Yarra Valley Water

The challenge

Multicultural communication at YVW had grown organically. Individual teams were doing their best, drawing on instinct and what had worked before, but there was no shared reference point pulling it all together. That created a clear opportunity, to bring some structure and cadence to the work so good practice in one part of the business could travel to every other part.

Staff cared about getting this right. Across the organisation, people had already found practical ways to connect with multicultural customers, including translated door cards, support from bilingual team members, social content in languages other than English. What YVW needed was a common framework to bring these efforts together, backed by practical tools and a clearer sense of when and how to use them. Leadership also wanted to build the case for future investment on evidence rather than instinct, so proving what worked mattered as much as designing it.

The insight

Early evidence review and direct community and employee consultation pointed to something more specific than a translation gap. YVW's existing translated materials, such as its door cards and in-language social content, were generally well regarded. The deeper opportunity sat with trust, discoverability and consistency. Multicultural customers often didn't know support existed, couldn't easily find it when it did, and experienced YVW differently depending on which team or channel they happened to encounter.

Community members and staff both pointed to the same missing piece, trusted intermediaries and relationships built before a service need arose. The opportunity for the framework wasn't to produce more translation, but to build the shared judgement, tools and community relationships that helped every part of YVW know when, how and through whom to communicate, and to give staff the confidence to act on that judgement consistently.

The strategic approach

We ran the engagement as a Double Diamond process across four phases (Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver), layering Equity-Centred Community Design principles throughout. The work stayed close to real voices at every stage rather than relying on desk research alone.

A Community Advisory Group of 6 community leaders, representing communities from across YVW's service area, met over 3 sessions to share lived experience, challenge emerging framework thinking and stress-test tools for cultural safety and usability before delivery. Alongside this, stakeholder interviews were held across YVW's business, from the contact centre and marketing teams through to emergency communications and customer insights, to surface gaps and opportunities.

That evidence base, combined with a literature review and analysis of YVW's own customer perception data, shaped every part of the framework and the practical tools built beneath it.  These ranged from a shared model for translation decision-making through to the KPI scorecard used to track progress against a defined theory of change.