Neighbourhood Watch SA

The Neighbourhood Watch in SA undertook a journey of discovery aiming to better understand their members as well as the larger community around them. They were looking to re-position themselves within the community so that Neighbourhood Watch offerings could be more widely adopted. I worked with the Neighbourhood Watch to define a Digital Strategy that could help drive them towards this future.

The first step in the process was to complete a current state audit of Neighbourhood Watch’s current digital offerings. This current state audit took into consideration current technologies used, the current experience provided to users, as well as a high level review of competitors/comparators.

A stakeholder workshop was held to gain an understanding of the requirements for the project, as well as getting to know the people involved within the organisation. In these stakeholder workshops we reviewed the Neighbourhood Watch vision and mission statements, reviewed current objectives and gained an understanding of what strategies and KPIs were in place to meet these objectives. Any successful digital strategy needs to align and form part of the overall strategy of the organisation, which is why this step was absolutely vital at this stage.

Primary user research to gather user requirements was completed in two forms; existing members were interviewed in user workshops, and non-members were represented by a survey to the wider Adelaide population to gain a statistically significant representation of the non-membership base. I was responsible for crafting survey questions, facilitating workshops and reporting on the findings of each including a comparison between the two audiences to identify their similarities and differences.

At this point in the process we brought the stakeholders back together to review the research findings and define a set of target personas for the new Neighbourhood Watch digital experiences. The intent was that the digital experiences would augment and be in addition to current offline activities that were being managed by the watch, an online experience could never wholly replace these offerings.

We then worked together to define what the future vision for the organisation should look like, taking into consideration the research and persona creation done to date, and then complete a gap analysis along with defining a strategic roadmap to allow the organisation to achieve it’s short and long term goals.

One major component of this process was the refresh of the Neighbourhood Watch online presence, and as such we also created a set of wireframes and visual designs to complement the new Digital Strategy, showing how much of a difference this could make to the way the Neighbourhood Watch is perceived.

At the end of the process the Neighbourhood Watch was able to make educated decisions and move towards a more positive digital future with a better understanding of their groups and the communities to which they belong.