The National Forest
Covering 200 square miles across three counties, the National Forest is a major UK regeneration project. To drive donations and engagement, it needed to modernise its fragmented digital presence.
The ask
Through an open G-Cloud tender, Zoocha was chosen to deliver a full website transformation, consolidating three legacy sites into one unified Drupal 8 platform that aligned with the National Forest’s brand and future roadmap.
Collectively re-aligning the National Forest online brand and portfolio of websites as one, to promote the National Forest and future proof inline with their product roadmap, The National Forest team required a digital platform that could:
- Migrate three sites to one single Drupal 8 CMS platform to modernise the architecture and provide ownership of the content to reduce development expense
- Create a method for online transactions to simultaneously collect donations and provide ecommerce functionality for shop products
- Create a search feature to enable users to explore the National Forest and plan their trip
- Allow users to book ‘Plant a tree’ experiences online and reduce the back office admin overhead
- Improve upon the limited editing capabilities and the high reliance on developer time to make updates
The approach
The National Forest is a Charity that works closely with Defra, and therefore adherence to the GOV.UK Service Manual was adopted as a best practice approach to achieving project success. The project followed a Discovery, Alpha, Beta, and Live process.
Key steps included:
- Stakeholder workshops to establish the wider project scope
- Research directly with National Forest users to establish needs, motivations, goals and pain points.
- Card sorting to establish an evidenced information architecture that will meet user needs
- Information Architecture mapping and iterative testing
- User journey mapping and wireframe iterations to produce informed user journeys through the website
- Iterative user testing to enhance best practice and ensure the site works for users
- Fully managed development roadmap to take the site to Live
The results
The result was high performing Drupal 8 CMS with National Forest enabled with full content control and publishing capabilities giving the National Forest the ability to enhance its online presence.
Highlights include:
- CRM integration with “Access ThankQ CRM” to maintain consistency across National Forest campaigns
- Bespoke design implementation that allows the National Forest to ‘stand out’ from competitor websites
- Robust ecommerce solution using Drupal Commerce facilitating ‘Plant a tree’ experiences and dedications, as well as future proofed shop functionality to help National Forest grow their brand licensing strategy
- Measurable donations facility - demonstrating how and when campaigns increase donations
- Ongoing analytics analysis and sprint iterations to enhance website performance
- Custom Paypal subscription donation ability
- Fully mobile responsiveness and WCAG2.0 AA compliant
The new site not only improved user journeys but also reduced operational overhead, helped increase donations, and positioned the National Forest with a scalable, future-ready platform, but also became an award winning website achieving “ Outstanding Achievement in Mobile Development".
Visit website
A flexible, multilingual platform enabling VisitBritain to deliver targeted digital campaigns across the globe
Rebuilding Visit Valencia’s Drupal site into a high performance platform
An accessible volunteering platform that turned two legacy sites into one powerful engagement engine.
A 7 year partnership partnership that continues to grow.
The first LocalGov Drupal platform offering bilingual functionality in Welsh.