Australian Red Cross

Optimizely Commerce Cloud described as ''4-in-1'' ecommerce platform

To help define the best solution for both the stakeholders and the staff at the Red Cross, Optimizely and the client’s preferred Optimizely partner LEVO went on a discovery mission to define and point the extended Australian Red Cross family in the right direction through a series of workshops aligning priorities for the organisation.

COVID lockdown arrived at the start of the discovery phase changing the course of what Australian Red Cross wanted to achieve. The team were only able to facilitate one face-to-face workshop before everything moved online. Australian Red Cross generates 98% of its shopping revenue from 180 bricks-and-mortar shops selling pre-loved items. With lockdown and social distancing restrictions, it suddenly became clear that making an online premier destination for the shopper was more important than ever. To do this, Optimizely and the LEVO team needed to create a bespoke e-commerce platform, launched in time for Christmas. The platform of choice was Optimizely Commerce Cloud.

Optimizely Commerce Cloud enables the charitable organization to get a better understanding of monetary contributions from visitors that span across, donations, retail purchases and other payment transfers. Australian Red Cross have this one instance to easily manage this aspect of operations as well as their content with Optimizely's best-in-class CMS capabilities. This strong collaboration of Commerce and Content makes a more efficient and effective use case for the Red Cross, especially when every dollar needs to be put to work to gain value. 

Opting for a new DXP marks a significant digital culture change for the nonprofit as they invest in a new, more engaging way of interacting with its community. Not only does the technology make for better visitor insight, it also creates momentum and drives future innovation.

The final key element of MyRedCross was to produce a 360 degree view of the stakeholder. Allowing stakeholders to access a single portal and observe how they interact with the website all in one place. From the charity’s viewpoint, unifying the digital experience by recognising that a single stakeholder may have several different identities (for example, volunteer, shopper, donor) when interacting digitally with the Red Cross was a key goal. Completing this final piece of the solution would then create a self-service, personalised portal that would seamlessly engage with multiple identities.

While the long-term benefits of MyRedCross will be realised over time as ease of engagement and positive user experience deepens stakeholder experience, efficiency gains are already being seen. Consolidating back-end data processes in a secure infrastructure and automating a range of administrative functions such as volunteer on-boarding have sped up processes freeing manual resources to focus on other more valuable activities. The Red Cross has seen some obvious quick win benefits by moving to a platform-as-a-service, noting that four channels have now been consolidated into one. With the support and experience of LEVO, Australian Red Cross streamlined 4 separate ecomm platforms into one, central platform. The Optimizely Commerce Cloud enables intuitive purchasing experiences that intelligently guides the visitor along. Australian Red Cross are at the forefront of digital change with standout features including Product Recommendations which was completely unthinkable in the lead-up to the project. The advent of AI, plus the new capability of selling digitally demonstrates the appetite, shift and ambition of Australia Red Cross, future proofing their commitment to its community.

The speed of implementation of the entire project has made the organisation see what’s possible and increased the appetite for even more participation and innovation going forward. Cale Maxwell, COO of LEVO shares, ''Optimizely allowed us to deploy and be operational fast. This speed helped us to create momentum internally which further accelerated the project. We are immensely proud of what we could achieve for Australian Red Cross and its humanitarians in such a short space of time and look forward to continuing to expand this story.''

The Optimizely Content Cloud aspect of the platform helps editors deal with optimum A/B Testing across 40 blocks of information. This is coupled with the already included Visitor Group personalization feature. Together, this flexibility is driving value for Australian Red Cross and its community.