Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation: Take Steps 2018
Project Description
Take Steps is the signature event for the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation and has brought together more than 300,000 people raising over $85 million to help further the Foundation’s mission to find cures for Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis and to improve the quality of life for children and adults affected by these diseases. Take Steps has over 100 events taking place across the United States on various dates throughout the year, so it requires a complex development and delivery schedule that aligns to each specific event. Charity Dynamics worked with the Foundation to develop scheduling processes that would produce an efficient workflow and accurate message delivery system for the multiple events. To learn more about this incredible event, visit cctakesteps.org.Project Details
Client Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation Skills Technology, Scheduling Support
Challenge
- Timing of messages had to be considered from both the date of registration and the event itself to minimize gaps and/or overlap in communications.
- Within each event, multiple audience segments required tailored messaging to support their individual journey from registration through event completion.
- Resources had to be managed to ensure the timely creation and development (as well as review) for more than 6,000 messages.
- The ultimate challenge was to ensure a high level of accuracy for such a complex program.
Approach
- Introduced a batch development process that spread the work into manageable chunks through many phases of the project: copywriting, email implementation, scheduling and quality assurance (QA).
- Conducted comprehensive testing and documentation of the custom code used to personalize emails.
- Developed a detailed user acceptance testing (UAT) protocol to ensure accuracy across all audiences and messaging groups.
Outcome
- Further improvements were realized, despite the already high degree of accuracy.
- The level of effort to build the program’s messages and conduct QA on their implementation decreased, creating greater efficiencies and allowing resources to be redeployed to support optimization of the individual message streams, which resulted in:
- Participant revenue increasing by 15% and overall online fundraising increasing by 25% in the first half of the year due to audience segmentations and tailored messaging (conditionalized by an individual’s activity).
- Funds raised by active participants (removing $0 fundraisers) increasing by 19%.