The RSPB wanted to develop its first ever major strategy to understand and review the offer for visitors on its nature reserves across the UK.  It wanted to improve the experience, better connecting people with its cause and raising income that would directly influence its conservation work.

 

Millions of visitors enjoyed its sites every year, but it also wanted to attract more non-specialist audiences to enjoy the reserves, so the strategy also need to address how the different visit components could be linked, as well as exploring how to bring people closer to wildlife.

​

The sites represented the biggest single opportunity for membership recruitment and for the first time, the strategy was addressing how to build and deliver an experience that would support that.

​

I talked to teams from across the organisation to understand the current visitor offer, which varied from site to site, to explore views on what it could look like and to identify common areas of opportunity and challenge. Workshops were then held with key groups to explore the findings with a view to developing a series of recommendations for how the RSPB could enhance the visitor experience across its sites.

 

The eight-month piece of work resulted in an extensive outline strategy including recommendations to deliver change. It ultimately led to a major rebrand, an increase in visitor numbers and an improvement in the experience scores from visitors.

​

The RSPB’s former Head of People Engagement said: “Amanda’s work enabled us to start a discussion at the most senior levels of the charity. It was clear we needed to consider some level of change to encourage more visitors to some of our nature reserves.”

​

www.rspb.org.uk