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. Other countries emulate our efforts. 

For the past three years, I've been lucky to be a part of the National Park Foundation (NPF) team at CHIEF. 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. Engaged new audiences in creative and thoughtful ways. And helped achieve agency goals of greater awareness, 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. While NPF is adept at utilizing social media and creating annual contests to garner attention, never before have these been wed into a single campaign. This year, we changed that.

OVERVIEW:

Utilizing the Chute platform we are able to aggregate Instagram posts on the #PicYourParkContest hashtag, use an API to feed the content to the website we built and create a scoring apparatus to create a contest. And with wild success--thousands of people are participating and other organizations and businesses jump on the hashtag.

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 had to move at an incredible pace to achieve the scheduled six week launch. We organized our team around the idea that we needed to rapidly prototype and test to ensure the scoring worked correctly. While we had a strong background in 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 already existing content types and components
• Testing the prototype: to ensure scoring was working and accurate
• Reviewed legal rules to ensure park scoring and legal requirements matched
• Worked with the client and partner stakeholders

WORK PRODUCTS:

• Wireframe
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Wireframes:

The contest page was a part of the larger Find Your Park website, making design aesthetic easy to determine. I worked directly with a designer to determine page layout. Since we were working quickly, we sketched the landing page on a white board. Below is the first iteration of that wireframe and requirements.

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

Park Scoring:

In addition to determining the page layout, I also worked with our internal development team, NPF, NPS and Grey 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 more rapidly and encourage participation of the larger team. I checked the list from the NPS API against more colloquial park names found on the FYP site to a master list. Some parks already had official, assigned designations. I kept these. We had to research all the other parks and determine a park type for each of them.

We created badges that users can earn in order to encourage further participation. These are based largely, but not always, on park type. Finally, I created a scoring system that encouraged users to visit lesser known parks by assigning more points for those parks. I created "surges" or the ability to earn double-points for specific parks aligned with the FYP summer marketing plan. This made it easy to promote these parks, the surges, and game participation. The final and full park list can be found at findyourpark.com/pic-your-park/list.

Site Architecture:

The NPS team wanted to add a number of additional related areas such as national trails and heritage areas. We had to pull the information from the NPS API and migrate it to the site as unpublished content so that it did not appear in the FYP search. 

The FYP site already had a park content type that powered the search that allows users to drill down and find a park based on a number of factors. In order to verify the scoring, we had to add a number of fields. They are noted in the ACTION column. By creating central documentation we were able to handle off various components to different members of the development team.

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

A user's park location is verified by geolocation data. Each Instagram location has associated polygon data that we are able to verify against the GPS coordinates for each park. While we had polygon data for roughly 400 of the parks, it was not available for the national trails and heritage areas. We had to create a backend system that allows us to "tutor" the park content type with the polygon data from Instagram as users check them in. Once a user checks in an Instagram location for a place we do not have polygon data for, we're able to eliminate the location from further "tutoring" and verify it automatically for subsequent users. 

In addition, each park is assigned a point value. This allows us to also create "surge" or bonus points for special months. The larger national parks earn users 5 points, while the rest of the parks earn users 10 points. In special months different parks earn different point values. NPF promotes these parks and surges on their social media during the months. For example, in July, most National Battlefields and Military Parks received double points, encouraging users to visit these parks!

CONCLUSION: