Homewaters

Mountain Equipment Co-op’s corporate and social community campaign this year is focused raising awareness for issues facing rivers, streams, lakes and other sources of fresh water. To engage their audience with current fresh water issues, we launched an innovative HTML5 campaign that geo-targeted users in Canada to specific highlight local campaigns.

Agentic has been a partner with MEC for over four years, creating awareness campains around ecological issues facing Canadians. Homewaters had its genesis in a larger project called The Big Wild, an engaging project focused on highlighting the value of keeping 50% of Canadian land permanently wild. Homewaters is the next iteration of MEC’s community efforts and we are pleased to be a part of it.

MEC partnered with eight non-profit organizations with the goal of helping build the NGOs’ lists. The idea was to use MEC’s large reach and contact list of concerned citizens to effectively introduce their members to these non-profits.

Motivation and Goals

To design a beautiful interface that can geo-target site visitors about local issues affecting their fresh water. Many of the NGOs wanted to specifically highlight the prevalence of CSOs (combined sewer overflows) that are outflowing into popular, nearby recreational bodies of water. The goal is to motivate these target groups to sign up for further information and contact by the NGO partners. Creating a mobile-focused, responsive site design was also a high priority to ensure the site looks great when viewed on a large desktop display or a tiny mobile screen.

Implementation

Agentic set out to create a campaign site that featuring compelling video, photography, information and local stories to encourage people to engage with the preservation of their regional “home waters” and sign up to take additional action. We used Angular JS to geo-target site users, so they will see the most relavent, local issues. The Homewaters campaign is nationwide, so it is important for visitors to be presented with the most relavent information first. The Homewaters design used cutting-edge parallax scroll effects for a modern, up-to-date look and navigation.

Innovation and Ideas

The use of Angular JS provided significant advantages for this project, including being more cost effective for the client and providing a better user experience. Site visitors receive a faster response from the site because it does not need to load a new page after every click, and it does not require the same server capacity of a CMS like WordPress. Angular JS provides a ‘blank-slate’ starting point, so we were able to build to our exact specifications for this project and create very sophisticated behaviors inside the framework that we could quickly prototype and build. Another significant advantage is that security updates are not required!

Results

Agentic created an attractive and efficent site containing nationwide information but using geolocation to encourage maximum relavent engagement on the local level. Campaign signups are stored in a 3rd party service to provide best-in-class interface and reporting to the campaign organizers.

• Client: Mountain Equipment Co-op
• Year: 2014

• Category: Campaigns, Environment and Social Justice, Youth Engagement