Connecting Canadians with Wildlife Knowledge

Hinterland Who’s Who (HWW) is a Canadian Wildlife Federation (CWF) initiative that fosters wildlife conservation awareness by providing accessible, science-based information about native species and their habitats. Through engaging educational materials, multimedia content, and outreach programs, HWW empowers individuals and communities to understand, appreciate, and protect Canada’s biodiversity.

The Canadian Wildlife Federation (CWF) sought proposals to migrate the Hinterland Who’s Who (HWW) website from its outdated and unsupported Blackbaud Luminate CMS system to a modern, robust platform. The project’s primary objective was to replicate existing website functionality and migrate tens of thousands of assets seamlessly. While no redesign was requested, the project anticipated enhanced functionality resulting from the transition to a modern platform. Key requirements included user-friendly content management, compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards, full bilingual capabilities, and maintenance of the site’s extensive interconnected content relationships.

The legacy Hinterland Who’s Who website, managed through Blackbaud’s outdated Luminate CMS, significantly hindered efficient content administration and restricted compliance with modern accessibility standards. A lack of a comprehensive export tool and discontinued support from Blackbaud further complicated efforts to migrate content and assets effectively. The complexity was compounded by the sheer scale of the website, which encompassed tens of thousands of interconnected pages, documents, and multimedia files that needed to maintain their relationships post-migration. Additionally, budget constraints prohibited a complete redesign, and the project faced stringent timelines, requiring rapid, precise execution to ensure uninterrupted service.

Our team initiated the project by working closely with CWF’s IT and communications teams to identify and define their challenges and objectives clearly. Through targeted workshops, we outlined user stories based on existing functionality, ensuring each component of the website was thoroughly documented and understood. Additionally, we proactively drafted user stories for future improvements that could enhance site functionality at a later stage.

To establish a clear, precise visual guide, the existing website designs were carefully recreated in Figma. These detailed designs facilitated the creation of a highly efficient and WCAG 2.2 AA compliant WordPress theme, along with a set of reusable templates. Recognizing the complexity of migrating large volumes of data, our team developed customized scripts that systematically exported data from Blackbaud’s disparate databases while preserving crucial content relationships.

This extensive automation enabled approximately 95% of the content, images, and documents to be migrated seamlessly into WordPress, significantly reducing the need for manual data entry and ensuring accuracy and efficiency throughout the migration process.

Through effective automation strategies and meticulous development efforts, the project was successfully delivered on time and within the allocated budget. The migration resulted in meeting WCAG 2.2 AA compliance and significantly improved CMS administration workflows, reducing previous frustrations and the time associated with making updates to one of Canada’s institutional websites.