Celebrating te reo Māori in Aotearoa

Te Māngai Pāho (TMP) play a key role in Maihi Karauna; the Crown's Strategy for Māori Language Revitalisation. The 2019 budget opened up a further $14m to TMP for funding more Māori language content across all media. In order to get this money to the right content creators, TMP needed to make information on funding submissions easier to find and to take action on. They also rebranded and wanted a new look and feel on their website to capture this change.

Qualitative and quantitative research investigations into TMP’s existing website came first. A high-level analytics audit showed us which questions we needed to ask audiences in workshop sessions and surveys. The feedback was clear: it’s hard to find information (particularly around what TMP funds and how the funding process works), the content is out of date (largely due to a complicated and inflexible CMS), and; the microcopy used is confusing (pointing to a loss in translation between the language TMP uses internally and what their audiences expect).

Early design concepts, based around TMP’s new brand work, centred on a couple of important themes: sharing the joy of te reo, telling TMP’s story, and; creating a clear mental image of TMP’s funding model.

Featuring a showcase of content that had received funding from TMP helps content creators understand whether they should apply for funding, and also highlighted the impact TMP have on Aotearoa’s media landscape. The visual language used in these case studies connects the feel of the website to entertainment platform brands like Netflix, or Spotify.

Content design work focussing on communicating TMP’s funding model was absolutely critical in closing the gap between the way TMP talks about what they do, and how their audience understands and can use that information. A comprehensive content-block library in the CMS empowers content managers to deliver a wide range of content types beautifully and flexibly. The integration of te reo in the right places is just the first step on TMP’s path to delivering a completely bilingual website as their content teams find more and more opportunities to spend time developing that content.

The number of emails TMP now receive from people trying to figure out how their funding works, and whether they can apply for funding or not, has dropped from several per week to none. This is due largely to a cleaner content structure and empowered content managers. Instead, TMP is now fielding messages of thanks and congratulations on their new digital presence. Ka rawe! Beyond making their audience happy, and being able to better share their work and purpose, TMP is benefitting most from an organisational efficiency perspective. Managing their online content and the way new content is created for the web is now a frictionless experience thanks to their new Wagtail CMS.
"We are thrilled with our new website and working with Octave was a great experience. They understood our brief, what we were after and our requirements for a fully bilingual site. We now have a website that clearly shows what we do, our history and a place to showcase all the quality content that we fund.”
Jess Tawhiri, Kaitohutohu Whakapā Communications Advisor
https://www.tmp.govt.nz/en/