Project Overview
DEATH, DYING and DONATION.
This is a difficult subject to broach with Australians.
In collaboration with creative digital consultancy Reading Room, the Organ and Tissue Authority are driving a DISCOVER, DECIDE, DISCUSS campaign message through digital, encouraging individuals and families to discover the true facts, make informed decisions, discuss and know family members’ organ donation choices.
At the same time, Reading Room successfully brought the Authority’s own wider identity and matured purpose to the fore, capitalising on the previous success of DonateLife but evolving the message from singular to dual purpose, under the DonateLife domain but with clear connection and ownership by the Authority.
With the Authority’s annual DonateLife week promotional drive less than 2 months away, Reading Room and the OTA team revitalised the donatelife.gov.au site in record time while building a new digital voice for the wider Organ and Tissue Authority (the force behind the brand) without diluting the impact of the already successful DonateLife campaign branding and message.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Adelphi Digital - Reading Room Australia
Team
Project Director - Rachel Ratcliffe
Project Manager - Nick Trembath
Designer - Mark Payne
User Experience Developers - Jason Sackey, Daniel Tonon, George Spyropoulos
Technical Developer - Randell Benavidez
Project Brief
The Organ and Tissue Authority was established in 2009 to lead the government’s national reform agenda for a nationally consistent, coordinated program to increase organ and tissue donation rates.
The donatelife.gov.au website was launched in November 2009, has been hugely successful and is now seen as the authoritative website in Australia about organ and tissue donation for transplantation.
Audiences of the donatelife.gov.au website include the public, media seeking facts and figures as well as a wide range of expert clinical agencies and other stakeholders in healthcare and government.
Whilst the original website was primarily aimed at a public and media audience, needs have evolved and Reading Room were selected to help the Authority both build and capitalise upon the success of DonateLife as an awareness campaign and source of authoritive information, but also now the matured and wider role of the Organ and Tissue Authority whose identity was hidden behind the DonateLife brand.
Project Innovation/Need
The Authority needed to stand for more than the DonateLife brand itself and Reading Room provided them with a unique, powerful digital identity.
Reading Room took on the tough job of conceiving an elegant, contemporary and unique visual and user experience design, bringing together the Authority’s wider identity seamlessly with the key messaging and calls to action for the DonateLife campaign. Take a look...
Not only did Reading Room work on a problem somewhat unique to government, we needed to clear the design and technical hurdles in record time.
We worked in collaboration with the OTA to transform the site form a glint in our creatives’ eye to a fully-fledged platform sitting on the globally recognised open source Drupal CMS platform.
DonateLife is the premier event to promote the cause of organ and tissue donation is a key part of the OTA's strategic position.
They needed a site that not only adhered doggedly to the WCAG 2.0 AA accessibility standards, but also where they could update a range of content on the fly in a shell that would establish the OTA as an Authoritative figure that owns the DonateLife brand.
Design Challenge
How does one build a primary digital communication channel that
communicates the message of the DonateLife brand as well as a
burgeoning Authority without building a site that resembles a
semi-scared Batman villain? This was our challenge!
The new site untangles the identity of the Organ and Tissue
Authority from their successful DonateLife brand.
Few government based organisation have the foresight to wrap
their mandate in clear, distinguishable brand.
The Organ and Tissue Authority needed a site that elevated its profile while retaining that of the DonateLife Network and campaign brand.
Reading Room jumped into the project head first to understand what was to be achieved and how this new take on a government organisation could become a reality with a relentless focus on the user experience.
Our designs put a different spin on the look and feel and we
worked with the OTA on a final design that not only resonated
with end users, but gained buy-in from many state based
stakeholders. This design brought about a new concept in terms
of an institutions dual identity, but also facilitated new avenues for
donation discussions that were perhaps ignored in the previous
incarnation of the site.
Future Impact
Branding and speed of production are interesting business issues, but what did this site bring to the masses and how does it touch people’s lives? The answer is in the marriage of organisation and function wrapped in a responsive shell.
Leading this mantra was the redevelopment of the DonateLife Book of Life. The OTA had over 280 stories of hope from donors and recipients, but these were languishing in a dated, skeuomorphic and clunky page buried deep in an illogical structure.
We were given free rein to reimagine this piece of functionality with the mandate of making the stories come alive a format that needed to be extremely browsable, but where one could find a story on their loved one with minimal thought.
Our designers came up with a searchable and ultimately engaging interface based on a mosaic grid that reflected the sophistication of the rest of the site and communicated the humanity of the subjects and images. Selecting a story shows a full essay if needed without leaving the core page. Equally as important was searching and we built a function that searches multiple criteria and metadata that returns a refined list of results.
Tags
Service - Government
This award celebrates creative and innovative solution design for the successful delivery and provision of services. Consideration given to system integration, user experience, product design
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