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June 25, 2025

Mingan Island Cetacean Study

Research and Education for the Conservation of Baleen Whales

Mingan Island Cetacean Study (MICS) is a non-profit, charitable research organization based in both Canada and the United States, dedicated to ecological studies of marine mammals and marine ecosystems. Founded in 1979 by Richard Sears, MICS was the first organization to carry out long-term research of cetaceans in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and first to carry out long-term studies of the endangered Blue Whale. The principal study areas include the Quebec North Shore in the Mingan Island / Anticosti region, the Gaspe Peninsula and St. Lawrence Estuary.

Three whales surfacing and spouting water in calm ocean waters.

The Challenge

After having a website built over 8 years ago (see previous writeup), MICS wanted to bring it up to date, and start using some of the new tools available. Some of these include: 

  • a full text search to find relevant information
  • ability to categorize publications and find content in a variety of ways
  • ability to click to corresponding French / English page
  • an easier-to-use and more affordable payment system
  • ability to more easily manage tour bookings

Also, they wanted to have a more intuitive navigation after years of adding different types of pages to the website. 

Breaching Humpback

The Solution

Northern Village created an upgraded version of the website using the new Niiwin platform that included many of the features that MICS was looking for, including full text search and categorization. Page translation was enabled by linking pages, with a fallback of parent pages if a direct translation did not exist. MICS staff was responsible for moving the content over to the new website with support from Northern Village, to make the project more affordable.

For the payment system, we set up Zeffy, a membership platform with a unique model that allows 100% of the membership fees and donations to be kept by the organization while not charging anything for the software.

For booking whale tours, we set up a Formstack form with a Google sheets integration. A user can select the dates and type of tour they desire, sign a liability waiver and the form is submitted to a Google Sheet. Also, it is set up in such a way that the spreadsheet is ordered by tour date, to make sure that none of the entries will be missed, and a better sense of how many people are interested in travelling each day. 

The website was upgraded and launched in time for their new season.