Say no to Mowlands

Introduction

We worked with the local charity 'Kirkby in Ashfield Residents Association' (KARA) originally on a short term Wordpress project, that ended up exploding into a fully fleshed out JAMstack site, containing political support from the local independent party. We focused on creating a simple platform to engage users to object to the building of a 1,800 housing estate, which was initially going to be built in a beautiful green belt.

Email marketing

We developed an efficient brand for KARA with a typography logo, colour palette and baseline email template. This was exactly what they needed to create: efficient, bi-weekly updates from the meetings.

This resulted in engaging a huge number of supporters that attended one of the many meetings Kara had. One of the events was so prolific that they filled the entire village hall, leading to people listening from the outside door area to have their say.

Efficiency

The key strategy around the entire KARA movement was to ensure the highest automation from the email engagement and setting up pipelines to enable an efficient flow of data; for people to object to the local building site.

One notable aspect of this project was that everybody involved in this organisation, was a volunteer, so we helped structure their entire architecture to empower change. We wanted to be able to onboard quickly and ease the learning-curve for the volunteers.

Move over Wordpress

Originally the website was setup as a temporary platform to be able to judge engagement, but as the response scaled, so did KARA's hosting costs and upkeep. So after a planning session with Roboto, we decided the ideal solution would be migrating to a JAMstack website. Following the ethos of efficiency first, we utilised the incredible tool at Stackbit to easily migrate over to the current website. This sped up the site tenfold and simplified the way that users interacted with it. Essentially it allowed KARA to document the entire list of events and actions, and clarified their stance and purpose to the public.

Further work

The incredible news about this project, and the reason it remains so dear to us, is the success story behind it. KARA ended up ranking higher on Google than the Mowlands housing company (the opposition company) and were also covered in the BBC, The Nottingham Post, and the local newspaper The Chad.

Following a multitude of meetings, the housing estate was eventually withdrawn and the huge area of high grade farmland was saved, keeping the idyllic town of Kirkby without congestion and greenbelt destruction.