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.”