Naples Botanical Gardens

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The Naples Botanical Garden, encompassing 160 acres, is a premier botanical garden located in Naples, Florida. The Garden was first established in 1995 and now consists of lakes and lands representing seven distinct natural habitats and ecosystems. It currently features over 600 species and continues its mission of being one of the finest collections of subtropical and tropical plants in the world, with special emphasis on the ecosystems of the 26th Latitude.


The master plan for future development calls for a center for natural science, plant collections, art, science, history exhibitions, and education.

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Needs and Problems to Be Solved

Naples Botanical Garden (NBG) wanted to create a unique visiting experience for guests by delivering news about upcoming events (which happen frequently), photos and up to the minute happenings to their mobile devices using a custom built app. Guests are also encouraged to upload photos and comments during their visit, adding additional texture to the mobile experience.

Website Upgrade: NBG chose Concursive's Connect solution to replace their existing static website. Besides the informational requirements a website must meet, giving visitors the ability to register and add photos, videos and remembrances of their trip on the website or through their mobile devices creates a long- lasting connection to the Gardens.

Marketing Strategy: As NBG builds a Community of visitors, employees, volunteers and potential customers, Connect's social features - blogging, discussion forums, photo sharing and interest group participation - provide a powerful story that works to attract visitors year 'round.

Content Management: It wasn't possible for the NBG's team of volunteers or employees to add new content about the constantly changing plants, flowers, bird spottings and animal visits happening all the time. Using Connect, through it's unique permissions scheme, approved users can now post from their mobile devices right to specific areas of the website which in turn displays on visitor's mobiles instantaneously.

Familiarity & Ease of Use: As an entire generation was (and still is) being trained by using the mega-social sites like Facebook and Linked-in, NBG wanted to adopt as many common notions as possible so users could be easily on-boarded and then brought up to speed quickly.

Manageability & Upgradeability: While NBG required a custom solution, they also needed a solution that had an intuitive manageability layer, easily mastered, and one built on on an upgradeable platform so they can continually achieve efficiency, quality and security at reasonable cost.

Process Employed

NBG deployed their new web site through the iterative approach followed by most organizations building hubs. The phases they went through:

Prototype: Covered roughly two months; two weeks for structuring the new Connect site to match their old site, one month for development of new features, and two weeks for socializing it to stakeholders, gaining feedback, and then reaching consensus to go to the next phase.

Beta: Began immediately; the prototype "turned into" the beta. Additional customizations were made, users brought up and initial programs launched.

Soft Launch: As the beta continued and confidence grew, the site morphed into the initial "for real" system as existing content was added and Garden employees and volunteers were trained on how to manage the content for which they were responsible.

Production: It's now in full production with the full suite of capabilities employed: Web, mobile, management console and a number of cloud services plugged in.

Technology Components

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