KWT

Building a digital home for a wilder Kent

Turning a complex mix of conservation, membership and fundraising into a website that’s easier to explore, manage and grow.

Kent Wildlife Trust has an ambitious vision: a county where wildlife is protected and restored, and people are inspired to play their part in making it happen.

Its website has an equally big job to do.

From nature reserves and wildlife species to conservation projects, volunteering, events, membership and fundraising, KWT has an enormous amount to share with a wide range of audiences.

The existing website was struggling to bring all of that together. Navigation and signposting made information difficult to discover, the mobile experience needed improvement and the platform wasn’t giving the team the flexibility it needed.

Kent Wildlife Trust needed more than a new look. It needed a digital platform capable of supporting the scale of its work – and its ambitions for a wilder Kent.

Starting with people not pages

With so much content and so many different audiences, simply reorganising the existing website wasn’t going to be enough.

We created dedicated content types and flexible ways of connecting related information across the website. Maps provide another route into discovery, allowing locations such as reserves and events to be plotted geographically.

The result is a platform designed around exploration – helping people move from an initial interest in wildlife towards visiting, learning, volunteering or supporting the Trust.

Giving the team room to grow

Making life easier for visitors was only part of the job. The new website also needed to work harder for the people managing it.

We built the site in Drupal using a flexible component-based approach. Editors can combine calls to action, statistics, galleries, profiles, quotes, media and other components to create pages suited to what they need to communicate.

For an organisation whose work is constantly changing, that flexibility matters. Rather than locking the team into rigid templates, the platform gives them the tools to adapt content while maintaining a consistent experience across the site.

Connecting membership, funding and more

Behind the wildlife photography and conservation stories sits a much more technically complex platform.

Kent Wildlife Trust needed the website to connect with other systems used to manage supporters, members and income. Our work encompassed payment and donation journeys, ecommerce, email marketing and CRM data, alongside integrations supporting other areas of the site.

Membership became a substantial piece of work in its own right, accommodating different options and payment methods while connecting website data with systems behind the scenes. The functionality has continued to evolve since the initial build, including further work on membership checkout and webforms.

Visitors shouldn’t have to think about any of that complexity. Whether they’re discovering a reserve, finding an event or becoming a member, the experience should simply feel straightforward.

Built for what comes next

Kent Wildlife Trust now has a digital platform designed around the breadth of the organisation it represents.

Visitors have clearer ways to discover wildlife, places, projects and opportunities to get involved, while the team has greater flexibility over how that content is created and presented.

Just as importantly, the platform was designed to evolve. The subsequent development of the membership experience demonstrates why that matters: a charity website shouldn’t stand still while the organisation behind it keeps moving.

For an organisation working towards a wilder Kent, that means having a digital home capable of growing with the journey.

Need a website that can handle complexity without feeling complicated? Let’s talk about how we can help.

kentwildlifetrust.org.uk