Delivering a website that supports integrity within the voluntary carbon market

Migrating the website to improve conversions and optimise performance

Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market

The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market is a non-profit, independent governance body that aims to set and maintain a global standard for high integrity in the voluntary carbon market, unlocking private climate and carbon finance that would not otherwise be deployed.

Launched in 2021 with a basic website, Greenhouse were brought in to migrate the website to a high-performance, multilingual website that educated the target audience, built authority and supported adoption for the core carbon principles.

Languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Simplified Mandarin, Bahasa Indonesia .

Results and impact:

Building integrity at the heart of the voluntary carbon market

Challenge: the existing website lacked clear action

The Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM) website was built quickly by a developer team well-versed in website visual design but with no clear vision, minimal user research, no content strategy and little input from internal stakeholders. As the organisation matured, there was now a need for a highly targeted website that delivers action.

Solution: migrating the website from start to finish

We oversaw the migration of the existing website from start to finish. This included stakeholder workshops, full website audit, user interviews, card sort, information architecture design, content creation including SEO strategy, image library creation, prototype development, visual design, CMS and website build. All designed to improve usability, findability and accessibility including multi-lingual capability in six languages.

Results: an increase across all website results

Since launch, website users have increased 51% since launch, with a 33% uplift in traffic from organic search demonstrating the quality of the new content and SEO strategy. More than 2K users have subscribed to the newsletter, an increase of 42% on previous period. Page views have increased by 45% and over 2.4K users have download key resources helping to educate about core carbon principles.

Impact: ICVCM strongly linked with core carbon principles (CCPs)

Raised awareness of the organisation and intrinsically linking ICVCM with core carbon principles (CCPs). High-levels of users and engagement across the website. Improved UX, site speed and conversions is delivering significant impact to the voluntary carbon market ensuring support from governments and initiatives around the world, all interested in incorporating the CCPs in their own frameworks.

What we did

Stakeholder workshop and audit of content

• • Kickoff workshop determined organisation level goals
• • In-depth page level audit provided understanding of existing content performance and identified technical issues to address
• • Hotjar evaluation identified current user experience and heuristic challenges

Optimised web content to improve conversions

All website content was planned at a page level to ensure every aspect of the website addressed user needs. The build phase included a prototype to test out user journeys and visual design pattern library. Overall goals was to deliver a structured, engaging and user centred website that is optimised for search, UX and cross-device responsiveness.

Detailed Knowledge Hub as a single source of truth

• • Alongside the website, a dedicated Knowledge Hub was launched.
• • This provides a centralised location for all FAQs, resources and technical guidance on processes related to the Assessment Framework.
• • It is searchable and has HelpDesk functionality to streamline processes and triage support requests.

What our clients say:

“Greenhouse is an agency with true integrity, offering real understanding of the voluntary carbon market, first rate comms skills, experience and strong networks. The team are collaborative and tenacious, and through their support our spokespeople are regularly consulted by leading outlets.”

Tara Burke – Communications Director, Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market