Strategising digital transformation for Australia’s leading bird conservation charity

Our team worked to explore how to capitalise on the potential contributions of new and existing supporters through enhanced digital experiences for donations, campaigns, and volunteer participation in BirdLife’s work. 

Our aim was to provide an understanding of user motivations, frustrations and needs, identify user journeys, understand business requirements from BirdLife’s digital presence, develop strategies and recommendations to build engagement and generate revenue and address technical and digital needs.

Kicking off the engagement, our Senior Developer and Solutions Architect worked to complete a walkthrough of different aspects of BirdLife’s technical ecosystem including the conservation portal, Plantical and the main BidLife website including its CMS admin console, google analytics setup and hosting environment. 

We then worked with the BirdLife team to produce a consolidated list of its full technical ecosystem across the country, uncovering 37 sites managed by various offices, programmes and groups - a legacy of BirdLife’s previous structure prior to the two organisations unifying.  We then documented our technical insights and observations in a report, providing a holistic view of the current state technical landscape at BirdLife.

We then visited each of the 37 sites, documenting each external link on a home page and logging what we found on a digital footprints map. 

The map shows the connections and lack of connections between certain sites, and in the inner circle depicts the full range and diversity of social media accounts BirdLife has within its social ecosystem. It is split into quadrants of national and volunteer sites, alongside sites for programs and special interest groups / reserves. The map helped to provide a visual representation of the entirety of BirdLife’s current state digital ecosystem, its complexity and breadth.

To further dive deeper into current state experiences, an audience survey and a series of interviews and workshops with internal and external stakeholders was completed to inform our understanding of user motivations, frustrations and needs and gather insights that would direct future state journey maps.

Our Content Strategist completed an analysis of site metadata, analytics and navigation elements across the main BirdLife website. 

The audit helped to provide a snapshot of how much content and types of content exist across the site; document a benchmark to compare to after future changes are made; assist in future migration planning and suggest some improvement to be made to site content and navigation.

Through synthesising our insights from stakeholder and audience engagement, we were able to create personas to represent target audience cohorts, at both the current and future state, identifying the reasons why they do or not yet engage with BirdLife, their core values, digital engagement levels, needs, pain points and suggested ways to engage with them. 

We worked to identify their position on an engagement spectrum ranging from not yet engaging with BirdLife to retiring from engagement. The personas provide a useful visual cue of audience needs for BirdLife’s team in the implementation of identified digital transformation strategies.

Another useful supporting asset produced was a future state journey map depicting the life events of a future BirdLife supporter with a focus on their digital engagements with the charity. Each touchpoint was informed by lived-experience insights gathered during interviews and a co-design workshop run with supporters and staff. 

In the journey map we follow the story of our persona Tomac, a curious teenager and enthusiastic environmentalist. We see how major life events shape how and when Tomac chooses to engage or disengage from supporting BirdLife. 

This expression of a supporter experiences helps us visualise how and why supporters might increase or decrease when they donate money or voice towards BirdLife campaigns and opportunities to pivot services and communications to retain or increase engagement through digital channels

Our Content Strategist facilitated a workshop with staff from across BirdLife involved in content creation and governance. Together they worked to map current state processes involved in content conception, creation and publishing and then collaboratively defined an ideal content governance process for the future state to assist in setting clear directions for BirdLife’s digital ecosystem that better suits user journeys across this ecosystem.

We completed the engagement by providing BirdLife Australia with a Digital Engagement Strategy which summarised user insights and needs and put forward a range of recommendations for website redesign and redevelopment. 

One of our main recommendations was for BirdLife to explore consolidating its 37 digital channels using an event-driven integration platform alongside a headless CMS, which will connect to each application and provide the additional layers of separation. Other recommendations included guidance on improving the UX for BirdLife donors surrounding the way in which journeys through the site are structured, how content is created and governed and how impact is communicated.

Birdlife is currently exploring redeveloping their website and using Portable's user personas and technical documentation and content recommendations to guide this process.

This strategy was accompanied by a costed technical implementation plan identifying what steps BirdLife Australia need to take in the next two years to digitally transform and optimise their digital presence across their websites, social media platforms and CRM system.