Nurturing digital experiences at Kew

Meeting the needs of a diverse range of audiences

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is a world heritage site, leading visitor attraction and centre for plant science. The organisation has ambitions to improve its digital experience for a range of users; from visitors to the gardens, to event attendees, to users who are interested in the research conducted by Kew’s scientists. The kew.org website plays a critical role in increasing interest and engagement with Kew’s vital work in plant and fungal science and conservation, as well as delivering on key commercial goals such as ticket sales and donations.

Improvement through audience-centred collaboration

Working as an extension of Kew’s Digital Experience team, the creatives, technologists and strategists from Manifesto helped redesign the website’s information architecture and key user journeys, before rebuilding the site on the Drupal 8 platform with significant improvements to the user experience. Eschewing frameworks in favour of a pattern library approach, the new site provides editors with an easy way to build and publish pages to accommodate a wide variety of content and showcase stunning photography.

Increased engagement and a roadmap for future development

The new kew.org website launched in March 2019, marking the end of the first phase of Kew and Manifesto’s ongoing digital development partnership. Already, the new site has seen increased user engagement, with average bounce rates down by 19.9%. Manifesto and Kew will continue working together as a single team to deliver improvements to the digital experience and further develop their organisation-wide digital roadmap.

“Thank you all so much for the hard work that went into the build, and all the support you’ve given us along the way. I’m so pleased we chose Manifesto as our new agency partner, it’s been a really positive experience so far and I’m looking forward to the relationship continuing over the coming year. All of the team have mentioned how much they are enjoying working with you.” – Chloe Shipman, Head of Digital Experience, Kew

“It is a pleasure working with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Digital Experience team. Our collaboration throughout the entire project not only delivered an end product that we are all very proud of, but made it an enjoyable project too. We are thrilled to have worked on such a wonderful opportunity for RBG Kew and we look forward to working on more exciting projects together in the future.” – Natalie Volichenko, Project Manager, Manifesto