Wildlife Heritage Areas is a strategic collaboration between World Animal Protection and World Cetacean Alliance, established to develop and implement comprehensive standards for wildlife conservation destinations. The initiative focuses on identifying and supporting locations where community engagement intersects with wildlife preservation, creating a framework for sustainable tourism and conservation practices.
At its core, a Wildlife Heritage Area designation recognises destinations where local communities demonstrate exceptional stewardship of their natural heritage, actively participating in the protection of indigenous wildlife and their habitats. Our engagement centered on developing a Wildlife Heritage Areas visual identity, producing an engaging public facing website to showcase the designated locations and developing a complex application and assessment platform.
Our approach
Discovery and requirements gathering: Our process began with a series of workshops divided between the technical requirement sessions focusing on the platform's functionality, and brand development workshops exploring how Wildlife Heritage Areas should and could be presented.
Brand identity development: We created a comprehensive system of brand elements, including typography, colourways, graphic, iconography and illustration systems and wrapped all this up in a digestible set of visual guidelines. We also produced the Wildlife Heritage Areas logotype and accompanying icons that represented the three focus points of wildlife, habitat and people.
To ensure consistent communication across all touchpoints, we developed asset guidelines, and a set of report and presentation templates alongside a suite of social media templates, enabling Wildlife Heritage Area’s small internal team to self-serve and maintain a cohesive presence while effectively sharing their mission of community-led conservation across the various social media platforms they are present on.
Technical implementation: As new requirements were being fed into the project during development, we took an Agile approach to our technical development. We regularly deployed packages of functionality while defining future requirements in parallel. This approach enabled us to keep project momentum moving whilst requirements were still being defined or proposed.
The solution we developed for Wildlife Heritage Areas provides a public-facing website that showcases designated areas and presents the mission of the Wildlife Heritage Areas initiative. Built upon TYPO3 CMS, we have provided a solution that enables secure Area data submissions and overall content management. Completing this ecosystem is a sophisticated Assessment Infrastructure, featuring Assessor application and moderation, and the ability for assessors to be assigned to, and moderate and designate potential Wildlife Heritage Areas.
The result
Since launch, over 20 wildlife areas have been successfully assessed and designated as a Wildlife Heritage Area, and many more are in the process of assessment and designation.
The comprehensive digital solution we have provided Wildlife Heritage Areas gives them the technical infrastructure necessary to scale their conservation initiatives effectively as more wildlife areas apply to be designated, or if more features are required to be produced.
The platform serves as both an operational tool and a strategic asset, facilitating the program's mission to recognise and support community-led wildlife conservation efforts globally.
With this platform, Wildlife Heritage Areas is successfully positioned to expand its impact and continue setting standards for responsible wildlife tourism and conservation practices.
