of a template to use. Then we retrieve that template from Contentful.

For example, in response to “i got laid off”, Rasa returns laidOff. Then a piece of middleware, built by our development team, calls the Contentful API and requests the content associated with laidOff. Contentful responds with the content, and then we format the text and send it to the chatbot:

Content is delivered from Contentful straight to the chatbot

Using Contentful for the website

The chatbot response to “i got laid off” works perfectly as the introductory paragraph to a webpage. The chatbot buttons, such as “What to know”, show as website headings. Individual chatbot speech bubbles show as website subheadings and paragraphs. (Read more about the website project in How you can grow your website traffic 51%—overnight—by radically increasing speed.)

Content is identical in both the chatbot and the website — it’s just reformatted

Certain pieces of text aren’t appropriate for both the chatbot and the website. For example, we use emoji more liberally in chat. For those instances, we surround the text in question with a span tag like this: <span class="chatOnly">Cool, eh? </span>. The text is then suppressed in the channel where it doesn’t apply.

The Contentful editing interface is easy for content authors to understand

Changing text in Contentful instantly updates both the chatbot and the website

Unified content management in Contentful makes high-quality content easier

People’s Law School has a very high standard for content. After multiple drafts by their legal content developers, content passes to a plain language reviewer, who performs another check to ensure it’s as clear and easy to read as possible. Finally, it’s reviewed for accuracy by one of a host of external lawyers.

If this legal review process had to happen twice — once for website content, and once for chatbot content — it would be unsustainable. Instead, Contentful allows us to manage a single set of content, and publish it in two places: on a website and on a chatbot.

And it doesn’t need to stop there. We can theoretically produce PDFs or other printed collateral via Contentful. Indeed, we’re using maximum-resolution images in Contentful’s media library in case we go down that path. (Contentful resizes and downsamples images on the fly for delivery to the website and chatbot.)

The lawyers at People’s Law School are thrilled with Contentful as their unified content management solution. “Contentful is fast, easy to use and flexible,” says Drew Jackson, lawyer and project lead. “There’s nothing we’ve tried to do with it that it couldn’t handle. And I’m relieved that when the law changes, we don’t have to update both the website and the chatbot. We change the content once, and it updates everywhere.”

Our intranet workshops usually last from one to three days. Regardless of the length, we like to set everyone’s expectations by sharing an agenda. Although we share it in advance via email, discussing it again at the start of a meeting reminds everyone of the plan and provides an opportunity to make any necessary adjustments.

Lately I’ve been using the “Hero’s Journey Agenda” to set the stage for my Content Migration workshops. (Read about it in detail on Gamestorming). The Hero’s Journey captivates the audience and prepares them for what lies ahead.

Hero’s Journey for Intranet Content Migrators

1. Draw a big circle on a whiteboard. Write “Ordinary Life” at the top, and a little figure that represents a person in your group.
2. Explain that every epic tale involves a hero that gets the call to leave his or her ordinary life. Write “The call” around 2 o’clock on your circle.
3. Explain that as the hero embarks on his or her journey, they meet friends to help them along the way. Draw a little figure of “helpers” — perhaps with capes or wizards’ hats — and explain who is going to help your group on this journey.
4. Draw a big line through your circle and divide it into “Known” and “Unknown”. Explain that we’re crossing into the Unknown, and we’re going to be facing Problems and Perils. Write “Problems & Perils” at 4 or 5 o’clock, and draw some dark clouds and monsters.
5. At 6 o’clock, draw The Pit. Explain that this is the low point, when everyone is going to be frustrated. And that this might be a good time to break for lunch.
6. In epic tales, the Hero emerges from the Pit with hope: he or she has acquired “Special Powers”, which you’ll write at 7 or 8 o’clock with lightning bolts, light bulbs and exclamation marks. Explain that the group is going to acquire special abilities, such as the ability to quickly add, edit and manipulate content, files and photos.
7. Finally, write “The Return” around 10 o’clock. This is where the hero crosses back into the Known world, bringing back Gifts to his or her Ordinary Life. Draw little boxed gifts, and explain that everyone will be returning home as Content Heros. They’ll bring back the gift of Content Migration Know-How, which will benefit others on their team.

I used this agenda with a credit union a few weeks ago. The intranet manager loved it when I drew her with a cape, my colleague loved it when I drew her with a magic wand, and the content migrators loved thinking of themselves as heros. When we reviewed our takeaways at the end of the day, many people commented that the Hero’s Journey was a highlight!

The great thing about the Hero’s Journey agenda is that it prepares your group to face a period of frustration during the workshop. This is usually the part where they are learning something new and difficult, or are unravelling a complex problem. But the agenda also assures them that they will break through, learn something new, and leave the workshop with new skills. Presenting the agenda in this way can infuse excitement into what otherwise could appear to be a mundane topic, like content migration.