Conservation Volunteers Australia
Building a shared data platform for conservation across Australia
Conservation work happens everywhere — in wetlands, community gardens, bushfire recovery sites, and wildlife habitats across the country. But the data captured in the field rarely flows to the people who need it most. We worked with Conservation Volunteers Australia to design a minimum viable platform that connects the dots between fieldwork, funding, and long-term land management — making conservation efforts more visible, more shareable, and more effective.
Outcomes
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A set of life stories that map the different modes of landcare work across Australia — making the system legible to everyone involved
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An MVP approach to guide development of a new shared data platform
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A prioritised feature set to shape future releases and improvements
Services
Sectors
A disconnected landscape
Conservation Volunteers Australia (CVA) coordinates thousands of volunteers across a huge range of projects — from wildlife protection to wetlands rehabilitation to bushfire recovery. Each project generates valuable observations and outcomes, but without a consistent way to capture and share that knowledge, learnings stay siloed. Funders struggle to see impact. Teams on the ground repeat work others have already done.
As a nationwide organisation operating across Australia's complex landcare and conservation system, CVA was in a strong position to change this. The opportunity was clear — a shared data platform that captures fieldwork in real time, so project efforts and achievements become visible to the grants bodies and partners that support them.
Four modes of conservation work
Over seven weeks, we spoke with three CVA stakeholders and eight people involved in planning, delivering, and investing in conservation and landcare projects across Victoria and NSW.
What emerged were four distinct modes of doing conservation work — fieldwork, facilitation, stewardship, and investment — each with its own needs, pressures, and information gaps. We mapped these into a set of life stories that show how different organisations, processes, tools, and technologies either enable or block information sharing across landcare networks.
A platform shaped by real needs
We drew on the research to outline a vision for a digital platform, with recommendations for validation and market launch that deliver for each mode of conservation work:
- Facilitation: More efficient, streamlined processes that make planning and reporting easier
- Stewardship: A rich picture of field activities and impact to drive better business and funding decisions
- Fieldwork: Volunteers can focus on delivering quality outcomes — capturing stories and observations as they happen, rather than filling out compliance reports
- Investment: More responsive funding strategies, better attuned to the needs of people on the ground
Replacing friction with flow
The existing system was full of friction. Information moved slowly between stakeholders — when it moved at all. People worked in their own bubbles, which created disconnection and eroded trust across the network. Intentions and meanings were easily misunderstood without a shared language.
The new platform changes this. It enables more direct, faster information exchange between the people who need it. Stakeholders can see how every other part of the network affects the health and productivity of land over time. And a common language means everyone — from volunteers to funders — is working from the same understanding.
