Promoting community voices

The Challenge

The Taikorihi locality comes with its own unique character and set of challenges. There are five Iwi within its boundaries. Geographically, it is a large area where parts are both rural and remote. It is a region known for its stunning natural beauty, sacred places and cultural strengths.

It is also a rohe with a history of unmet need, persistent, long-term and long-standing inequalities and inequities that have yet to be addressed. The Far North has relatively high rates of specific, long-term health conditions that have not dissipated, but rather, increased over time.

Taikorihi engaged FutureLab to showcase, promote and gather their community voices – online. While providing a canonical digital space to provide access to the localities members and share time-critical information with its members.

The outcome

Our web design team extended their design assets from a single PDF into a fully-responsive, and clean web design. Importance was placed on highlighting the importance of the report alongside the voices and concerns of locality members, ranging from Kaumatua, Kuia and taitamariki on issues such as Mental Health and wellbeing, housing and primary healthcare.

The voices of up to 1300 respondents is easily managed via a custom post type named Voices, and able to showcase in multiple parts of the site design via custom sliders.

At FutureLab we appreciate that not all whanau in the locality have access to the internet from a fixed broadband connection, so the site is both mobile friendly and scores high on the Google PageSpeed index at a score of 92-100 performance score to allow universal access to the site across a wide spectrum of user devices.

Shining a light on community voices

The most important part of a working group who represent engagement across large land areas, iwi and residents was given centre stage on the website. A clean layout to support the ever-increasing voices of the community has it’s own page on the site, categorised by today’s focus areas, but scalable for new areas into the future.

FutureLab helping to grow local health initiatives

Taikorihi locality goals really resonated with our leadership team at FutureLab, the drive to be digitally innovative and agile to serve their community is a purpose we really got behind as a team.

We donated up to 20 hours of our teams time to deliver a handful of extra features to the final scope as our way of acknowledging the hard work their team puts in each and every day at Taikorihi.

At FutureLab, we believe that “a rising tide lifts all boats” – so we are very privileged and grateful to be a part of this initiative and lend our expertise.

Final words from the Taikorihi Team

“FutureLab really lifted the core design principals from our supplied PDF report and produced a brilliantly clean, easy to update website for our team to work with. We are looking forward to adding new features to the site as our community needs grow and are excited to be working with FutureLab to make that happen in the future!”

JJ Ripikoi, Programme Manager @ Taikorihi