Client
The national Managing Climate Variability program
What we did
Climate Kelpie is a portal for Australian farmers and their advisors. It connects them to tools and information about climate to help them make decisions about their farm business.
We created the concept for the website after conducting a nationwide survey of farmers, on behalf of the national Managing Climate Variability program, about the type of information farmers wanted and how they wanted to receive that information.
We worked with a small set of farmers to specify the information architecture and navigation, and to test prototypes.
We manage all content; this includes sourcing, repurposing, writing/rewriting, editing, proofreading and publishing.
Decision-support tools
We described 28 decision-support tools in a way that farmers can quickly assess whether the tool is of interest to them.
Each tool has its own consistently structured web page.
The content is written for scannability using techniques such as short paragraphs and sentences, bulleted lists, parallelism, meaningful headings and meaningful hyperlinks.
As the web is a one-to-one medium, we use personal pronouns such as ‘you’ and ‘your’.
The language is plain English, allowing for some farming jargon that farmers are familiar with.
Check out Yield Prophet as an example.
Farmer case studies
We visited more than 30 farmers around the country, to find out how they manage climate risk in their enterprise.
From our interview transcripts, we chunked the information by farming practice, keeping paragraphs and sentences short. Check out Susan Carn as an example.
Weather and climate drivers
We repurposed content about Australia’s climate drivers which was provided by the Bureau of Meteorology and originally written for print.
We worked closely with the Bureau to simplify the terminology while keeping it accurate.
For each state/territory, you can see at a glance a summary of all climate drivers and synoptic features.
From here you can drill down on each climate driver.
Check out Queensland’s climate drivers as an example.