Our Work

In 2021, the Wildlife Trusts sought out a tech collaborator as part of their Nextdoor Nature initiative. This lottery funded project aimed to get 1 in 4 people across the UK ‘taking action for nature’. They were aware that they needed some kind of digital solution to help further the aims of the project, and we were delighted to win the tendering process to work with them on developing this.

As a studio this is exactly the kind of project we love — the client was extremely open-minded about their final outcome, and were keen for us to explore and experiment together in an iterative way, in order to find a solution that would best develop their vital work.

Over the course of the year, we conducted in-depth qualitative research with a wide variety of staff and volunteers from across the country, and undertook a number of collaborative exploratory workshops to try and establish the most important aspects of the digital solution that we were to develop.

The Wildlife Trusts are a collective body of 46 individual regional trusts. The diversity and localised knowledge of each individual trust brings gives the Wildlife Trusts a lot of power to make a meaningful positive difference to nature and wildlife in the UK. However, our research found that this structure could also lead to issues like internal confusion, duplication of work, and some lack of clarity around overarching communications and strategy.

We learned a huge amount about the work the Wildlife Trusts do and the challenges they face, and discovered that one much needed solution was some kind of centralised resource for members of the public who are looking to ‘take action for nature’ in their own neighbourhoods. Resources specifically focussed on grassroots organising and strategy for the environment, which are different to the trust’s more traditional, individualised guides like ‘how to build a bird box’.

When we started the project, although there were lots of valuable resources already out there, they were widely distributed across the Wildlife Trusts’ sites and could be hard to find, and — as mentioned — work on creating these resources was often being doubled across different individual trusts.

There was also a great desire amongst both staff and members of the public to see other people’s stories (both success and failure), to help them learn from the work that’s already being done.

Our Nextdoor Nature Hub brings together these two needs — for a centralised hub of information resources, and a space for members of the public to share stories of their actions for nature.

We developed a beta standalone version of the Nextdoor Nature Hub, which, if successful would ultimately be incorporated into the main Wildlife Trusts site after a trial period.

The Nextdoor Nature Hub has now been live for 9 months. Initial data shows very promising results:

• 3.02 mins average time spent browsing pages (people are spending time with the site)
• 59.9% average scroll depth (as per the above, people aren’t clicking away from pages too quickly and are engaging with the content in depth)
• 67.5% new users, which shows promising uptake in the early stages, but also that users are returning, which means the site is offering a useful resource
• We were also interested to learn that the website is visited about three times more often on desktop than on mobile, which is counter to what we and the Wildlife Trusts expected — but luckily the website is optimised for all devices.

The Wildlife Trusts have monitored and updated this beta site, and are using their ongoing review process to build on the learnings from the initial work. The site continues to evolve in style and usability according to the ever-changing needs of their communities, staff and volunteers.