The Nature Conservancy: Digital ecosystem UX
The Nature Conservancy (TNC) needed more than just a visual website refresh. They needed a unified digital experience that could both serve diverse global audiences and enable internal teams to manage and govern content effectively. The existing nature.org experience lacked cohesion across regions and audiences, making it difficult to guide donors, legislators, media, and supporters through meaningful journeys. My goal was to uncover the identity and journey these personas would effectively take on a modern site that met their needs as well as deliver a scalable digital component library that could support rich media, search functionality and online forms for TNC to manage without sacrificing governance or brand consistency.
Company
The Nature Conservancy
Role
Product Strategy+Design
Year
2017
Process
Understand front and back-end user needs
Through stakeholder alignment and research synthesis, I validated key audiences and mapped their end-to-end journeys, identifying critical moments where content could drive engagement and action. This work surfaced the need for clearer pathways for donors, policymakers, and media, each with distinct motivations and informational needs. I facilitated working sessions that would defined future-state content types and established access and governance principles to ensure consistency across regions while allowing local flexibility.
Synthesize insight into design
These insights informed the redesign of nature.org as both a human-centered experience and a scalable system. I translated personas and journey insights into a modular component library that empowered TNC teams to build pages aligned with audience needs while maintaining brand integrity. The component system was intentionally designed not just for launch, but for long-term usability, enabling non-technical teams to confidently manage and evolve the site.
Operationalize the content strategy
I facilitated a series of cross-functional working sessions with stakeholders across regions to audit and rationalize the entirety of nature.org’s content ecosystem. These workshops focused on identifying redundancies, consolidating like content with like content, and clarifying ownership and purpose for each content type. By guiding teams through structured exercises, we amplified what audiences are looking for and mitigated excess fluff. I translated these decisions into a comprehensive sitemap to visually reflect the strategic priorities and gain continuous alignment.
Outcome
The newly redesigned nature.org successfully launched on the new CMS platform, supported by a clear governance model and structured content framework. By pairing experience strategy with governance and tooling, the project positioned The Nature Conservancy to attract and engage audiences more effectively with the structure and flexibility to withstand the test of time.
