Imagine Newcastle: Moving Talent to a Progressive, Regional City

Challenge
As Newcastle changed, the demand for skilled professionals grew. The local workforce was not enough to fill specialist roles, and a need was born to attract young professionals to move to the city.
Outcome
We supported the City of Newcastle to develop a content site with over 20 custom designed components that could be re-used and rearranged as the product released further content pages and features.
Newcastle is a regional city two hours north of Sydney, Australia, home to roughly half a million people. In 2022, the City of Newcastle (CN) asked us for support in progressing its vision to attract a diverse group of millennial and Gen Z professionals to the city. The campaign was called Imagine Newcastle.
After a successful pilot campaign in 2021 that offered movers a $10,000 grant to relocate to Newcastle, CN approached Endava to design and deliver a new website for the next iteration of the campaign. After extensive user research, it was determined that the financial grant was viewed as a ‘cherry on top’ and professionals would make the move without the grant.
With these insights the new website pivoted its focus to highlight the professional opportunities, lifestyle benefits and affordability of Newcastle.

A progressive city with a skills shortage
In the last 15 years, the city of Newcastle has transformed. Its history as an industrial town has been eclipsed by massive growth in renewable energy, technology, creative arts and large investments in city infrastructure and education. It is now a progressive, affordable, creative city by the sea, home to more artists per capita than any other Australian city.
As the city changed, and new businesses grew, the demand for skilled professionals to fill roles in science, technology, engineering and maths also grew. The local workforce was not large enough to fill these specialist roles, and a need was born to attract millennial and Gen X professionals to move to Newcastle.

User research drove the product
The first iteration of the campaign (before our involvement) brought 30 new movers to Newcastle through the $10,000 incentive campaign. We conducted user research with this group of movers to understand their motivations, lifestyle, pain points and user journey when making the move.
Cost of living, type of neighbourhood, proximity to nature and opportunities to ‘build a community’ were the most important considerations for movers.

A content site with flexible components
We developed a content site with over 20 custom designed components that could be re-used and rearranged as the product released further content pages and features.
Development of each component had multiple goals in mind; to create a fresh, engaging and creative design for the website viewer, a seamless authoring experience for the content loader in the Content Management System (CMS) and a library of components that could be used to build a new page in a single day if required.
The website employs significant front-end CSS to accommodate animated icons, a seamless scrolling background colours, rotating menu items, a flexible masonry grid and a delayed reveal on scroll. These design enhancements combine to create a unique user experience that reflects the creativity of the city itself.

Solution architecture
As City of Newcastle used Kentico as their CMS across their suite of websites, CN content authors had experience with the platform and were used to the interface for content loading. For this reason, we employed Kentico for the delivery of the website.
Our team had not used Kentico before, but our many years of experience with similar platform Umbraco helped us to adapt to this new platform quickly. The delivery was also supported by SQL, Azure, Asp.net and .net6 platforms.
Outcomes
A content site with flexible, re-usable components
Front-end CSS animation and styling that reflects the creativity of the city
Growth in lead generation due to digital funnel
Full product journey from discovery research to prototyping, testing, design and delivery
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