The Challenge

The Northern Land Council (NLC) supports a network of Indigenous ranger groups across the Northern Territory, including Mardbalk, Bulgul, Malak Malak, Garngi, Wardaman, Njanjma and others, each delivering "Caring for Country" programs under a Healthy Country Plan. These programs were strategically planned and monitored in Miradi, a purpose-built conservation project management tool, with field data captured on patrol via SMART (Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool).

The problem: these systems didn't talk to each other. Strategic plans lived in Miradi. Field data lived in SMART. Day-to-day scheduling, resourcing and reporting were in disparate systems. NLC needed a single operational layer that could sit across all of it, usable by rangers in the field and ranger coordinators planning activities, right through to leadership needing clean, board-ready reporting.

The Solution

Agility built and evolved a bespoke Airtable system for NLC that acted as the connective tissue between Miradi, SMART and the ranger groups' daily operations.

Airtable as the operational hub

At the core was a purpose-built Airtable base with dedicated interfaces for planning, scheduling and administration. A Planner interface showed ranger coordinators exactly which Miradi activities were due for scheduling each quarter, cross-referencing what had been completed against what was required. A Calendar interface allowed coordinators to schedule, activate and complete activities with structured lifecycle rules: an activity couldn't move to "Active" without its people, transport, communications and safety requirements confirmed, and couldn't move to "Complete" without post-activity requirements signed off. Colour coding, warning icons and confirmation workflows were added and refined based on how rangers actually worked in practice, right down to how "WHO" was recorded (permanent staff, casuals and Traditional Owners each needed to be tracked differently).

One-way sync from Miradi

Agility designed and built the core Miradi-to-Airtable integration from the ground up, using scheduled API calls against Miradi's endpoints to keep Activities, Strategies, Result Chains, and Resource Assignments current in Airtable. As NLC's needs matured, this expanded significantly: new tables were added for Measurements, Future Statuses, Indicators and Key Ecological Attributes, extending the sync to support a full adaptive-management loop, so ecological monitoring data, not just scheduling data, flowed automatically from Miradi into Airtable and linked back to related activities. The sync itself was refactored multiple times for speed and reliability as the number of ranger groups and records grew, including a staging environment for safely testing sync logic before it touched production data.

SMART Patrols integration

Field patrol data captured in SMART was synced into Airtable and matched against Scheduled Activities, so a ranger coordinator could link the patrols that actually happened on the ground back to what was planned in Miradi, closing the loop between plan, execution and evidence.

Purpose-built reporting

NLC gained a dedicated reporting interface inside Airtable, grouping activities by Result Chain and pulling together Miradi and SMART data alongside status and progress notes, purpose-built for NLC's mid-year and full-year reporting cycles.

Support and continuous improvement

Beyond the initial build, Agility provided ongoing investigation and troubleshooting as NLC's data scaled across more ranger groups, tracking down sync edge cases (activities that changed from zero-duration to non-zero, duplicate records, missing activity metrics), tightening notification logic, and adding safeguards like sync logging and duplicate detection so issues surfaced quickly rather than being discovered by rangers in the field.

The Outcome

NLC ran a single, purpose-built system that reflected how a genuinely unique organisation operated, from national strategic planning in Miradi, through to individual rangers running patrols on country and recording it in SMART, up to leadership reviewing outcomes at a Result Chain level. What had previously required manually reconciling separate platforms became one connected, continuously-synced environment, with an audit trail and lifecycle rules that gave NLC confidence in the data leadership reported on.

The relationship grew from an initial Airtable build into an ongoing technology partnership, with Agility acting as an extension of NLC's team on system architecture, integrations, and day-to-day support across an expanding organisation. 

Xavier Espiau, the Adaptive Management Coordinator at NLC, sums it up nicely:

After 3+ years of working with Shaun and the Agility team, I'd recommend them without hesitation. They bring deep expertise across the tools they work with, but what really sets them apart is how well they listen. Shaun consistently gets to the heart of what we actually need, not just what we asked for, and turns it into something practical. Whenever we've needed help, they've been there. I'd happily recommend Agility to anyone or any organisation wanting to build a dedicated platform or software solution, whether or not they have a technical background. They meet you where you are.