The backstory
IDH, The Sustainable Trade Initiative brings governments, companies and financiers together in action-driven partnerships.
Their Farmfit programme makes investing in smallholder farming more attractive by providing technical assistance, insights and de-risked finance models.
The Challenge
We collaborated with IDH Farmfit to create a new web platform, called Farmfit Intelligence. We met with the team at their HQ in the Netherlands for the project kickoff sessions. We used this two-day workshop to learn about their target audience, goals, needs and challenges.
We created two user personas for the website, based on former partners and clients of IDH:
- Sustainability Manager at a multinational company in Amsterdam
- Owner of cashew sourcing company in Africa
Their goals included:
- Building a business case for sustainability within their organisation
- Creating effective presentations of business plans
- Improving the productivity of smallholders
The Solution
To help our personas achieve their goals, our client had 3 main functionalities in mind for the platform:
- Creating a business modelling tool that helps making better investment decisions
- Creating a benchmarking database to compare the performance of businesses
- Sharing insights on how to work with smallholder farmers
Following the workshop sessions, we set up content inventory to help writing copy for all website pages with our personas and business goals in mind. After gathering all content, we created wireframes for all website pages.
We did weekly reviews and created a shared Trello board to make sure our client always know how the project is going.
After two rounds of reviews, we created the designs for the Farmfit Intelligence portal, using the IDH Sustainable Trade visual library. After our client approved the designs, we built a CMS and a website as the first phase of our development effort.
The Farmfit Intelligence website provides information about the initiative and shares innovative solutions for working with smallholder farmers.
With the first phase concluded, we were ready to take on the bigger challenge: create a custom benchmarking and business modelling tool.
We set up another set of workshop sessions, to make sure our team fully understands the business logic and the underlying calculations. These workshop sessions helped our development team connect with the client and empathise with their problems.
| Problem | Solution |
|---|---|
| Business Modelling & Benchmarking are difficult concepts. |
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| Business Modelling is a complex process that takes time to complete. |
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| Users need to be able to share the reports to make a case and create effective presentations. |
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Setting up a staging environment allowed our client to review all changes in user interface and functionality, before going live.
Technology
Benchmarking database is backed by a CSV file, which has different versions on the backend, so it is easy to switch between them.
Business modelling is completely local tool, meaning that the data does not leave the users browser and everything is kept on the person’s computer. Even the PDF is generated on the user’s computer.
Still, the result are shareable if the user decides to.
The Results
The Farmfit Intelligence Portal launched in May in its fully-fledged form and the first reviews from the target audience have been overwhelmingly positive.
Accessibility
The website is in line with the W3C accessibility standard.
Performance
Part of the target audience is from areas with low internet speed. We created a platform that performs well under all circumstances.
Scalability
We built a robust web solution that is easy to modify on the backend and frontend.
We really appreciate that Evermore invested themselves into the project and instead of just pinpointing problems they offered well thought out solutions. They’ve set a high bar for how consultants should operate.
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