Learning to Drive DSA .Gov microsite

The Learning to Drive .Gov microsite for the Driving Standards Agency (DSA) and the Department of Transport centred around a ‘Young People’s Forum’  for 16-24 year olds. It was designed to explore options for updating the content and format of the Driving Test in the United Kingdom and encourage users  to complete a Consultation Questionnaire.

I helped develop the forum concept alongside Victoria Creative’s Mike Conwill, Lavanya Sivakumaran and the DSA team and was involved in the user-interface design, HTML build and reporting analytics.

Back-end functions were supported by Headland Multimedia’s in-house .net CMS platform which was integrated with a 3rd-party Forum module.

The site featured video interviews with the ‘Young People’s Group’ which were edited in FinalCut Pro and hosted on the Headland server and the DSA YouTube channel.

The Learning to Drive .Gov microsite leveraged social networks, with content and discussion filtering out to Facebook, Bebo, mySpace, MSN and YouTube – perfect channels for engaging the audience demographic.

So called ‘Forum Champions’ seeded the online forum with questions for visitors to answer. Their identities anonymised through use of illustrated figures designed by Ruth Disney. Characters were also given their own Facebook profiles and discussions were moderated by Victoria Creative’s Phillipa Richmond.

The microsite was launched at a national press conference chaired by Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly MP.

The campaign achieved its target figure of 6,000 questionnaire responses and was quoted by the DSA as “their most successful campaign ever”. The project served to highlight the importance of distributing information across a wide selection of internet channels rather than focussing entirely on a single destination website.