With over 176,000 members and 314 affiliated Surf Life Saving Clubs, Surf Life Saving represents the largest volunteer movement of its kind in Australia, and the world.
Partnering with The Together Society, a Brisbane agency, April9 won a competitive tender to be selected as the ICT provider for the 2020 redevelopment for the Surf Life Saving Foundation (SLSF) Australia’s Donation and Lottery websites.
As a public-facing non-profit organisation, security and positive user experience are paramount in maintaining SLSF's reputation and safeguarding trust and revenue from members and donors. Secure integration with SLSF's chosen payment platforms was at the heart of the project, for both the Foundation and the Lottery websites.
April9 built a "headless" CMS using a unique instance of our in-house rapid development platform, Stack9, to easily create records and entity relationships to match custom business rules. To provide SLSF’s content editors with supreme flexibility when it came to maintaining the websites’ content and donation campaigns, the CMS is highly intuitive and allows non-technical users to create new web pages, lottery campaigns and content in a matter of minutes. This same functionality is allowing SLSF to rapidly build location-specific websites for each of their 314 Surf Clubs across Australia, a task which would otherwise involve thousands of hours of labour.
The solution was integrated with SLSF's legacy systems and CRM using secure API endpoints for fluid information delivery and zero disruption to operations.
The SLSF websites needed to be able to handle large spikes in traffic with potentially thousands of users accessing the site at any one time. Scaling through serverless cloud technology to meet traffic demand, April9 cloud experts were able to economise SLSF's infrastructure costs through auto-scaling, without any impact on website performance.
With everything 'under the hood' taken care of, all that was left was to implement a great design. This is where The Together Society's UX and brand specialists came in, crafting customer focused strategies, designs and gorgeous on-brand visuals which April9's developers brought to life, to drive higher engagement and ROI for the Lottery and Foundation websites.
