Our Community Projects: The Dnipro Botanical Garden

From the start, Go Wombat has cared about the well-being of its team.

As we grew and had more budget, we decided to extend this to our local communities.

Instead of spending the extra revenue on fashionable offices, we chose to invest in things we consider important, such as our ecological projects.

Laying the groundwork

We tried several directions before deciding where our skills, expertise and connections could help most.

This became a series of local ecological projects. The founders were interested in ecology and wanted the whole company to take part.

This post is about one of them: our work with the Oles Honchar Dnipro National University Botanical Garden.

The planting of an idea

Although our CIO Mike Ivanov can’t remember exactly what brought our attention originally to the garden, he says it probably came as the result of some of the business trips taken by him and our CEO Volodymyr Sokolovskyi.

They found themselves impressed by botanical gardens in other cities, comparing the states of those with that of their hometown.

This led to making little donations to our local Botanical Garden in Dnipro.

After a while, our company became close friends with the people who worked there and who were responsible for the things we donated to them.

Providing basic supplies

Finding out how we could contribute started simply by talking to them. We asked them what the most crucial things were and how we could help at that moment.

Very few other people or organisations help the Garden.

So, most of the things we bought at first were real necessities – routine things, not things even particularly interesting to us as an IT company. For example, at some point, they needed some cable wiring. Then we bought electrical heaters.

Not every donation that can make a difference is ‘Instagrammable’. Once they were raising money for a wood chipper – a very ordinary thing. We just silently gave them money so they could buy it.

Digging deeper

As we got more and more acquainted, we better understood where we could help.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t take over as their main sponsors or sources of help. We couldn’t pay their workers’ salaries, and we couldn’t pay the bills.

What we could do was make the Garden more visible and accessible to the local community, in the hope that some people and organisations would eventually support it too.

Branching out to the rest of the company

We also started involving the team, as team building with a purpose. Working together on something useful brings people closer.

For example, Go Wombat placed a small insect sanctuary in the garden that we dubbed a ‘bug hotel’. It was assembled by hand by almost everyone in the office. Our employees physically built it and then transferred it to the Garden. (Note: we’ve since also put another bug hotel in a public space in Ivano-Frankivsk.)

These things become a milestone for the company, and people remember them: how we did it, who did what, and how we got there.

“Not to put down company parties too much, but people remember these things more than the parties,” says Mike Ivanov.

Sowing seeds

Even more, when we visit the Gardens, we go with our families, so it draws what Mike calls “some kind of ‘bigger circle’ around the whole company.” And these ideas get transferred to their relatives and their friends.

Spreading the word costs us little and reaches people well beyond the company.

Later we decided that our next step should raise awareness of the Garden itself. That is where the idea of a web platform came from.

So we invested not only our money but our time and expertise in the infrastructure of the Botanical Garden, both physical and digital.

Building a platform for the Gardens

Developers, project managers, designers and writers all took part. We also did a business analysis, treating the initiative as a full-cycle project.

Applying business analysis

The Garden is not a commercial business, but it has its own operations. We needed to understand them, decide what the website should cover and plan the iterations.

We completed a Discovery Phase, including solutions architecture. The team created wireframes and designs, both for the website and place for the QR code.

The templates can be reused as modules for similar projects in future.

Development

The first iteration took half a year, but it involved developers who were between projects and people who volunteered their time. At different times, we had about 10 people working on it.

Digitisation of the plant archives

During this process, the specialists at the Garden were inspired to take the initiative to create a database of their plant inventory. Previously, this information wasn’t readily available to visitors. It was all old-school, library-card style.

They had to search through physical archives to find information such as when a certain tree was planted and where it grows. This data was not structured and was scattered across different places.

The Garden's specialists did a lot of this work themselves. The database strengthens the Garden's role in science education: a student can now prepare before a visit and come with the right questions.

Everything we currently have available is on the website, but we only covered about 10% of the plants that they have. We will continue this work in the next iteration (as budget and time allow it).

Making it easier to connect

As the Dnipro Botanical Garden is a member of an international botanical garden organisation (participating in seed sharing, etc.), sometimes they receive donations from them. With this web platform, we hope to make it easier for them to connect, sending links like “Look these are our activities, this is what we do, this is what we already did in our botanical garden”.

Showing the results of their work should help the Garden stand out among its peers.

The first iteration

As a result of our work, the Botanical Garden now benefits from:

• A new design that can be reused in future projects
• A website where visitors can find information about facilities, plants and the latest news.
• A navigation system, with a welcome stand to orient visitors and signs identifying plants throughout the grounds.
• Stands with QR codes that visitors can scan with their smartphones to get more information about plants.
• Bicycle parking near the administrative building.

Feedback

We don’t have hard data yet, but from observation, people come to the Garden every day and are using the QR codes.

Speaking of data: we will add a dashboard in order to keep track of the exact numbers and get more precise feedback in a future iteration.

The revamp also received local press coverage, and some local bloggers posted about it on social media.

A footprint on our culture

Somewhere along the way, we understood that initiatives like this help us in terms of marketing. We had never looked at it from this perspective. Our initial intention was not what is commonly referred to these days in business as ‘greenwashing’.

But we began to realise that as new people came to us, they said they’d been following our Instagram and actually decided to go with our company because they liked what Go Wombat does. We were a bit surprised, but we came to understand that this is the way things are, so “let’s go with it.”

Some of our employees visited the Garden for the first time through these projects, and it changed how they see it.

Projects like this are part of what defines our culture at Go Wombat.

The ongoing effort

We also use our marketing channels to spread the word about these projects, not to promote ourselves but because the projects need help.

Challenges

Places like the Botanical Garden need substantial financing – these are big institutions.

We use our influence as we can in any particular situation. We gave as much as we could before the war. But now, much of the budget goes towards supporting those efforts.

And even worse, in the foreseeable future, state and local governments won’t have the funds to spend on these types of projects either.

Partners in the work

One of the important things we want to add to the next iteration is a section on the website called “Partnership” so that individuals and companies can participate under different models (e.g. personal, friendship, partnership).

There are also obstacles here, and we have to find out how to overcome them. For instance, as it’s part of the university, a special foundation would have to be created for them so that they can receive donations.

The Garden is also a scientific institution, and it matters for the country's future scientific development.

So, continued and broader support is imperative. As Ivanov warns, “Once organisations like this disappear, it’s very hard to restore them.”