With the right data plan, Australian Red Cross builds a digital spine

At the start of the Australian Red Cross’ digital transformation journey, CIO Brett Wilson quickly realized they had a data issue. “We have around 250 applications across the organization, and they all create massive amounts of data,” he says. But the information wasn’t doing anything for them. Much of it was siloed or ineffectively segmented, leading to making some business decisions and investments on incomplete or misinterpreted data.

“When you don’t have a good understanding of your data, you can’t use it well,” he says. So they set out to build a customer data platform (CDP) capable of aggregating, cleaning, and organizing data. This CDP, provided by Optimizely, combines their donors’ transactional history with behavioral data — from the website, email, social, and other sources — to create marketing automation campaigns capable of driving fundraising efforts, and designed to engage with each donor on a more personal level.

Data, done right

There’s the saying that data is the new oil, but you can only use oil once, says Wilson. “I prefer to think of data as a renewable resource that can be used repeatedly and can link with other data sources to uncover fresh insights,” he says. “The goal of our digital transformation efforts was to create a digital spine so the many different systems across the business can work together and enhance each other.”

Around 15 years ago, companies simply stored data and didn’t really think about what they could do with it. “Today, the first questions we ask are do we have to keep this data, what can we use it for, and how can we transform this data into a business asset,” he says. To get answers, they enlisted the help of external partners. “For us, it was important we had partners that understand what good looks like — not just when you’re rolling out a system, but also from a data perspective, because we were pulling in data from so many different spreadsheets and systems, and we needed someone who could say you don’t want to bring that data in, because it won’t add any value down the line.”

Tax transparency

At the end of every financial year, Australian Red Cross runs a tax campaign to remind people that they can claim back their donations. “With the right technologies in place, and cleaner data, we saw a 10% increase in contributions following the tax campaign,” he says. “We couldn’t attribute all this to data, but it was definitely the foundational piece that allowed us to market to our donors more effectively than we could have in the past.”

The results speak for themselves. There used to be a lot of different Excel spreadsheets

and different systems running. But now, for the first time, everyone — up to 20,000 people — works on one system. And a comprehensive data governance function has also been set up, which details how Australian Red Cross is, and isn’t, going to use data. “In other words, this covers everything from how we collect information and who we can share it with, to how long we have to keep it for before getting rid of it.” It all comes down to understanding what data there is to be more strategic and achieve specific results, requiring a major cultural shift.

Making the change

Looking back on the process, Wilson says change management was a project sticking point and something they could have done differently. Specifically, he believes he and his team should’ve spent more time understanding the impact of the changes they were making, particularly for those in the field and on internal operations teams.

“It’s important to bring everybody along with you on the journey so they understand why things are changing and the benefits they’re going to get, rather than just telling them we’re rolling out a new system and they need to use it whether they like it or not,” he says.

He also stresses the importance of giving employees a sense of ownership. “It’s their platform after all,” he adds. “We just happen to be the ones supporting the deployment and keeping it going, but they need to be comfortable with it because they’re going to be using it.”

The bottom line is it’s important not to underestimate organizational change. “Now that we’ve got that foundation, or that digital spine in place, we must focus on improvement,” he says. “But we can’t do that unless we take people along with us on the journey. This isn’t just a technical implementation. We need to be able to tell a story as well so everyone understands what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.”