Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium
Building a digital ecosystem for a complex institution with a critical mission.
When one of Florida’s most-visited aquariums needed a website capable of serving researchers, educators, donors, members, and families simultaneously, it turned to Big Sea. Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium began with one person’s passion for marine conservation. In 1955, “Shark Lady” Dr. Eugenie Clark founded a one-room marine lab. That endeavor grew over time to what Mote is now—an organization with global impact on marine life and habitats. Today, Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium is home to the best and brightest scientists, educators, and stewards committed to thriving marine ecosystems.
So much more than an aquarium, Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium welcomes more than 350,000 visitors a year while developing science-based solutions to urgent problems. The renowned team at Mote saves marine wildlife, restores critical ecosystems, helps coastal communities preserve their quality of life, and more.
In 2014, Big Sea began working with Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium to grow their digital presence. Our story entered another chapter in 2020 when we began the discovery work needed not only to re-platform Mote’s website but also to bring the functionality up to speed with Mote’s research and educational needs. Over the span of almost four years, we collaborated with Mote’s teams to develop the tools they needed to continue their incredible work and expand their institution.
The Objectives
Aquarium website design built for research, revenue, and mission
- Strategize, reorganize, and migrate hundreds of pages of content, balancing the needs of researchers, visitors, students, educators, families, and donors
- Design a new museum website showcasing Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium’s incredible research and facilities, while ensuring that information remains easy to find for all core audiences
- Develop on WordPress using a complex, modular design system, making the website a responsive, multifunctional, SEO-friendly tool useful for multiple stakeholders
- Integrate the Terentia DAM assets into a seamless front-end user experience, enabling easy content management across hundreds of team members
- Support fundraising and membership acquisition by building donor and member pathways into the website architecture from the start, not as an afterthought
The Problem
The challenge of nonprofit website design at scale
Balancing user and end-user needs
Brilliant people keep Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium running smoothly. Every individual does important work. It was our job to get those folks around the table to express their individual needs. From there, we worked to create balance and purpose, ensuring that every visual component and back-end feature was built with intentionality, honoring the needs of disparate audiences.
Ticketing, DAM, and CRM integration for a complex institution
Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium’s website is as much a tool as an information hub. When Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium selected Terentia as their digital asset management platform, our development team worked directly with theirs to ensure seamless integration. We also implemented a new ticketing system, helping Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium move onto a platform that better met their needs.
The Strategy
Discovery-first: how nonprofit website strategy works
The scope and scale of this project required more than a year of R&D before project planning. Before so much as a single sketch was made, we hosted multiple workshops with Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium’s web team, as well as their broader stakeholder team. We engaged with donors, members, parents, and even volunteers. At the same time, our team analyzed website performance, examined website UX, and audited content.
In collaboration, we mapped user journeys and clearly defined the organization’s needs and those of its various users and use cases. This intensive discovery phase allowed us to make informed recommendations for the sitemap and navigation and to build out the remainder of the project with confidence in our agreed-upon approach.
The Strategy
Scalable museum website design built for nonprofit content governance
Flexible, human-centered design
Many cultural and scientific organizations struggle with long-term online content governance. We designed website templates that enable website admins to build and organize new features while adhering to a content governance system. This provided a scalable, sustainable solution for further content generation down the road.
Engaging visuals
Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium’s new museum website spotlights the beauty of marine life and aquatic ecosystems, exciting visitors and encouraging engagement with its many initiatives. Dynamic design and compelling visuals make the museum website a fun place for students and enthusiasts as well as a resource for scholars.
Big Sea helped our complex institution create a website that is clean and easy to navigate without diminishing the richness of our mission and identity. That’s an incredible balancing act!
Hayley RutgerContent Development Manager, MOTE
The Results
A robust ecosystem
Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium now has an aquarium website built to grow with the institution, managing content across hundreds of team members, serving distinct audiences from research scientists to first-time visitors, and supporting both earned revenue and philanthropic goals within a single, coherent digital experience. Now that Mote has expanded with Mote SEA, they have a flexible platform designed to scale without a full rebuild.
