Paddle Australia

Paddle Australia (PA) is seeking comprehensive proposals from qualified digital agencies to design, develop, and implement a modern, highly responsive digital platform that will serve as the foundation of our future online ecosystem.

This project is a critical enabler of Paddle Forward 2032, Paddle Australia's strategic plan to connect, develop, and grow the paddling community across Australia.

Our current digital environment is fragmented, burdened by significant legacy technical debt, inconsistent user experiences, and disconnected customer journeys. As a result, our digital presence does not reflect the ambitions of our organisation or the needs of the diverse paddling communities we serve.

Through this tender, Paddle Australia is seeking a strategic digital partner to help remove these barriers and transform our online presence into a unified, intuitive, secure, and scalable platform. The successful solution will provide a seamless experience for our existing members while reducing barriers to entry for new participants and enabling us to attract, engage, and retain a substantial untapped market of recreational, casual, and lifestyle paddlers.

The platform should support Paddle Australia's vision of becoming the central digital destination for paddlesports in Australia, creating stronger connections between participants, clubs, events, education, experiences, and the broader paddling community.

Paddle Australia currently maintains a contractual relationship with EngageRM for the delivery of an offers and experiences platform - Paddle Connect - due to launch later this year. Paddle Connect forms part of our broader digital strategy as a destination for paddlesport experiences and opportunities. The redevelopment of Paddle Connect is explicitly excluded from the scope of this tender. However, respondents must ensure that the proposed solution maintains the integrity of existing domain configurations and enables appropriate integration and coexistence with Paddle Connect within the broader digital ecosystem.

Improve user accessibility and experience: Deliver a clean, vibrant, mobile-first interface, aligned to our new brand guidelines, designed entirely around customer personas and defined customer journeys - to ensure users find what they need on their first attempt. It should have intuitive navigation, fast page loading, robust searchability, maximum data security, and comprehensive search engine optimisation.

Increase the number of people Paddle Australia have ongoing engagement with: A platform that will support Paddle Australia to increase the number of participants it has an active engagement with - both through traditional membership i.e. club and non-traditional i.e. lifestyle engagement.

Create Australia's most comprehensive and intuitive paddle discovery platform: A unified national "Paddle Finder" that seamlessly connects people with clubs, accredited operators, waterways, events, disciplines, and participation opportunities across the country. This will serve as the primary entry point into the Paddle Australia ecosystem, enabling users to easily discover how, where, and why to get involved in paddling based on their location, interests, skill level, and participation goals.

Individualised dashboard for athletes in PA's High Performance program: Restricted access for nominated athletes to access dashboards, data, reports and other information with the potential to access data via API and integration to PowerBI.

Consolidate the Ecosystem and reduce subsites: Replace the out of date club websites with unified, standardised landing pages (one per club) that are approached by the "Paddle Finder". Review bespoke education services to inform discussion regarding whether these are in or out of scope.

Establish a single source of truth: Implement a highly functional, centralised document library with strict version control to host critical regulatory, integrity, and operational policies, completely preventing outdated legacy information from persisting online.

Celebrate all our disciplines: Provide a news section with filtering and sorting options - allowing landing pages for news to be viewed, without the need for everything to go via our home page. The current platform functions primarily as a dense, news site. A "spider's web" that turns away new participants.

Enhance self-service and support administrative tasks: Considered, time-saving customer service layers (including automated tools like chatbots) to address routine public enquiries and alleviate manual pressure on state and club volunteers.

Events and Calendar: Provide an interactive and searchable event calendar with registration/and ticketing links, and associated documents.

Note: We would like to provide the opportunity for our State Associations to sit within this ecosystem should they wish. Currently some State Associations have their own websites on our domain.

Our intention is to cease support for club sites on our domain, so we are seeking to either facilitate offboarding (support for exporting content and decommissioning) or handing over sites in isolation for clubs to support with their own hosting and domain solutions.

JustGo is our current Membership Management System. We intend to remain with JustGo for this element of the ecosystem. JustGo's published API is available to support objectives such as event calendars, club information and club or coach finders.

Discovery and Strategy

• Stakeholder Engagement and Workshops: Conduct an insight phase with key stakeholders to align on requirements and priorities.
• Persona and User Journey Development: Define and map distinct digital pathways for target personas, balancing the needs of existing and prospective participants, and charting the journey from interest to active engagement.
• Architecture Review: Paddle Australia has commissioned a current-state mapping of its architecture and systems. The appointed agency must include a review of this work within their discovery scope.

UX/UI Design

• Brochure-Style Layout: Create wireframes and responsive prototypes that prioritise high-impact imagery and video, experiential content, and clear calls to action over dense text.
• Standardised Component System: Design a uniform layout system for club profiles using clear, nationally recognised icons to signify specific demographics (juniors, beginners, seniors) and active disciplines (e.g., paracanoe, sprint, marathon).

Front-End and Back-End Development

• PaddleFinder Engine: Build a prominent, mobile-friendly activity, provider, club, and operator locator tool linking to club profile pages. Include a centralised digital waterways mapping interface as part of the PaddleFinder.
• Results and Competition Display: Design a gateway linking seamlessly to external scoring and ranking systems (such as Webscorer and Regattas) to ensure visitors can find results directly.
• Media library capability: Also scope historic media items.

Content and Copywriting

• Content Strategy: Deliver a clear content management framework to guide ongoing editorial governance.
• Zero-Based Content Development: Draft and publish new, concise web copy from scratch to guarantee tone consistency, searchability, and brand compliance. Direct bulk migration of existing content will be avoided due to legacy corruption and technical clutter.
• Asset Optimisation: Compress and structure high-quality visual imagery to support fast loading speeds across mobile connections.
• News: Also scope new history and what we will migrate.

Core Integrations and Functional Workflows

• Software Ecosystem: Ensure seamless data synchronisation with JustGo (membership management system) and other required platforms.
• AI Chatbot Service Layer (ideally Zendesk): Configure and deploy an interactive customer service chatbot with automated logic to resolve routine enquiries regarding club contact details, safety documentation, policies, and similar.
• Online payments: Streamlined payment collection for webinars and educational course fees - dependent on scope of educational platform being in or out of scope.
• Data Privacy and Analytics Framework: Integrate legal user opt-in mechanisms within sign-up and interaction pathways to securely capture non-member data. Establish Google Analytics properties to track engagement metrics and validate marketing return on investment.

Testing and Quality Assurance

• Comprehensive Testing: Execute rigorous functional, cross-browser, and device-compatibility testing.
• Accessibility Compliance: The delivered platform must meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards as a minimum requirement. Vendors are encouraged to propose WCAG 2.2 AA compliance where feasible.
• Recorded Usability Testing Sessions: Record and evaluate structured testing sessions with key stakeholders to identify and resolve navigational friction points prior to deployment.

Training and Support

• CMS Training: Deliver intuitive documentation, user guides, and practical training workshops enabling non-technical administrative staff to confidently maintain content.
• Technical Support Retainer: Provide itemised Service Level Agreement (SLA) options for ongoing security patching, software updates, and platform evolution across a 4-year lifecycle.

Club Landing Pages - Scope Clarification

The replacement of the club website with a standardised landing page for each club represents a significant component of this project. Note: Paddle Australia holds much of the relevant club data in JustGo.

• CMS Flexibility: Paddle Australia currently operates on WordPress multisite infrastructure. Vendors are strongly encouraged to propose the technology stack (whether WordPress or an alternative CMS) that best balances security, performance, and ease of use for non-technical staff. Our international federation, the International Canoe Federation (ICF) is developing their platform on PayLoad. PayLoad technology should be considered as it may allow us to access content from their website (for example results and rankings) - removing duplication.
• Microsoft 365 Integration: Paddle Australia is migrating its entire operational environment to Microsoft 365 and OneDrive (from Google Workspace). The platform must support compatibility for secure data integration, embedding Microsoft Forms, and linking to cloud storage pipelines.
• Data Sovereignty: To comply with Australian Privacy Act requirements and state sporting body mandates, all hosting environments, backup servers, and user databases must be located within Australia.
• Hosting and Infrastructure: Proposals should specify the recommended hosting environment (cloud vs. dedicated), expected capacity to handle anticipated traffic volumes, and whether disaster recovery or failover infrastructure is included or available as an option.
• Scalability: The platform must be architected for continuous development and long-term scalability. Scope and development architecture should explicitly account for future growth.

• Integrated project plan detailing timelines, risk matrices, and explicit resource allocations.
• Stakeholder insight summary report and formally approved customer persona maps.
• Finalised information architecture scheme, sitemap, and user navigation blueprints.
• Mobile and desktop UX/UI design assets and functional prototypes.
• A fully deployed, production-ready website built from scratch, containing operational PaddleFinder mapping including integration.
• Verified, secure API integrations where required.
• Comprehensive privacy and security audit report confirming local Australian data storage compliance.
• Complete set of technical documentation, system architecture maps, and internal user training guides.
• Delivered training sessions for internal content managers.

2 months design, 2 months dev etc

Please provide separate, itemised pricing for:

• Core website design and development
• PaddleFinder mapping engine build
• Interactive and searchable event calendar integrated to our membership and events system
• Club Finder with geolocation integrated to our membership and events system
• Content strategy and zero-based copywriting
• Integrations (JustGo, Microsoft 365, analytics, chatbot, Paddle Connect??)
• Testing, accessibility compliance, and quality assurance
• Training and handover
• Ongoing retainer / SLA options (annual, per year for up to four years)
• State Association ecosystem inclusion (optional, separately priced module)
• Decommissioning or handing over club sites (priced per site)