Portfolio

The Coordinated Aquatic Monitoring Program (CAMP) is partnership between the province of Manitoba and Manitoba Hydro. Its purpose is to study and monitor the health of water bodies are affected by the electricity generating operations of Manitoba. While CAMP has published a comprehensive set of reports and other documents about its activities and findings, these publications are technical and their content inaccessible to average citizens, policy and decision makers in government, and other stakeholder groups including Indigenous communities.

CAMP has hired NIVA with a long-term communications support agreement to promote the value of the organization’s activities, while ensuring the scientific research that they conduct is more accessible to various audiences throughout Manitoba. This entails working closely with the CAMP team to build awareness and understanding of the important work they perform, helping to establish greater levels of trust with Manitobans affected by hydroelectric generation, and enabling CAMP to engage in two-way dialogues with the regions and communities where they operate.

NIVA is responsible for the following:

• Developing and managing a robust CAMP social media strategy that includes regular posts on all social media channels.
• Writing numerous communication products such as:
  • fact sheets
  • infographics
  • blog posts
  • staff profiles
  • articles
  • quarterly newsletters
  • reports from community meetings and workshops
• Providing insight and advice regarding stakeholder engagement and issues management.

CHS supports Government of Canada priorities and provides up-to-date, authoritative, and standardized hydrospatial information that includes producing and delivering nautical charts. CHS operations support maritime transportation, bolster Canadian maritime boundaries and sovereignty, monitor coastal natural hazards, and use the latest technology for ocean and freshwater mapping. CHS publication products include Canadian tide and current tables, Sailing Directions, Notices to Mariners, critical information for ice navigation, and Canadian aids to the navigation system, among many others.

To remain a relevant and efficient organization, and to support its vision to be a world class authority and supplier of hydrospatial information, CHS had determined that it needs to modernize its approach to service delivery to meet the rapidly evolving needs of its end users and other stakeholders. This will entail a transformation that moves CHS away from an organization based on paper products to a fully digital enterprise. This digital renewal will provide CHS with the capacity to deploy a data-centric service model and cutting-edge digital outputs that align with the demands of current and future users who want and deserve to have access to the most advanced navigational technologies available.

NIVA developed a detailed strategic engagement plan that encourages and motivates staff to become actively involved in the digital transformation process, share insights and perspectives, and directly participate in associated projects. We also developed a communication plan to promote the CHS digital transformation both externally and internally, including effective tools and tactics to successfully implement the communication plan, such as targeted key messages, digital and social media content, articles/columns in appropriate magazines, PowerPoint decks, and customized visuals. NIVA also wrote and designed communication materials and other tools identified in the communication plan including adapted messages, fact sheets, and visual assets that for engaging CHS stakeholders.

The National Collaborating Centre for Indigenous Health (NCCIH) is a national Indigenous organization established in 2005 by the Government of Canada and funded through the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) to support First Nations, Inuit, and Métis public health renewal and health equity through knowledge translation and exchange.

With a long-term service agreement, we are honoured to be their agency of record for design that supports NCCIH in carrying out their mandate through the many key documents and publications they release each year.

To highlight the important and sensitive content of these documents, we work with NCCIH’s team to ensure a strong focus on appropriate and culturally meaningful image selection, as well as developing graphic overlays that align with the interpretation of document themes and recognition for representations of First Nations, Inuit, and Metis peoples.

As part of our long-term service agreement, we are very proud to have been chosen to produce WWF-Canada’s 2020 Annual Report. Our focus was to help the organization better engage with donors, sponsoring and partner organizations, and the public to tell the stories of the incredible results that have been achieved over the past year, and about the major impacts obtained from the generous support they receive.

We were responsible for the full spectrum of requirements from creation of design concepts, image sourcing, formatting, quality assurance, and file optimization.

Special attention was made with image selection to spotlight key species and habitats of concern across the country, the communities that depend on them, as well as making an emotional connection with the audience. The project included the development of an infographic overview to help WWF-Canada highlight key outcomes and promote the report on their social media channels.

Download Report

NIVA is one of Statistics Canada’s partner firms chosen to support the agency’s remarkable commitment to helping Canadians understand important and often complex information derived from the data they collect. We work closely with their communications team to produce infographics and other communications products that reflect information design, data visualization, and data storytelling principles.

For infographics, Statistics Canada’s primary objectives are to quickly communicate key messages, simplify the presentation of large amounts of data, highlight patterns and relationships in the data, and to enable the monitoring of changes over time.

Three examples below (click here to download)

We are honoured to have been chosen to provide communication support services for WWF-Canada, the country’s largest international conservation organization.

Our most recent project was supporting the release of their Living Planet Report Canada 2020 (LPRC2020). This is their flagship report that offers a window into the nation’s ecological health and provides solutions for protecting and conserving wildlife while mitigating climate change.

Our team was tasked with extracting and synthesizing core elements of the main report to develop this 4-page fact sheet. The primary objective here was to engage and inform a broad audience with a clear, understandable, high-level summary surrounded by vivid imagery of appropriate species. A high priority was also placed on highlighting the need to integrate both Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge systems into responsive conservation initiatives and associated actions.

Download LPRC2020 fact sheet

To support the release of the State of the Atlantic report itself, NIVA also developed a series of 11 shareable infographics, designed especially for use with Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s social media channels. These were created to raise awareness and outline key messages in an illustrated format to help the public and other non-scientific audiences quickly understand key information about Canada’s changing Atlantic ecosystems.

Some examples:

Click here to view full infographic series

Click here to download report

NIVA recently developed this comprehensive report for the Government of Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO). The Atlantic Ocean is changing, and the important content of this document will help to shed light on what’s happening above and below the surface – clearly informing Canadians about complex issues while helping to guide decision making for related policies and programs.

Our mandate for the project was comprehensive and included plain language writing and editing, design and layout, data visualization, and illustrations. Our team worked collaboratively with DFO’s scientists, science advisors, and communications professionals to ensure a flawless final product that achieved its objective.

The Environmental Protection Branch of Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) hired NIVA to develop a digital communications strategy and plan for their National Air Quality Program. The main purpose of this exercise was to help them better communicate about the state of air quality in Canada, and about the work that the federal government is doing to improve air quality and protect the health of Canadians. This initiative provided the strategic and tactical direction to enable the Department to implement a new model for digital communications, while building a greater capacity to effectively engage, inform, and motivate their target audiences.

NIVA led a number of activities to provide a foundation for the core strategy document including:

• A communications planning workshop was held to obtain insight from air quality stakeholders representing all relevant federal government departments related to challenges, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, key messages, lessons learned, etc.
• An internal environmental scan was conducted to assess communication activities underway within the federal government that have a focus on air quality, and the communications environment in which these activities are performed. An full inventory of air quality-related websites housed by the federal government was also completed.
• An external environmental scan was conducted to review best practices in air quality communication carried out by provincial/territorial governments in Canada and selected international jurisdictions.
• A case study on a successful federal government air quality communication and engagement initiative was developed to gain insight on methods that have proven to be successful in the past, and to inform part of the way forward in developing this communication strategy.
• A search term trend analysis was conducted to gain insight into the types of internet searches that Canadians are conducting in relation to air quality, how these searches are influenced by interest in other related topics or during important air quality related events (e.g., wildfires), and how much of this search traffic is getting directed to associated ECCC web pages.
• A perception analysis was carried out using public information requests received by ECCC related to air quality as well as the results of relevant public opinion research (POR).