Te Waihanga New Zealand Infrastructure Commission is responsible for developing and maintaining a 30-Year Strategy for New Zealand’s infrastructure. Essentially, Te Waihanga sets out a long-term vision for what’s important and where we should invest when it comes to infrastructure. But what is the point of doing all that hard thinking and creating a guiding strategy if nobody reads it? The challenge put to us by Te Waihanga was: how could we use digital to make it easy for people to adopt our thinking?

The Commission needed a plan that outlined what it should do with its websites and digital channels. We worked with Te Waihanga staff and stakeholders to develop a strategy for the strategy (yes, it did get confusing at times) that had three parts. The first part required creating a new website to support engaging with the public, the second part required the development of a sub-site dedicated to Rautaki Hanganga o Aotearoa - the infrastructure strategy, and the third phase is to redesign and repurpose the Commission’s existing ‘corporate’ website to better support the organisation’s role as data-holders, thought-leaders and advisors for infrastructure. Along the way, the plan has the Commission consolidating its technology platforms and vendors.

For step one, we needed to design a digital experience that meaningfully engaged the public in the complexities, trade-offs and ‘dry’ language of infrastructure. As we developed the experience, we had to find the balance between what was interesting to the public, and what was relevant to the strategy that Te Waihanga was developing. For example, it might be easy and exciting to talk about new monorails, but there was nothing in the strategy to suggest this was a good idea. Instead, the serious business of climate change, water, resilience and equity needed to be debated in meaningful ways. Adding to the ongoing translation of complexity into simplicity was a tight timeline dictated by unwavering government legislation.

To build confidence in the approach and combat growing project pressure, we tested the engagement approach along the way using a survey tool and a survey panel of hundreds of ‘ordinary’ New Zealanders. This gave us early and rapid insight. The result of our ideation, testing and iterating was Aotearoa 2050 – a website where over 23,000 Kiwis had their say on infrastructure issues. This was a fantastic result, revealing genuine insights into what people cared about. These insights helped shape the country’s infrastructure strategy.

By creating an overall plan, then independently testing and validating the engagement concept, Te Waihanga could be confident that the approach was going to work before investing significant funds in the design and development of the website.

We continue to work alongside Te Waihanga to support the execution of the overall digital strategy, with the most recent product being the planning, procurement and launch of the Infrastructure Strategy sub-site.

Technology partners:

Pikselin, Tribal