From Invisible to Front and Centre: How iHemp NSW Found Its Voice

A year ago, iHemp NSW, the peak body representing the hemp industry in New South Wales, was, in a lot of practical ways, invisible. Not because the people in it weren’t doing good work, but because none of that work had anywhere to land. No searchable website, no consistent admin system, no video presence, no real read on whether anyone outside the committee even knew the organisation existed.

A year on, it’s a different organisation. The contribution from all volunteer executive committee members is astounding. People that really believe in what hemp can do and contribute their expertise and time.

Here’s how Environmentarian contributed, and why the process mattered as much as the result.

Assessment

The starting point wasn’t a plan, it was a look around. What existed, what didn’t, what was quietly costing the org time and credibility every week. Meetings in the weeds with no actions. A website that was hard to find and harder to navigate and had no funnel from newsletter sign up to contributing member. No video presence at all, in an industry that increasingly lives on video. It’s a pretty unglamorous first step, but it’s the one that actually tells you what to build next, what bit of work will have the biggest ROI and what larger bit of work around system design so that the org could scale.

Data collection

From there, it became about actually measuring things instead of assuming them. Google Search Console tracking got switched on, and the numbers have told a clear story since: the site crossed 40 clicks in 28 days back in December 2025, then climbed steadily through the new year — 60, then 80, then 100 by March — and sat at 150 clicks in the most recent 28-day window, with 170 tracking toward a 180 milestone now. That’s roughly a 4x lift in Google Search visibility over the year, which for a volunteer-run industry body with no marketing budget is a meaningful shift from where it started.

Newsletter sign-ups told a similar story. A slow trickle before the rebuild, then a sharp climb from January onward, peaking in March. Numbers like these are what let you tell if changes are actually working, rather than just feeling like they should be.

UX and structure

None of that growth happens if people land on the site and can’t find anything. A big chunk of the work went into just making the thing usable. Simplifying navigation, cleaning up the menu structure, making it obvious where to sign up, where to find resources, where the news actually lives. Boring work, but it’s probably the single biggest lever behind the newsletter growth.

Behind the scenes, the admin side got the same treatment.

A free Gmail account was set up as a shared iHemp admin inbox, and it’s quietly become the backbone of a lot of day-to-day running. It handles scheduling for meetings and events, it’s a place for data and files to actually live, and it makes logging into platforms like YouTube and various AI tools far simpler than juggling personal accounts. Emails, sign-ups, logins, all of it now sits at an iHemp level rather than scattered across individual committee members’ personal accounts. It sounds like a small thing, but it’s removed a lot of the friction that used to eat into meeting time, and it’s the beginnings of real succession planning, the organisation’s systems no longer live in any one person’s head or inbox.

There’s also been an ongoing stream of suggestions around budgets, governance, and organisational structure, not flashy, but the kind of groundwork that lets a volunteer committee actually function like an organisation rather than an online group chat with an endless stream of emails threads that grow and grow without actions.

Branding and Visual Identity

Before any of the website work made sense, the branding needed sorting. What existed was scattered, roughly ten different shades of green in use across different materials, a pixelated logo, no consistent font family, and graphics that didn’t match the logo at all. It’s a common thing for volunteer-run organisations to end up with, since branding tends to get built piecemeal by whoever’s available at the time, not as one deliberate decision.

Once the branding board was approved, it fed into everything downstream. The website design, the digital assets built for webinar promotion, the newsletter template, and updated email signatures. The icon in particular still does a lot of quiet work: its design means it can serve as the profile image across every login, the colours picked from it now run through the design system, and it gets adapted into graphic elements wherever they’re needed.

Building a media presence

A YouTube channel didn’t exist for iHemp NSW before this year. It does now, with three recorded full webinars produced into podcast style videos and vertical cut-downs ready to roll out. Content that can work both as long-form education and as short, shareable clips.

The webinar programme itself has been a good example of the “test, learn, adapt” approach running through all of this. The first one focused on hemp building. The learnings from that fed directly into the next, run with Colin and Witold, ticketed through Humanitix, which turned into a genuinely successful pilot that generated income for the organisation. That step-by-step process, where each event improves on the last instead of starting from scratch, is now the model being adapted for the webinars ahead.

Reflection

None of this was one big move. It was assessment, then measurement, then fixing the parts that were actually broken, then building new capability once the foundations held. It’s the kind of growth that doesn’t show up as a single headline number, but shows up everywhere at once. In click numbers, in sign-ups, in smoother meetings, in a paid webinar that worked.

Growth, growth, growth

An organisation that was close to invisible a year ago now has a searchable web presence climbing steadily in Google’s own metrics, a video library building out on YouTube, a proven paid-event format ready to repeat, and internal systems that mean none of it depends on one person remembering everything. That’s not the finish line, there’s more to build, but it’s a different organisation from when Jeremy was drawn in as secretary in September last year, to how it looks this this year, and it’s a strong base to keep growing from.