Kotahitanga mō te Taiao Alliance is an alliance of iwi, councils and government agencies working together to restore nature across 3.4 million hectares of land and sea in Te Tauihu, the top of the south Island of New Zealand.
Kotahitanga mō te Taiao Alliance
The Challenge
Kotahitanga mō te Taiao Alliance’s (KMTT) collaborative structure is the organisation's greatest strength and its hardest communications problem. KMTT needed a website that could explain a shared kaupapa held by many partners and make the case for investment to funders, all without flattening the mana of the individual partners into a generic conservation site.
Our Approach
The priority was a structure that mirrored how the Alliance actually works: programmes as the organising idea, projects as the visible evidence, and pānui as the ongoing record of progress on the ground. Avoca worked in partnership the team at KMTT on a content model and site structure that allows them complete control over their content and it’s relationships. We worked with Revell Design, integrating the KMTT brand into a web design developed collaboratively between the two studios.
Bilingual navigation was treated as a design constraint from the start rather than a translation layer added at the end, so labels such as "What we do / Ā mātou mahi" and "Invest in te Taiao / Haumi ki te taiao" sit together comfortably at every breakpoint.
What Was Built
A Statamic site built around interconnected content types, each one designed to carry its own weight rather than sit in a generic template:
Four programmes covering marine ecosystems, native species, lowland restoration and community empowerment, giving the Alliance a stable frame for work that spans 3.4 million hectares
25+ projects including Thriving North-west, Restoring Lowlands and Te Kāhui Tangaroa, each linked to the programme it sits under so the connection between strategy and delivery is visible to visitors
Pānui and news, published continuously and archived by issue, turning years of newsletters into a public record of progress
E-Pānui newsletter archive with sign-up integration, so every archived issue doubles as a subscription prompt
People and partners, easily managed
An Invest in te Taiao section making the funding case, with impact reporting and clear enquiry pathways for individuals, foundations, family trusts and businesses
Underneath the content types sits a page-building system with multiple design treatments for each block. The same content block can be presented several different ways, so the team can build a programme page, a campaign page or a partner story that each look considered and distinct without needing a developer or a new template every time.
That flexibility only pays off if the people using it are confident, so the project included full training for KMTT's content editors. The team now publishes pānui, updates programme content, builds new pages and manages relationships between projects, people and partners entirely on their own. SEO metadata, indexing rules and the cascade were configured across the site so new content inherits sensible defaults automatically, rather than depending on an editor remembering to set them.
The Outcome
The Alliance now has a home of its own: a single place where 3.4 million hectares of restoration work reads as one coordinated effort rather than a scatter of separate projects. The investment section gives KMTT a credible asset to put in front of funders, philanthropists and family trusts, and the pānui archive turns years of newsletters into a searchable public record of progress. Avoca continues to host the site and develop new functionality as the Alliance grows.
