Record-Breaking Fundraising with Children in Need’s New Platform

Problems We Had To Solve

1. Children in Need wanted to optimise the tools they provided to the public to help them with fundraising
2. However, they had no data on what activities were most effective, and where to focus their efforts

The Plan

1. Run a workshop with the CiN board on how to think like a start-up
2. Rebuild the CiN fundraising platform to put attribution and measurement at its core - giving their team the data they needed
3. Update and iterate based on previous dataI hope you all know that we wouldn’t have made another record-breaking total without you. Fact.

The Challenges

1. Lack of data to make decisions
2. High traffic, high stakes - the fundraising platform can’t go down the week before the event!
3. Tough security and compliance requirements from the BBC digital team

What We Did

1. Got buy in on a multi-year, iterative process where we would gather data which would be used to both update the site and focus their engagement teams efforts
2. Going beyond best practice, load testing, penetration testing and duplicate setups with two cloud providers to quickly recover from a disaster
3. Transparency and open engagement with the security team - they were kept in the loop throughout planning and we were the first third party to get direct access to the BBC hosting infrastructure
4. Ultimately, after three great years we handed over to the BBC’s internal team

Technologies Utilised

• .Net back end
• Angular front end
• AWS infrastructure (including Elastik Beanstalk)
• MS Azure infrastructure

Results

• Two Years of Record Fundraising
• Strong Three Year Partnership