Are you a homeowner or renter in Auckland? Chances are you’ve used the Watercare site to pay your water bills, learn about faults and outages, discover local infrastructure projects, or explore Tamaki Makaurau’s most precious natural resource, H₂O.
If you’ve used the site this month, you might have noticed the fresh new public website and elegant secure payments portal. We were thrilled to partner with the Watercare team on the content for this epic project, given its impact on city dwellers.
We’re also proud of the record time in which everything was delivered, thanks to a successful collaboration between the client, developers, and our BOW strategists and writers. Here’s more on how this project unfolded.
Watercare plays a crucial public service role, supplying 1.7 million Aucklanders with safe drinking water and reliable wastewater services—all while protecting waterways and the environment.
We found that their legacy website had accumulated a large content debt, which is common for long-standing platforms with multiple people making front-end updates.
The UX was clunky, causing cognitive overload. Some helpful content was hidden (death by accordion), and the copy was inconsistent and dry.
Importantly, Watercare’s many audience segments had different content needs (think commercial customers, or landlords, for example) but finding information was not intuitive for them.
All-in-all change was required.
The corporate communications team has an important and wide remit, leading and advising the business on media-related issues and ensuring the public is kept informed and educated. Adding a new website redevelopment to their work load, would be no walk in the park!
This is where BOW stepped in to help drive the content strategy and deliver new content that would make a splash. The catch was we all only had three months.
First, objectives for the new site were collectively defined:
Self-service payments and info: Customers are time-poor, and we want to help them be efficient by doing things quickly, on the go.
Keep the public informed: The site houses updates that affect the city, local community, daily life, or your bank balance.
Build trust and engagement with diverse communities and site users: Give users what they need when they need it, showing that we understand their various needs.
Then we established some design principles to guide content decisions:
Be ruthlessly simple: Users are busy. Create an intuitive, seamless road from A to B and reduce obstacles. Reduce the need for someone to contact us by providing helpful answers and self-service options.
Build trust: Every paragraph, click, image, and interaction is an opportunity to prove to Aucklanders that we’re genuinely here to help.
Understand my reality: Put the needs of Aucklanders first, whether they’re residents, tenants, or commercial customers. Anticipate their needs in what we write - at each touchpoint.
When we began, Watercare and Rush Digital (design and development agency) had already started proposing page components and the main navigation. Their approach was to segment journeys into residents (critical), business, landlords and property managers, and solicitors. The team had conducted detailed stakeholder workshops to understand audience needs, pain points and key opportunities, which validated this.
We then conducted a 420-page audit. This allowed us to stress-test topics against the proposed segmented taxonomy. For most page topics, it worked. Where a piece of critical content didn’t fit into a segment or related to all segments (repeated content would cause SEO and content overload issues), we found solutions.
We also defined which pages required a critical rewrite, a light refresh, or a lift-and-shift (although migrating like-for-like content was not always straightforward with an all-new set of component blocks). This helped us estimate writing hours.
Then we spearheaded a robust stakeholder and review process, where we all worked collectively on SharePoint and Miro. Microsoft Planner was a little restrictive (the client had IT restrictions on external tools), but the Watercare project leads made this work as a Kanban workflow board.
The Watercare team worked tirelessly in the background on other assets and deliverables like fresh imagery, forms, and FAQ migration; as well as uploading all content to the site. Rush continued to design and deliver components and build the Strapi CMS.
At our end, we ensured each strategist and writer were allocated a subsection they could own and work with stakeholders on, and we had a central ‘control’ writer at BOW for editing and consistency.
We also had to figure out how to amalgamate the content from two other external Watercare-owned sites that were being shut down.
In terms of tone of voice, we knew that like water, our writing should be clear, hydrating, energizing, refreshing, and flow well. We had to write fast to get nearly 100 critical new pages across the line.
You can check out the site for yourself now!
Some of our main outtakes on this job:
Congrats to the Watercare project team on delivering this awesome new digital asset.
Rachel Hughes | Head of Communications
Thanks for your contribution to the project. I know it was a fast and furious undertaking, with a mad dash to the finish line – but what a wonderful result (and a big relief!).
Please pass my thanks onto your team of writers. With the new segmentation, we are set up to deliver a great experience to our customers.
I really enjoyed working with all of you; and appreciated everyone rolling their sleeves up to get the job done as quickly as possible. I thought the process that we followed in Microsoft Teams – with the content delivery cards – worked well and made it easy to track progress.
