The Municipal Climate Change Action Centre is a partnership of the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association, Rural Municipalities of Alberta, and the Government of Alberta. It helps Alberta municipalities, schools and nonprofits to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through funding and assistance with energy-efficient practices. In 2019, the Action Centre secured funding from the Government of Alberta to develop new programs. This prompted the Action Centre to assess their current marketing state—including their brand, message, and digital presence.
Picturing the full landscape
Kobot worked with Sharon Bell and The Met Agency to craft a strategy for brand and website renewal for the Municipal Climate Change Action Centre. Through the teams’ complementary skill sets, we produced a well-considered snapshot of the current state of the Action Centre, and an understanding of their unique challenges and opportunities. After completing this process, Kobot set about turning all this information into a comprehensive digital strategy, and a brand new website.
- The Challenge The Action Centre delivers complex information in different formats to audiences that are pressed for time and resources. From emissions information, to sets of application forms and beyond, navigating the site could have been a quagmire.
- The Solution Kobot was able to use design, information architecture, and impeccable development to bring clarity across the whole site.
- The Results A website that is a support tool for audiences, that also improves the Action Center’s higher conversion rate and maintains their strong relationships with clients.
Putting their best strategic foot forward
The digital strategy we compiled started the project off on the right foot. By incorporating the in-depth quantitative and qualitative information brought to us by Sharon Bell into the environmental scan Kobot normally conducts, our team was able to form a well-informed picture of the landscape within which the Action Centre operates. From there, we developed a comprehensive strategy outlining ways to express the organization’s value to clients, cultivate its strong community relationships, express its brand archetype (The Hero), and prioritize its communication channels.
Incorporating intelligent design
We know that audiences on the Internet already skim rather than dive deep into dense blocks of text. And, in particular, the Action Centre works with municipal officials who may already be pressed for time just trying to keep the lights on. So it’s very possible that investing time and energy into hacking through challenging information about how to bring environmental initiatives to their community is out of the question.
Through design, we broke down facts into digestible, infographic-style visual elements that draw the eye and make it easier to skim. This not only makes it a far friendlier experience for these municipal leaders, but also increases the chances of a successful connection between the Action Centre and their audiences.
Bringing the Learning Centre to life
A key functionality of the new website was the Learning Centre—a hub of information, resources and data to help Alberta municipalities create and implement plans to decrease their environmental impact and increase energy conservation in their communities.
The Learning Centre could easily have fallen into the “junk drawer” trap common amongst resources pages. Through information architecture and impeccable development work, this section of the site is highly searchable—with tags, a search bar, and Featured pieces at the top.
Working collaboratively with our team, Kobot delivered a website that enhances our efficiency and effectiveness, from better back-end maintenance systems to enhanced ease of access to public-facing content.
Trina Innes, Director, Municipal Climate Change Action Centre
We built a website for the Municipal Climate Change Action Centre that is first and foremost a support tool for audiences. This not only meant a website with a higher conversion rate, but also the maintenance of strong community relationships between the Action Centre and their clients.