Delivering greater value for visitors
When the National Trust wanted to help its members discover more properties and places, it turned to us to transform its mobile app into the perfect base to start exploring.
The brief
The National Trust is the largest conservation charity in Europe. It has more than 5 million members, and hundreds of historic buildings, works of art and landscapes in its care.
Its Days Out app helped members discover new places, but the team felt it could do more. Research showed that people were more likely to renew memberships if they visited two to three places a year. So we set out to secure more membership renewals with an app that would encourage repeat visits and align with the Trust’s goal to move, teach and inspire people.
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Developing multiple concepts
We ran two distinct workstreams for the app. The first focused on support and maintenance, to give users a frictionless experience across every device. The second took the app experience to the next level.
We began with a deep-dive discovery phase to understand the needs and pain points of National Trust members. These insights helped define a range of features, which we took into concept prototyping. We developed several potential routes, then tested them on real users to see which would resonate. The winning features fed into a complete design prototype, ready for final testing.
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Getting buy-in across the business
We know that it isn’t enough to simply create a set of new features, particularly for an organisation as large and complex as the National Trust. Active stakeholder involvement and buy-in is essential for the success of a project like this.
We worked in partnership with the National Trust to facilitate a collaborative end to end process. We made sure that technical and operational feasibility was always front of mind, joining forces with the relevant departments through a series of working sessions and internal engagement initiatives to gain their support and fire up their enthusiasm.
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A new and improved app
Through this rigorous and collaborative process, we transformed the app. And as one of the UK’s biggest app propositions, it boasts enviable results.
With more than 2 million downloads across iOS and Android, and 250,000 active monthly users, it’s been a great success. It’s perhaps not surprising that it won iTunes app of the week straight after its launch.
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