Enabling rapid emergency fundraising.

Challenge

Act for Peace (AFP), founded in 1948, is the international humanitarian charity of the National Council of Churches in Australia. Its goal is to advocate for displaced people, ensure their safety, and help them find a permanent place to belong. In 2021 it funded over 35 projects in 19 countries, improving the lives of over 286,000 people.

Act for Peace wanted to migrate to a new flexible website that delivered an improved user experience for stakeholders, strengthened brand salience and increased supporter acquisition, retention and value. Critically as a not-for-profit organisation, Act for Peace needed to ensure that ongoing costs were minimal by being able to make updates and developments in-house.

Sometimes what’s required is simplicity, a discrete solution our clients can execute themselves. This is particularly important in the case of an NGO, where every dollar not spent on the frontline, every overhead, needs to be scrutinized.

Dillon Hicks

Managing Director, Sudo Roux

Solution

As is typical in the NFP sector, budgets and resources are tight. When presented with the project budget and the Total cost of ownership (TCO) of the existing tech stack balanced against what AFP wanted to achieve, Sudo Roux’ recommendation was to invest more into the design phase and build of a component based front end framework and reduce the costs on the backend infrastructure.

To balance the offset in budget we looked to reduce the TCO of the digital landscape by considering three different back-end architectures to deliver the project for Act for Peace.

These included a Jamstack solution with headless DXP, a best-of-breed, all SaaS solution; a jamstack architecture built on GatsbyJS with WordPress supporting headless content management operations, and finally a traditional WordPress implementation.

When we analysed Act For Peace’s specific needs against each solution, we were surprised to realise that a traditional WordPress approach was ultimately the best option. It isn’t a solution that we often use for clients so this was a more unusual outcome. Like any platform, WordPress requires ongoing updates and maintenance but it is a known quantity and commodity and highly supportable.

Deployed to premium WordPress host Kinsta, and by building the solution with WordPress community developed frameworks – Bedrock and Trellis – provided improved project structure, security, management of plugins, environment configuration and deployment automation with high availability and performance.

“We wouldn’t typically recommend WordPress as a solution, but in this case it matched the client’s needs and budget, reducing the TCO of the digital landscape being platform agnostic and easy for staff to maintain and update. The content authoring was critical to success in this project and the authoring environment is very familiar and accessible to many people and can be managed by anyone in the organisation,” explains Dillon Hicks, Sudo Roux.

Activation

The new WordPress site was created with a component-based content management approach. Act for Peace can drag and drop elements on any page in a pre-formed way that enables them to execute quickly. Everything including the payment widget is a block that works the same across desktop and mobile, in every format.

Because the WordPress build phase was relatively straightforward, Sudo Roux was able to invest more time in the design phase. This involved creating a visual design that represents Act for Peace’s rebrand, and giving them the tools and templates so they can keep future content aligned.

Results

Act for Peace’s new website is delivering them the agility and flexibility they need, so they can respond at lightning pace to emergencies. During the Tonga volcanic eruption in February 2022, Act for Peace was able to get a new fundraising page up within hours.

The website is easy to update and manage, making it highly cost-effective. Act for Peace is completely self-reliant, without any specialised developers in-house, nor need to enlist Sudo Roux for support.

The new website has also resulted in significant savings. Act for Peace has been able to reduce operational footprint and costs by 60%, by moving platforms from a system that was costing a significant amount per year, to a fit-for-purpose setup.

“The solution is all about what’s right for the client. It’s not about the biggest, most expensive thing. Sometimes what’s required is simplicity, a discrete solution our clients can execute themselves. This is particularly important in the case of an NGO, where every dollar not spent on the frontline, every overhead, needs to be scrutinized.” Dillon Hicks says.