Conservation Leadership Programme

Initiated back in 1985, CLP have provided essential early career support to over 2,500 young individuals who now form a vast global network of conservation practitioners, who mostly work in their own countries.

This was an ideal project for our team and we delighted in the opportunity to rebuild the CLP site to showcase the incredible work they undertake. There was a wealth of material available so we got to work with enthusiasm.

Project scope

The CLP provided a brief to build a new website that explained what they do, why the visitor should care, and how they can get involved e.g. apply for funding, receive advice, collaborate with CLP, donate funds to CLP etc. They wanted to educate visitors about the links between strong leaders, strong institutions and a healthier planet. They wanted to differentiate the programme from other capacity building programmes and to illustrate what makes them unique. A key part of this was highlighting the CLP approach (practical, hands-on, scientific, and field-based), the partnership, and their global network. Ultimately they wanted to position CLP as an effective programme that gets results.

This project encompassed a complete redesign of their existing website including its structure and how they presented their work (and supported projects) to their key audiences. It included a brand refresh of their logo. It also provided an opportunity to embrace new technologies which have emerged in the past few years and enable them to position the website alongside other online tools.

The old CLP website provided extensive and detailed information about the programme, the various support mechanisms and abstracts or final reports of supported projects. However, it was information heavy, time-consuming to update, not very user-friendly, out of date design-wise and not as visually appealing as it could have been. They wanted a website that played a more central role in the programme, was more visually appealing, more intuitive to use, and less overwhelming in terms of text heavy content.

Project Outome

Together the CLP and Intex Digital teams worked through a process as outlined on Our Approach page. This project included a complete brand refresh that involved developing various visual concepts of their brand which were amended until a final brand was provided that could then be incorporated into the website design stage. The new website went live on the 12th January 2015 after some 4 months of working together. The feedback from the client has been very positive and in turn the feedback they have received from their new and old visitors has been overwhelmingly good.

For this project we could draw upon our experience from building the MBZ website. CLP wanted to have a page for each of their projects, so as with the MBZ site these projects were grouped and branded via iconography dependent upon what species class (plant, mammal, etc.) they belonged to. Visually this gives the opportunity to logically introduce a variety of colours away from the main brand colours. It also helps users digest information easily.

We took this one step further and created iconography for each of the 4 grant types that CLP provide. In addition we linked grants so that visitors can follow the work undertaken by an individual through each step of their conservation work with the organisation.

We also wanted to present a page that was full of information and gave a complete overview of all the grants that CLP have provided since 1985. So we set about developing a map page located here. We built the site using WordPress and having reviewed all available plugins decided to build our own so we could incorporate all the website iconography and deliver a tool that was bespoke to CLP.

We continue to work with CLP providing ongoing maintenance, hosting and design support.

Before

After

Within 6 months of launch...

Users increased

Sessions increased

Page views increased

Organic search acquisition increased

I managed the implementation of this project and worked closely with the team throughout. From our first communication, I was very impressed with their professionalism, enthusiasm and understanding of the task in hand. Importantly in our case, they also fully appreciated CLP’s mission and view-point of our many stakeholders. Their pitch for the job shone out amongst the competition.

The primary objectives of our new website were to communicate our activities to a broad range of visitors (funding applicants, existing grantees, donors and the conservation community), showcase work achieved through CLP support, and demonstrate the importance of developing leaders and their institutions to conserve biodiversity. They were tasked with conducting a complete redesign of our old website including its structure and how we present our work and that of our grantees.

Intex Digitial is an excellent company to work with, bringing expert knowledge, integrity and a positive attitude. Throughout project design they methodically researched solutions to meet our needs and provided regular updates to me and my team members on the project from start to finish. We are all absolutely delighted with the end product. Our new website has attracted praise and user figures are up significantly.

Since the website went live we have not experienced any problems and they continue to provide technical support and advice as well as provide design and branding services which continue to make a large impact on our programme’s communications.

Their internal communication and general project management between key members of their team “bridged the gap” between the technical and the functional. Overall, they provide a tremendous contribution to CLP. Intex Digitial successfully completed work on time through individual effort with the highest level of openness and honesty. I highly recommend them for any website work.

Stuart Paterson
Executive Manager, Conservation Leadership Programme
Fauna & Flora International

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