Client
Plants of Concern is a program of the Chicago Botanic Garden. Its goal is to monitor rare and endangered species of plants in Illinois. This monitoring happens in large part through the efforts of trained volunteers, or citizen scientists.
Challenge
Plants of Concern wanted to enable volunteers to complete this training program online and enable volunteers to use the newly designed mobile app to collect this important data. They needed to figure out how to deliver a wide-range of content–everything from basic botany principles to complex data collection methods that require estimation–in an engaging e-learning environment.
Aha! Moment
We determined that a combination of field footage of volunteers conducting data collection and animations that break down the content into digestible pieces would enable volunteers to visualize how exactly to carry out the work.
Solution
We used a combination of drone footage, 4K video, archival photos and original animations over the six training modules. We also produced an outreach video about Plants of Concern that is used as an orientation and for outreach and fundraising purposes.
