Passport 2 Recovery
A trip to Kangaroo Island is now more than a holiday. With Passport 2 Recovery, visitors to KI can "arrive as a tourist, leave as a scientist!"
The Challenge
Flinders Uni is on a mission to take Kangaroo Island’s environmental and economic recovery, post the 2019 bushfires, to the next level. Their goal was to connect with people and inspire citizen science curiosity, whilst also promoting and encouraging KI tourism, educating users on KI’s natural habitats, flora and fauna and ecosystems and promoting their partnership with Sealink.
For Flinders Uni, it’s about science, building and retaining relationships with tourists, locals and businesses, reputability, trust and growth.
The Solution
The team at Flinders Uni came to us with a plan for a digital solution and a way for the public and visitors to KI to play an active role. Keeping their goals in mind, we worked alongside them to build a feature-rich, scalable and functional app that clearly showcases to their audience that “Passport to Recovery” is worth engaging with.
Passport 2 Recovery is a government-funded initiative. After downloading the app, users can explore KI and participate in a range of interactive science projects, collecting data to be used by scientists striving to improve conservation outcomes. Activities include collecting and dropping off specific samples and submitting observational data such as photos of wildlife, flora and fauna for scientific analysis.
Tourists are encouraged to participate and are rewarded with points which can then be redeemed at local businesses, thus bolstering local tourism and encouraging users to share the app with their friends.
As well as being functional and easy to use, the Passport to Recovery app increases environmental knowledge about KI and entices tourists and locals to participate in citizen science projects. By immediately connecting with the target market and bolstering Kangaroo Island’s position as a number one destination for tourism and citizen science initiatives in Australia, the app will create a vital database of information for Flinders Uni for monitoring and tracking the recovery of KI following the devastating effects of the 2019 bushfires.
The Path Forward
Through the creation of this app, Flinders Uni has made a positive change towards the revitalisation and restoration of Kangaroo Island. Having released their app to the public; recovery on KI is now something that anyone can actively contribute to – the pathway to recovery is now clearer than ever.
The app was released to the public in August 2022. Flinders are tracking usage and bookings in the short term and will be measuring impact on the recovery for KI’s environment and economy. Phase 2 is scheduled for October 2022 and introduces new features and activities into the app, followed by Phase 3 in early 2023.
