New Zealand Rugby (NZR) is an organisation with a long history, extensive reach and considerable social influence. Many New Zealanders consider NZR a bit like a Government department: The Ministry of Rugby. The public expects NZR to do hundreds of different things for the community, whilst always ensuring it churns out winning All Blacks teams.

Over the years, NZR has had to balance the need to meet the public’s expectations with its need to generate commercial returns. To walk this line, NZR created many different websites designed to achieve a variety of different objectives, for different audiences, using different technologies and vendors. The weight of these websites was starting to drag the organisation down. The question that Diagram was asked to answer was: do we need so many websites?

Naturally, this question could really only be answered by an independent consultancy. If you asked any of the individual vendors working with NZR if their website was really necessary, the answer would probably have been yes. If you asked any of the individual business units within NZR if their website was really necessary, the answer would probably have been yes.

Instead, our approach was to run a series of workshops with different stakeholders within NZR. The workshops looked at NZR’s audiences and the objectives of the different business units. Through the workshop process we built alignment around what was really important and common to all audiences and business units. As a vision started to emerge, we refined it further and aligned it with NZR’s corporate strategy. Over several months our work revealed that all of NZR’s digital channels and initiatives could be boiled down to three objectives: how do I get into the game (for players, fans and coaches etc), how do I stay in the game (support, wellbeing, tips and toolboxes etc), and winning the game (high-performance, All Blacks etc).

Once the vision was clear, the answer to the question was obvious: no, you don’t need so many websites. In fact, you really only need three main properties. The process of rationalising websites and content could begin with purpose. Several websites were migrated onto one platform, an entirely new corporate website was created, and other websites were simply turned off. As part of this rationalisation, a single web platform was chosen to reduce complexity and lower the ongoing maintenance costs.

Another benefit of taking time to create a clear strategy was that procurement and delivery went very quickly and smoothly. NZR was able to be up and running with a new corporate website within three months of agreeing the strategy. We also supported NZR in a steering capacity throughout the content audit, migration and website delivery phase.

Technology partner:

DNA