How WWF Cities scaled feedback collection with Typeform

WWF Cities launched their “We Love Cities” initiative over 10 years ago to gather citizen feedback on climate action. They wanted to collect opinions and insights to help cities connect with their citizens on their climate-related action plans.

Approaching the initiative with optimism, they built a custom website from scratch—complete with a survey for collecting feedback. 

What began as the perfect platform to connect with communities and gather insights soon grew into a bigger challenge. As more cities joined, the initial solution became unable to handle the volume of feedback that began to come in.

“When we first started ‘We Love Cities'…it was a very new idea,” explains Yoshi Funaki, Global Communications Manager at WWF Cities. “We were initially working with just a handful of cities because we only wanted to work with ones that had done well in their climate action plans.”  By 2022, they were working with sixty cities, with numbers increasing to over seventy in 2024. As the project kept growing, the team realized they needed a more efficient way to collect and analyze feedback.

Scaling feedback collection

The WWF Cities team faced a growing challenge—managing a 300% increase in the volume of feedback. The website, originally designed to handle a modest number of cities and responses, soon became outdated and clunky. Managing the data out of a single Excel file became increasingly difficult, and analyzing or segmenting the data for individualized city reports was almost impossible.

Growing pains

Organizing the data was too time-consuming with the old system. Yoshi and the team also needed to overhaul the website to better engage the public, as well as reflect recent updates to the We Love Cities branding. They decided that the built-in feedback tool would no longer cut it. And so began their search for a smarter survey tool.

‍“We wanted a platform that could reflect the design, style, and the tone we were using,” Yoshi tells us. “And we also wanted something where the transitions between the questions would look professional.”

To make things more complex, the project had to support multiple languages. Managing separate folders and forms for each city in different languages required major effort. With only one and a half team members dedicated to this, resources were stretched thin. 

Forming a new solution

The introduction of Typeform marked a turning point for the campaign. After exploring a variety of tools, they found what they needed with Typeform.

“We particularly loved the almost animated feel to the transition between questions. It just gave that extra element of a very smooth delivery that made it feel really professional,” Yoshi told us.

Typeform's user-friendly design, as well as the ability to embed forms directly into the city profiles on the website, made it much easier for citizens to share their thoughts and feedback. 

Thanks to the brand kit feature, the forms were personalized and branded, which helped them easily add We Love Cities branding across all of their forms. This helped reduce the barrier to participation, as well as encourage a wider range of voices to contribute. Participation from various age groups, including both younger and older citizens, helped enrich the data and provide valuable insights for city planners and other stakeholders who were sent the results.

Making a difference

The impact of these changes has been transformative. With Typeform, WWF Cities not only gathers a diverse range of feedback and perspectives, it also provides a more detailed analysis of the results. The outcome? More inclusive and effective campaigns.

“It changed the way in which we were getting the data to the cities and how we were helping them see the patterns and data,” Yoshi shares.

They can now easily share a report generated from Typeform’s Results summary, allowing each city to dive into their own data with a handy overview.

Typeform’s introduction of multi-language forms was also a game-changer for the team. Instead of having to manually translate over 70 forms, they could use the multi-language form feature and let Typeform do all the work. 

The ability to handle multiple languages and the seamless integration with their existing platforms were crucial improvements that addressed many of the pain points they had experienced in the past.

Of course, we can’t underestimate the value of the data itself and the information and insights that it can uncover. When we asked Yoshi what she learned from survey participants, she said the one thing that really stood out to her was the range of interest in climate change.

Q:  “What's one thing that you've learned from survey participants that you didn't know before?”

Yoshi:  “I think the range of interest in climate isn't just young people. I always find it really gratifying when I'm looking at the results to see that there are people in their 80s down to people in their teens all engaging in this. There's a lot more engagement than you would imagine, given how depressing sometimes the news can be.”

Learn more about using Typeform for feedback collection and analysis in this handy guide.