Anglian Water set up the Rivercare scheme in conjunction with the environmental charity ENCAMS (who run the Keep Britain Tidy campaign) and the Environment Agency. The scheme’s aims are to encourage volunteers to ‘adopt’ a stretch of river in their locality and to help care for it’s natural environment.
At an early stage of the scheme’s development, it was recognised that there needed to be some form of central information portal to which volunteers could turn to access news, advice and events and somewhere which could provide a framework for detailed project information.
Affinity were given the brief to produce a site which answered all of these requirements and a data driven web site was duly developed, fully content managed through the integration of the Affinity Media Assistant content management tool.
However, Affinity took the site one step further and developed a module which allowed virtual communities from all over the UK to interact online – with the ability to post news, tips, photographs etc into a secure area of the site, accessible only by approved community Rivercare groups.
“The website gives the project much higher visibility and people can go and look at it at any time, see what’s happening in their area and who to contact. The people who use it are really proactive, sending in links and updates. It helps to show that Rivercare activities aren’t onerous, but fun for anyone who wants to help. And they can get a feel for it before committing themselves. Also, it’s accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. It crosses geographical limits and as a water company with a strong bio-diversity action plan, we’re happy to spread the word as far as possible. Recent surveys have shown the highest ever scores for the number of Anglian Water customers who are satisfied that we care for the environment, and Rivercare helps to underline that.”
Rebecca Doughty, Rivercare spokesperson for Anglian Water
