Project Overview
The My Smart Garden program is a highly successful sustainable gardening program conceptualised and managed by three local councils in inner west Melbourne – Moonee Valley, Hobsons Bay and Maribyrnong. Its purpose and vision is to build the resilience of local people living with a changing climate and scarcer resources, taking a holistic approach to ‘smarter’ (or more sustainable) home gardening across the five elements of food, shelter, waste, water, and habitat.
My Smart Garden showed significant traction, with more than 1500 urban gardeners joining the program and gardening ‘smarter’.
The Moonee Valley City Council sought to extend this engagement online by facilitating community involvement, communication and the sharing of sustainable gardening information while building a network of like-minded contributors.
The result is a visually stunning, fully responsive My Smart Garden online community hub featuring interesting and useful content, local events and the ability to book online, a forum and a weekly newsletter.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Adelphi Digital - Reading Room Australia
Team
Moonee Valley City Council:
Carole Hammond (Project Leader)
Reading Room:
Mark Payne (Creative Lead / Designer)
Leonie Witten (Designer)
Paul Corbett (User Experience Developer)
Friendy Sin (Lead Technical Developer)
Rheka Rao (Technical Developer)
Matt Jelen (Project Manager)
Rachel Ratcliffe (Project Director)
Project Brief
Moonee Valley City Council sought a digital partner to design and build an online community presence that reflected their goal to build a sustainable urban garden network. It needed to be visually engaging, intuitive in use for all members of the communities and in plain language teach, encourage and empower local gardeners. The online presence needed to be an extension of the program, build on the reputations of the participating councils and showcase the knowledge, expertise, resources and best practices in sustainable urban gardening.
The introduction of the My Smart Garden website would strengthen and expand the My Smart Garden community. With an emphasis on the wealth of information the program made available, the My Smart Garden website aimed to further engage the community with sustainable gardening methods presented intuitively through a digital platform.
Moonee Valley City Council worked closely with Reading Room to create a highly visual, collaborative and flexible online presence.
Project Innovation/Need
Built on the powerful Sitecore platform, the new My Smart Garden website added the digital dimension to the program. It allows users to sign up for sustainable gardening workshops, ask and answer questions, post images and videos of their successes, and access the knowledge centre and special community case studies to learn more.
Design Challenge
The new site uses clean, modern, highly visual design practices with strong iconography that extends to the program's offline presence and can be used on materials such as banners and workshop handouts.
User Experience
The design enables intuitive access to discussions, expert knowledge, and future workshops via phone, desktop computers and tablet technologies.
Almost all of those who attend the My Smart Garden workshops now find the program through the website and digital communications.
The website has also proven a useful tool during the workshops, often available on an iPad to enable attendees to sign up to the My Smart Garden mailing list.
The website has demonstrated itself as a strong source of information, allowing the program to extend engagement to those who aren't able to attend workshops. Nearly 70% of those that visit the My Smart Garden website are accessing resources and notes from past workshops.
My Smart Garden was launched in October 2014 with a resoundingly positive acceptance from the community. In the ten months since launch the site has been steadily gaining traction with monthly traffic increasing over 300% since launch.
Tags
Digital Experience - Website - Government
This award celebrates innovation and creativity in design of a unique user experience in the combination of text, audio, still images, animation, video, and interactivity content for websites. Consideration given to clarity of communication and the matching information style to audience.
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