David Suzuki Digs My Garden

David Suzuki Digs My Garden is an annual contest rewarding Canadians passionate about organic gardening. It supports the Foundation's efforts to ban lawn and garden pesticides and helps to raise awareness of the importance — and ease — of pesticide-free gardening. This year, we took a new approach with uncertain expectation by letting our public take the reigns with content. It paid off handsomely. Our bloggers nurtured a community, blogged independently with photos and videos posted via Movable Type, and showed us what great user-generated content looks like. It also offered us an insight into what a particular segment of our audience loves.

The clean, friendly design built out with basic features materialized extremely quickly as our timeline was particularly short. A personal approach that incorporated photos of our staff and of bloggers' faces in user pictures was intended to help attract visitors to content, offer a face behind the name, and show the public there are real, everyday people at DSF. The interface helped people feel comfortable contributing. Experienced gardeners were rewarded by feeling like experts, while beginners were provided with a support network.

Our annual photo contest saw triple the number of entries, to over 500 from across Canada. Finalists and an "inspirational gardens" feature profiled winners and their stories. The media buzz around the contest was huge, popping up in local TV and radio and garnering one elated winner a front-page article in the Langley Times. Generating significant donations to our campaign was a bonus.

Fresh, engaging content on a daily basis was key, and a first for us. Minimal training in Movable Type allowed our staff to easily moderate the community and to create and update more static content. They were thrilled at having this capability with little effort for maximum output.

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