Danish Red Cross: Brand site focused on donations plus Community Portal for 32,000 Volunteers

Non-profit

Summary

The Danish Red Cross is one of Denmark's absolute largest NGOs. The organization has 32,000 volunteers and more than 200 local departments, each with its own board. In 2018, Novicell delivered two new, powerful digital platforms to lift DRC's overall online ambitions.

Case description

In 2018, Novicell has delivered two digital platforms to the Red Cross: rodekors.dk and mitrodekors.dk.

The brand site on rodekors.dk tells the story of the Danish Red Cross. Simultaneously it should be as easy as possible to support the organization's projects. Therefore, the solution was to make a stable platform with high ease of use and good performance at peak times.

Donations are the basis of the existence of the Red Cross and almost 200,000 Danes support the organization each year. Some become members and give a monthly contribution, others give their contribution earmarked to a certain disaster or topic. The donation forms therefore have maximum visibility on the site and focus on ease of use.

One of the nice features for the donations forms is how we dynamically visualise what the money donated actually translates into in terms of e.g meals or blankets (see vide example here https://www.novicell.dk/media/63368/donations-test.mp4). All donations forms are automatically integrated into the PSP (QuickPay), ERP (Axapta), CRM (internal system) and mail service (SendGrid).

In general, editors have great flexibility in interface and easily builds unique donation forms for landing pages. In this way, they can easily create two versions of the same page and run A/B split testing to increase the conversion rates on a certain campaign.

The solution also contains three different Drupal Commerce shops with joint checkout and payment flow. We also built a booking flow for b2c and b2b users where they can sign up for the organization's popular first aid courses.

We also have a dynamic map component which editors can use to visualize the Red Cross' work internationally or where to find the nearest recycling store or local branch. The listings show locations from imported data from the ERP - or editors can choose to upload a file manually with selected locations.

The other site, Mitrodekors.dk (My Red Cross), is crucial to building loyalty and retaining the volunteers. Red Cross uses the portal to communicate with their volunteers and send them news. The volunteers can follow specific groups and get recent posts and comments from selected groups in a feed or sent as an email. That way, they are always up to date on their interests, such as recycling, family networks or integration.

Volunteers can also post to the groups themselves and comment on each other's posts. For example, with small announcements about something that has happened in their department or by asking other volunteers for help. This way, the portal serves as a social media network for the volunteers.

The My Red Cross site also contains a shop with items that are not available to other than the volunteers (e.g. merchandise or store signs). There is also a document archive for internal, shared documents.

In the background, we run advanced data imports that retrieve information from the ERP system with data on users, roles, departments, locations, activities, etc. Based on the import, we create/update all department pages and sub-pages for each department - and ensure that all users have the right roles and permissions. Although the unique pages are created and automatically updated, editors can still add new content to the pages. That way, all local department can get an individual online presence.

Test login: (please contact us for a test login - we do not want this to be published)

Case goals and results

rodekors.dk:
Results for the period from 2018-11-01 to 2019-03-31 (compared to the same period previous year):
● Donation conversion rate increased by 28.8%
● Number of transactions increased by 47.3%
● Revenue increased by 88.9%
● Avg. order value increased by 28.3%

mitrodekors.dk:
We do not have any insight into actual satisfaction surveys, but can see these results:
● 34.8% more page views
● 20% increase in unique page views
● 8% decrease in bounce rate
● 65.2% faster average page load time

Challenges

Selected challenges:

Peak periods and fast load times: In case of emergencies all over the world, Danish Red Cross need to be able to launch landing pages for donations very quickly and these pages need be able to handle very high amounts of traffic -> We solved this by making a simple way to make new landing pages and by implementing a solid caching strategy + scalable server setup.

Integrations: We have many integrations on the two sites. The most complex one is to the ERP, which is an old highly customised Axapta platfom. We run nightly imports of all data, while donations and webshop orders are sent to the ERP on the fly. This was not a trivial task :-)

GDPR + handling of personal social security ID: In Denmark, it is possible to get a tax refund from donations. The only requirement is that the donation can be tracked by the donor’s personal social security ID. The social security ID has to be handled as sensitive personal data according to the GDPR. Therefore we have had to make sure that the ID is encrypted directly in the browser and never gets saved within Drupal nor in any logs.

Community contributions

It is a great accomplishment to have a company like Red Cross to run all their online activities on a Drupal platform. The case study with such a well-known brand opens many doors in Denmark and it is a perfect showcase for how powerful and flexible Drupal actually is.

We have not made any direct code contributions to the Drupal community for this project (yet). However, we are currently working on a version 2.0 of the donation module which we plan to release to the Drupal community mid 2020.

Why should this case win the splash awards?

In very close collaboration with a highly profiled client such as Danish Red Cross, we have achieved to launch a very capable, solid solution which performs well on all KPIs. Donations have increased significantly on the new site, more people sign up to become volunteers and on the community portal, we have increased the overall engagement.

At the same time we have built a technically solid foundation which we continue to develop, so it can help solve more needs for Danish Red Cross in the future. Currently, we are working on an online administration system, where users can log in and see + manage data for all volunteers. This is possible because we have a good underlying architecture and configuration of roles and permissions. Another upcoming project is document sharing for all volunteers in the secure, user-friendly and well-known setting of the My Red Cross site.