Protecting a charity’s digital future

David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation (DSWF) is a far-reaching wildlife charity providing hope for the world’s most iconic animals. Its founder, the late, great wildlife artist, David Shepherd, has inspired conservationists both young and old since founding the charity in 1984. Today, DSWF works tirelessly to raise funds, counting celebrity ambassadors such as Dame Judi Dench among its supporters.

Focus area

Data & Measurement
Paid Media
SEO
UX/UI Design
Website Development
Website Support

Industry

Charity

See live

Offline, the charity is doing an incredible job – but online, things told a different story. An ageing website, misaligned with the charity’s goals, needed the expertise of a strategic partner to position the charity as the expert in its field – and that’s where we came in.

Goals

DSWF’s clearly defined pillars are clear: to support conservation, education and art. The goal of the website is to support these activities via clearly defined pathways, underpinned by a robust SEO strategy, layered with engaging content.

Our persona work, carried out during the discovery phase, helped us better understand and tailor our strategy towards supporting these pillars:

_Convervation: people who wish to attend an event, make a donation, or ‘Adopt an Animal’ in return for a monthly subscription.

_Education: through the charity’s workshops, delivered in schools to inform and inspire a new generation of young conservationists.

_Art: supporting and promoting a busy schedule of art-related activities, from the charity’s highly popular Wildlife Artist of the Year competition (which attracts thousands of entries from around the world), as well as sales or prints, and occasionally, a David Shepherd original.

“

If you are looking for an agency with genuine technical understanding and skill, who are easy to communicate with and genuinely care about your project and business, then I can recommend StrategiQ. They have been easy to work with and the results are beginning to show. Previous experiences of other agencies have sometimes included not having the technical skillset to create solutions to bespoke challenges, communicating poorly or in overly technical language, and staff not committing the time to fully understand our business, which is why StrategiQ has been a pleasure to work with.

Roddy Hamblin

David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation

Strategy

The first stage involved a chemistry call, where StrategiQ and DSWF engaged in conversations around performance, SEO and utilising the charity’s Google Advertising grant.

Next, we began the site audit, and were quickly able to identify – and resolve – security issues with the existing site that had resulted in an undiscovered, longstanding Google penalty.

Once that barrier was removed, we were able to carry out a detailed audit into how the charity was using data to monitor website performance, making detailed recommendations for improvement. This was warmly received by the charity, and as a result, we created a brief for a new website that would:

_Create a faster, frictionless user experience to turn more clicks into conversions

_ Attract new visitors to the site by increasing rankings for revenue-generating keywords

_Engage new users by making the site a fun, attractive, trustworthy and informative space

_ Work with the in-house specialist team to produce best-in-class content about their protected species to improve SEO visibility for highly competitive research terms

_ Transform the CMS to allow effortless evolution and enhancement of site content and launching campaigns without development cost

_ Migration to GA4 with a detailed new performance measurement plan

Results

The launch was a Red Letter Day for the whole StrategiQ team, who were delighted to see their hard work come to life.

The site features a stunning user interface, complemented by new, high quality photography, art imagery, and compelling content. This, underpinned by our content/SEO strategy, worked hand-in-hand behind the scenes to boost organic traffic to the existing site right up to the moment of go live.

The result – we’re already reporting impressive results, including a doubling in SEO visibility over the past six months.

“

Although the new website launches today, our dedicated SEO and content strategy means that DSWF not only avoids the dreaded drop in traffic that can occur through a site migration, but hits the ground running. Organic traffic is already up 55% year on year, and we have high hopes of further visibility gains in the coming months due to the quality of the site and its content.

James Bavington

Chief Technical Officer (CTO)

The Latest