Exco Partners is an Australian Management Consulting firm expert in delivering transformative change solutions and providing advisory services to enterprise businesses. Exco Partners brings together a powerful mix of experience, creativity, and engineering, with a purpose to assist customers with smart, effective execution of digital and transformative change.

The National Centre for Farmer Health (NCFH) is an organisation focused on the education, research and innovation into health, wellbeing and safety of farmers and rural communities.

Based in regional Victoria, the NCFH is unique in delivering specialised multidisciplinary, integrated agricultural health services, research, training and education direct to farmers and rural (health, agriculture, policy) professionals. With farms accounting for 23% of worker fatalities in Australia, the NCFH provides an important role for regional communities.

The NCFH engaged Exco Partners to find better ways to engage with “hard to reach” regional community groups, build awareness of farming hazards, and create a sustained and long-term and positive impact on regional communities.

The NCFH has built an incredible asset of information, research, and data on farming health during its journey. This asset has created an amazing opportunity to make a positive difference to the health, wellbeing, and safety of farming and regional communities, yet a challenge remained:

• How can these community groups be better engaged to build awareness of farming hazards and create a sustained, long-term, and positive impact?
• How can the information, research and data be best presented in a way the is consumable, discoverable and in a medium that is useful to the community to utilise?

Exco Partners, in collaboration with NCFH established a project with the following objectives:

• Enable further reach and engagement with the clinical, educational, research and farming communities
• Develop new ways to create a long-term connection with the above user groups
• Increase the awareness of the NCFH and the hazards present in farming
• Increase the NCFH ability to contribute to the positive health, wellbeing and safety, of farming and regional communities across Australia and internationally.

Exco Partners initiated the project focusing on customer research, stakeholder engagement, visual design, and planning. Exco Partner used a “Human-Centred Design” approach as the centrepiece of initial discovery activities, focusing initially on a heuristic review of existing data and user research.

Through the insight gained from the research, two distinct streams of work emerged, which were successfully delivered by Exco Partners:

1. A Farmer Health Website, focusing on the awareness, engagement, discoverability and accessibility of health, wellbeing and safety information, and research to better represent the NCFH’s value and contribution to the community,
2. The development of an innovative health and wellbeing self-assessment App as a way to create a longer, more sustained method of engagement with farming and regional communities.