Placing New Zealanders at the heart of online community engagement

Community Matters is an initiative of the Department of Internal Affairs with the sole focus on strengthening communities in New Zealand. Although a key part of their role is offering funding and grant applications, Community Matters also acts to encourage action from individuals and groups to engage with their community and make a social difference.

Silverstripe and Community Matters worked together closely to create a digital experience that placed New Zealanders, and their work as community advocates, at the centre of the website. The approach to serving information to audiences in this project transcends the traditional informational website where the user needs to sort through pages of information. Instead, the website acts as a knowledge base, with questions being the impetus for information discovery.

Placing natural language search in the form of a question, at the centre of the website, allowed Community Matters to gain deep insights into their audience. The ability to identify and track what information is being searched and then viewed, gives Community Matters website administrators the option to adjust information presented to users, and be able to immediately add more valuable information if new questions are searched. Users can also mark if the information was useful or not on each page, and add comments directly for the website team to see, so adjustments can be made if needed. Insights gained from collecting rich data from the onsite search are then used by the call centre and web content teams to further enhance the agency's service.

The project needed to be both bicultural and multicultural so to best reflect the diverse nature of New Zealand Communities. To ensure the values of Community Matter and all New Zealanders were represented in the website, a Kiwaha (message) was created to solidify the vision and purpose of Community Matters. “Kia akiaki te mana o te tangata” encapsulates and celebrates the core values of the project. Interconnectedness, unity, hospitality and working towards a shared goal of supporting and strengthening communities. This is Community Matters.

New learnings and approaches that were presented in the project, helped to shape a polished and high performing website that is both usable and valuable for all New Zealanders, strengthening the social fabric that is our communities.

• Workshops
• Discovery
• Creative Strategy
• Wireframing
• UX & design
• Branding
• Front and back end web development
• Dedicated testing resource
• Ongoing UX & UI discussions
• Project Management
• Solution Architect consultation
• Programme Management
• Account Management