Situation

In mid-2017, Zeeland Seaports (now North Sea Port) found itself in a turbulent phase. The government had mandated that it become a public limited company (NV), meaning it had to operate more commercially. Additionally, as a regional director, it had financial and social responsibility for major projects in the industry, port, and for citizens. There was also an exploratory phase for a merger with the port of Ghent, Belgium.

The head of corporate communications was seeking tools to intelligently and clearly communicate with all stakeholders, keeping the communication lively and active.

Issue

The website was outdated, and the communications department wanted to prepare for a new website. This needed to account for possible scenarios over the coming year.

The website had not been updated in years because the department was unsure how and where to start. Lack of user-friendliness was a major issue, as were integration with social media, statistics, and the CRM system. This caused the website to become more of an afterthought than a well-visited hub for the Zeeuws-Vlaanderen region.

The question was:

How can the communications department prepare for the upcoming situation and support the organization by developing a leading direction, enabling us to quickly develop a smart new website in any scenario?

Approach

We conducted workshops to explore the most likely scenarios and researched the most relevant personas. We also held brainstorming sessions on how to approach each scenario.

We mapped out how and what content to create and deploy, even before investing in a new independent or merged website.

Result

We simultaneously explored how to prepare for these scenarios: the idea was to start working on the website, even though we didn’t yet know if the merger with the port of Ghent would proceed.

We decided that personas would be a solid foundation to begin content development for the website. We also determined which parts of the technical work could be handled in-house and which would need to be outsourced, including the necessary budget.

The communications department could now proceed with preparing for the new situation. Content topics distributed across personas could already be developed, and specific requirements for the new website could begin to take shape.

The department, with this vision, could take the lead and respond flexibly to major changes.