Blue Marine Foundation
Helping to protect Maldivian reefs from overfishing
How might we create an experience that helps prevent overfishing and protect Maldivian reefs during a pandemic?
Disruption to tourism meant a reduction in imported food supplies to the islands. This sparked a rapid increase in fishing from the native population.
We started by facilitating a series of workshops to understand the challenges and goals of the campaign. We began with lightning talks from local experts in the field – marine biologists, conservationists and researchers. Insights were captured as ‘how might we’ questions to help frame the challenges into opportunities. We looked at inspiring ideas from previous campaigns or products and mapped these against an effort/impact matrix to help us understand where the value lies.
One of the challenges was the environmental considerations and any cultural nuances we should be aware of. Working closely with the research team in the Maldives we created empathy maps to deeper understand the user needs and profiled some mindsets based on our learnings. We also absorbed facts about the endangered fish and made sure we were absolutely clear on size, age and species that were safe to catch.
The ideation workshop began with a series of ‘brainwriting’ sessions. This method quickly captures lots of ideas for each mindset in note form. We then used dot voting to decide which ideas were the strongest. These ideas were then used to generate a series of ‘crazy eights’. We followed the same process of dot voting the strongest ideas.
We then elaborated on these ideas using the ‘T-bar’ method which expands on a single idea in more detail. We collectively fed back on each idea and reached a mutual agreement on the ones to bring forward.
Finally, we used storyboards to help describe the scenario and user flow of the chosen idea.
It was BLUE’s best performing campaign to date, with a reach of over 100,000 (a third of the native population of the Maldives) after only 24 hours of launching! 30,000 delved into our deep-learning assets – the game or the hub – which equates to almost 10% of the native population of the Maldives.
