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Brief
As one of the largest defence companies in the world, BAE Systems employ around 105,000 people across the globe, many of whom work in engineering-related roles.
Given the importance of engineering to their business, it’s no surprise that they’re committed to nurturing the next generation of engineers through their UK education programme.
AWA was challenged with revamping the existing BAE Systems UK Education Programme website, with the primary aims of:
- Rationalising the navigation and content structure
- More effectively bringing engineering to life for pupils aged 5-19 years old
- Better supporting planned schools activity, such as challenges, roadshows and BAE Systems Ambassador visits
Strategy
The previous site had grown over many years, with a wealth of new content added regularly during this period. In addition to the core site content, a host of associated microsites also sprang up, all of which had their own visual style and featured everything from games and quizzes to photo galleries, video and virtual tours.
Whilst the quality of this content was fantastic, when viewed as a whole, it lacked cohesion. It created an information-rich online presence, but one that suffered from a lack of consistency and structure. This was one of the first things that we needed to address.
The site exists to support the schools activity and direct student engagement that’s central to the education programme as a whole. This activity includes school roadshows, the Schools Challenge competition and Schools Ambassador visits from BAE Systems employees.
The site also needed to provide teacher support for a range of Key Stages and the 14-19 Engineering Diploma in the form of downloadable lesson plans.
We were mindful of ensuring that students and teachers could easily find information about these activities, as well as sign up to take part. This meant giving these areas good visibility within the navigation, and consistently cross selling them around the site.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the site had to appeal to young people. It had to promote engineering as being an attractive, dynamic and exciting career, and tell them all that they needed to know in order to take their interest further.
Execution
Firstly, we restructured the site architecture and brought the content from all of the disparate microsites together under one roof. The result is a more intuitive user experience and the new structure, combined with a fresh and modern visual style, presents a fun and enjoyable learning environment.
Each year, the programme’s schools activity adopts a different theme as a way of explaining the role of engineering in our everyday lives, and encouraging children to look at the things that inspire engineers in a slightly different way. For launch, ‘biomimicry’ was the chosen theme.
As part of our work to promote this theme we researched and produced a bank of content features, drawing on examples of how science and nature have been the driving force behind many engineering feats (many of these were actual examples of the work of BAE Systems). Due to the broad age range of the site’s users, we then tailored the features in three different ways, to cater for the 5-8, 9-13 and 14+ age groups.
Interactive content has always proved incredibly popular on the site in the past, and we produced two new engineering and biomimicry-themed games – Brains’ Biomimicry Quiz and Hexbusters – each appealing to very different ends of the programme’s target age range.
In addition to this we developed an interactive ‘Cool Wall’. This Flash-based feature displays the latest engineering-related news from around the world, encouraging users to vote on whether they think a story is cool or not. They’re also able to see how others have voted, before deciding whether to read the story in more detail for themselves.
As essential as it was that the site engaged young people, it was also vital that teachers were catered for, as it’s through them that the UK education programme is co-ordinated and promoted. We developed a secure teachers’ area where registered users could access useful resources and express interest in their school taking part in any of the UK education programme activities.
In addition to this there are the BAE Systems employees who offer themselves as Education Ambassadors, and give up their time to help deliver the UK education programme to schools in their local area. These Education Ambassadors also have their own secure area where they can access teaching plans and share best practice with each other.
Finally, to ensure that the BAE Systems UK Education team is able to communicate to their database of teachers in a consistent way, we developed an email template for them to use. This template – along with the YouTube channel that we designed to house the programme’s abundance of video content – shares the look and feel of the site and offers a single, coherent style to every piece of communication coming from the BAE Systems UK Education Programme.
Results
The new website went live in March 2010 and has been promoted at each school roadshow event that the BAE Systems team has undertaken (the roadshow will visit around 300 schools across the UK this year).
The response to the site from pupils, teachers and BAE Systems colleagues has been fantastic, and the site analytics show an increase in traffic, month on month.
Richard Hamer, BAE Systems’ UK Education Programme Director, is delighted with the new site that AWA has delivered: “By focusing on concepts such as the use of biomimicry in engineering and encouraging students to rate engineering feats on a ’cool wall’, we’re confident that the site will play a big role in inspiring the next generation of engineering talent.”
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