RSPB sees 43% increase in overall page visits

The RSPB is the UK’s largest nature conservation charity working to secure a healthy environment for and to protect threatened birds and wildlife. Whilst the RSPB was already seen by the public as the champion of birdlife, it had a greater ambition. To champion the cause of wildlife in general.

To achieve this they needed to extend the engagement of the charity’s existing one million-plus supporters and bring in a new generation of conservation advocates and donors online.

They embarked on a campaign to support this vision, and Optimizely’s partner Zone were tasked with bringing this vision to life.

Pacing For Lift-off

RSPB’s digital strategy was clear. They needed to rebuild their online presence and use a digital content solution to support and improve their vision of championing wildlife as a whole. RSPB started by rebuilding their website’s ‘Give Nature a Home’ section. In anticipation of increased digital traffic pushed by offline activities, Zone had to act fast to overhaul both this section of the website and the membership area and homepage – transitioning RSPB to Optimizely CMS in the process.

The website rebuild not only focussed on a striking visual design with a scalable video to engage the audience, but an improved smooth and seamless user experience was forefront. A simpler layout was implemented to the pages and focused on streamlining particular user journeys – for example a fractured and highly complex membership sign-up path was simplified into a universal four-step process.

Flocking Together Through Social Engagement

Global integration and localisation features were also introduced to the website. The ‘Make a Home for Wildlife’ feature lets members of the social community engage with other members as well as the charity itself. By sharing changes members have made to their gardens to make a home for wildlife lets other members see what’s being done locally that they can learn from, whilst promoting a community spirit. Engaging its members in this way lets RSPB develop a rapport between members and the brand, ultimately leading to increased and long term donor support and loyalty.

Taking Flight

The new fully mobile responsive website was built using Optimizely with a number of features integrated to enable first time web visitors to move through to becoming part of the social community and a donor:

Built in Optimizely, the website features extensive use of inline (WYSISYG) editing and relies heavily on Optimizely’s drag & drop block functionality. It has been built to be fully responsive, with ImageResizer to manage images and HTML5 enabling the fluid-width videos

Extensive personalisation was key to the success of the project so Optimizely Search & Navigation was implemented, working in conjunction with the Google API.

To build the social community and develop and encourage engagement, Stackla was used for social media aggregation and moderation

In the rebuild, it was essential to bring donors online so Authorise.Net was implemented for payment processing

A New Formation

Since launching the site, RSPB have seen an average increase in conversion of memberships by 23% over the datum conversion rate.The new 'Give Nature A Home in your garden' section has had a 42% increase in page views compared with the microsite serving that content over the same period last year . In addition, there has been an 11% increase in page visits from the 25–34-year-old age range, which would indicate an increase in families with younger children – RSPB's key target demogragraphic.

In rebuilding their website, RSPB has created an engaging user experience for their visitors, harnessing personalised content across devices, as well as implementing a streamlined user journey, demonstrating significant business results.