Find Your Park

#PicYourParkContest

Instagram Game

National parks are one of America's greatest inventions. Nowhere else on Earth are such vast treasures protected for today and future generations.

For the past three years, I've been lucky to work with the National Park Foundation (NPF). What started as the agency's first attempt at adopting agile methodologies on a website redesign (nationalparks.org) has blossomed into multiple awards, additional website redesigns, and a long-term strategic engagement as an agency of record (AOR). Together, we've brought national parks to life for millions around the world and engaged new audiences in creative and thoughtful ways. And this has helped the NPF raise awareness and generate more corporate partnerships and donations.

The #PicYourParkContest Instagram Game is just a piece of this engagement. We're always striving to engage new audiences, raise awareness about smaller parks, and bring the parks to new platforms. Though NPF is adept at utilizing social media and creating annual contests to garner attention, never before have these been wed in a single campaign. This year, we changed that.

OVERVIEW

Building this contest required a lot of creative and strategic thinking—with unprecedented speed. It required tremendous collaboration both in our office and out. In addition to working with our contacts at the NPF, we worked with National Park Service (NPS) stakeholders, their AOR team (Grey), and Chute.

Project Structure

Our project team needed to move at an incredible pace to achieve the scheduled six-week launch. We organized our team to rapidly prototype and test contest scoring. While the team understood the site design and architecture, we'd never utilized Chute or built a scoring system. On this project, I:

• Led project strategy: determining scoring and backend architecture
• Led user experience: laying out the page design and use of existing content types and components
• Tested the prototype: to ensure that scoring was working and accurate
• Reviewed legal rules to ensure that park scoring and legal requirements matched
• Worked with the client and partner stakeholders

WORK PRODUCTS

Because it was a fast-moving project, we created deliverables quickly and iterated on our approach. We sketched our first wireframe and were able to immediately begin building components of the landing page. As we finalized the contest rules, we iterated on the structure and layout. We created a scoring system that aligned with the contest goals of generating participation and raising awareness around lesser-known parks. Finally, we created a content structure that allowed us to utilize components of the site already built and added new ones where necessary to automatically score entries.

In this case study, I've included:

• Wireframes
• Game scoring
• Content type structure

Wireframes

Much of the design aesthetic for the Find Your Park website was predetermined. I worked directly with a designer to determine the page layout. Because we were working quickly, we initially sketched the landing page on a whiteboard. Below is the first iteration of that wireframe and requirements.

As we worked through more of the requirements, technical needs and project goals, our page layout and wireframe were adjusted accordingly. I have included the final wireframe below:

Game Scoring

In addition to determining the page layout, I worked with our internal development team, the NPF, NPS, and Grey teams to create a park scoring system that utilized the park content type already present in findyourpark.com. Using Google Docs, I created a master spreadsheet of parks. By creating a collaborative document, we were able to solicit feedback from the larger team in real time.

To create this master list, I began with the NPS API and de-duped it against the colloquial park names found on the FYP site. Some parks already had official, assigned designations. I kept these. We had to research other parks and determine a park type for each of them. Based largely on park type, I created badges that users can earn to encourage further participation. Finally, I created a scoring system that encouraged users to visit lesser-known parks by assigning more points for those parks. I added "surges" or the ability to earn double points for specific parks to align with the FYP summer marketing plan. This made it easy to promote these parks and the surges, increase game participation, and encourage participants to visit these lesser-known parks. The final and full park list can be found at findyourpark.com/pic-your-park/list.

Content Type Structure

The FYP site already had a park content type that powered site search and allowed users to drill down and find a park based on a number of factors. We added a few fields to this existing content type to verify scoring. Because of the time crunch, we utilized a large team of developers, so I created centralized documentation to easily allow new developers to tap in and out of the project. These new fields are noted in the ACTION column of the spreadsheet to your right.

The NPS team wanted to add a number of additional related areas such as national trails and heritage areas. To do this, we added the new parks, park codes, and associated geolocation polygon data to the site as unpublished content so that it did not appear in the FYP search.

When a user checks into a park location, Instagram records the geolocation polygon data of this location. This polygon data is how we verified a user’s park location. Though we had polygon data for roughly 400 of the parks, it was not available for the national trails and heritage areas.

To address this and create a site the client could easily use for years to come, we created a backend “tutoring” system that allowed us to add new coordinates to park polygon data. After we add this new polygon information, we can automatically verify it for subsequent entries.

In addition to adding to the park content type, we created a new content type that pulled in the information for each user. We had to pull these into the site to track scoring and verify scoring, if needed. One happy outcome of adding this Instagram User content type is that it allows users to search game participants by their handle name.

CONCLUSION

Building this first-of-its-kind Instagram game for findyourpark.com was no small feat! Utilizing the Chute platform, we can aggregate Instagram posts using the #PicYourParkContest hashtag, use an API to feed the content to findyourpark.com, and create a scoring system that is largely (and increasingly) automated.

Not only were we able to launch at the client's target date but we've built a tool they can use for years to come. And we’ve got a very happy client with a popular contest—thousands of people are participating, and other organizations and businesses jump on the hashtag.