Adelphi Digital, Singapore

Name of Organization / Company: Adelphi Digital, Singapore

Category: Award for Innovation in General Information Websites

Entry Title: National Parks Board - Singapore Garden Festival

Entry:

Organised by the National Parks Board (NParks), The Singapore Garden Festival (SGF) is a global tropical garden and flower show. The biennial festival is a key date in Singapore’s calendar, with an estimated attendance of 400,000 visitors in 2016.

Adelphi Digital (Adelphi) is the digital partner for NParks, and we nominate our SGF microsite as part of the wider body of digital work we undertake with NParks.

We were tasked with fitting all the components of a major website into a compact microsite – and in doing so, our solution was highly innovative on all levels.

Project objectives:

In order to curate our solution, Adelphi first identified NParks’ key business objectives:

1. To provide crucial information to diverse audience groups, including press, exhibitors, horticultural experts and visitors.
2. To account for multiple stakeholders. Sponsors, exhibitors and experts must see positive results; visitors must feel the value of their attendance.
3. To keep budget and time constraints in mind – SGF is an incredibly important part of NParks’ wider, day-to-day operations.
4. To ensure SGF is recognised as one of the most important horticultural events in the world, beating global competition by continuously improving the festival and its offerings.

The Challenges:

From these objectives, we identified key project challenges. Successfully doing so would be the difference between a ‘low budget, short run project’, and an innovative, creative solution with lasting impact. The challenges were:

1. Ensuring key audience groups can find relevant information quickly. SGF has a wider set of audience groups than many other information sites, making this challenge unique.
2. The short event timeline (2 consecutive weekends) meant that we needed to both accommodate traffic spikes, ensuring quick load time in crucial peak periods, and engage visitors
quickly, and start their festival experience at first click.
3. A user-friendly back end to streamline SGF workflow and accommodate complex data, including images.
4. KPI measurement, which enables SGF to feedback to stakeholders and improve future festivals.

Our Solution:

To design and build a microsite in Sitecore, using a variety of innovative functionality to address key objectives and meet the above challenges.

Design:

By researching and identifying audience groups, we created a unique information architecture (IA). The design reflects this IA, as well as the freshness of the air in gardens, and immerses visitors in the SGF experience whilst ensuring information is readily available.

Notably innovative design features include:
- Homes page design segments - diverse audience groups can find and easily digest information.
- Housing images and information without detracting from the freshness of the UX and quick visitor engagement.

Interaction, Functionality and Features:

-We leveraged User Generated Content (UGC) to ‘social proof’ the site. Clear calls-to-action (CTA) drives conversion, and UGC is invaluable for future festivals.
-Full mobile and device responsiveness, with mobile-only users (such as tourists) in mind to reach the maximum number of potential attendees.
-We anticipated traffic spikes before and during the events. To maintain high user-engagement, we used Sitecore caching mechanism ‘Data Cache and HTML Cache’, allowing high volume service without compromising UX.
-‘Lazy loading’ was used to optimize browsing experience during peak periods. This was especially important as the site is data heavy by necessity.

Social media integration, including Instagram and Facebook, was used to:

- Track social media updates from these channels.
- Maximise and leverage user engagement for marketing and event promotion.

CMS:

The Sitecore system accommodates media section logins to view and download high-res images of highlights from previous festivals – crucial to media engagement.
The CMS simplified content workflow and governance processes. In addition, component based templates were used to allow flexible content management.

Measurable Performance:

Google Analytics was installed so that NParks could use data and track performance and metrics for future improvement.

Supporting Links:

https://www.singaporegardenfestival.com/
https://www.nparks.gov.sg/