Lessons from migrating content on VA.gov

When Bloom Works began working with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in 2022, the agency had been engaged in a multi-year effort to modernize its digital presence. Much of VA.gov had already migrated to a modern platform. But there was still legacy content to update, restructure, and migrate. As part of our work with VA, we looked at over 350 pages—mostly older pages and dense PDFs—and moved essential content to several hub areas. 

Moving the older pages to VA.gov means that veterans can more easily find what they need on one modern, mobile-responsive platform. And veterans who use a mobile phone or a screen reader can more easily access content that was inaccessible in its PDF or table format before the migration.

Moving these pages gets VA one step closer to sunsetting older sites, saving money and resources. And it supports VA’s mission to deliver clear and accurate content that helps veterans and their family members get the benefits they deserve.

One migration effort involved establishing a new hub on VA.gov for family members of veterans. Spouses and children of veterans are sometimes eligible for certain benefits—like health insurance, life insurance, money for school, and other support. This meant we needed to work with partners across multiple benefit areas within VA to understand how family members interact with their programs differently from veterans. Then, we created or adapted content to reflect those distinctions.

We also migrated content from legacy sites around education benefits and disability compensation for veterans. 

Most of our content migration work at VA followed a consistent pattern:

1. Identify a collection of legacy content—often dozens of pages about a particular benefit like education or health care.
2. Begin a careful process of inventory and audit.
3. Determine what was still relevant and accurate, what needed updating, and what we could archive.
4. Draft new content for VA.gov's modern platform. This meant rewriting complex requirements into clear, actionable information while maintaining technical accuracy.
5. Work with our information architecture specialists to figure out where on the site the new content belonged. After we published the pages, we set up redirects to the new pages and updated navigation menus.

We made a lot of progress, but it wasn’t always easy. After moving through several phases of this work, we reflected a bit on why the work sometimes felt difficult and how we could do things differently in future projects.

This project reinforced something we’ve observed in other work: Effective content migrations in large organizations hinge on relationships. VA program managers and subject-matter experts (SMEs) are crucial to the migration's success. In content migrations, the work often can't move forward without their engagement and expertise. 

We encountered challenges that will be familiar to anyone who has worked on projects like this:

1. Explaining specialized expertise. We often worked with busy program managers who were subject-matter experts, not writers or communicators. While some were aware of content best practices, that wasn’t the case for everyone. It wasn't always obvious what content strategy was good for, how it worked, and most importantly, how it could benefit them. 
2. Addressing legacy problems. Years of accumulated "content debt"—-outdated, inconsistent information built up over time—-mirrored the policy debt that accumulates in many government programs. We couldn’t understand that debt without the SME’s help.
3. Navigating bureaucratic structures. Finding the right decision-makers, establishing clear authorities, and managing communication bottlenecks was difficult at times.
4. Balancing risk tolerance. Some program staff were understandably risk-averse about simplifying complex technical language. They worried that simplification might introduce inaccuracies or legal vulnerabilities.

These challenges aren't unique to content migration. They reflect the fundamental dynamics of driving change in any organization where expertise, authority, and accountability are distributed across multiple units.

In theory, words and text are some of the easiest things to change (we all can write!). But good content strategy means much more than just clear writing.  

The reality of government is that authority and expertise are often fragmented across organizational silos. Changing anything typically requires navigating these divided structures to build coalitions of support — just as we had to engage multiple program offices with their own priorities and constraints. Refining our content strategy started with recognizing that program staff aren't obstacles to be overcome but essential partners whose cooperation is required for success. This doesn't mean abandoning our own expertise or not pushing for something to be the best it can be. It means finding ways to connect our expertise to the needs and capabilities of the teams we are working with.

Our goal in our content work is to provide partners with a strong sense of how their content works, what it can do for them, and the value of keeping it up-to-date. 

Content migration is often a short-term solution to a specific problem: a backlog of content on an old website that needs to be updated and moved to a new one. However, we’ve found that a migration without a governance plan is likely to maintain the same dynamics that led to that content debt in the first place. If we don’t fix how things got messy, in a few years we will need another content migration. 

After reflecting on some of our challenges, we created a new strategy to test with future migration efforts. Our updated approach involves more upfront discussion of each team's communication preferences, decision-making structures, and resource constraints. And it includes creating a tailored governance plan for a more sustainable solution to content management. 

In our content practice at Bloom, we recommend building trust with SMEs and program managers to establish a sense of internal ownership over the new content. Even in a situation where there's an internal, full-time, sitewide content team, only subject-matter experts and program managers are close enough to the work on an ongoing basis to know when information has become outdated or unnecessary.

While we didn’t get to test all aspects of our refined partner strategy, we still got a lot done during our engagement with migration work. We worked with our partners at VA to assess 350 pages of legacy content and provide initial recommendations for each page. These recommendations included rewriting the content in a new page, updating an existing page, or redirecting and archiving the page.

We then followed our recommendations and published new pages or updated content for more than 50 pages. These are some examples of our updated pages:

• CHAMPVA benefits
• Benefits for children of women Vietnam Veterans
• Benefits for spina bifida linked to Agent Orange
• Getting urgent care at VA or in-network community providers

Moving the older pages to VA.gov means that veterans can more easily find what they need on one modern, mobile-responsive platform. And veterans who use a mobile phone or a screen reader can more easily access content that was inaccessible in its PDF or table format before the migration.

Moving these pages gets VA one step closer to sunsetting older sites, saving money and resources. And it supports VA’s mission to deliver clear and accurate content that helps veterans and their family members get the benefits they deserve.

In 2024, VA delivered $187 billion in benefits to more than 6 million veterans, their family members, and caregivers. These were record high numbers. 

The same year, Veteran trust in VA reached an all-time record of 80.4%—an increase of 25% since 2016. And Veteran trust in VA health care reached 92%. Another record high number.