CIO50 2023 #12 Brett Wilson, Australian Red Cross

Name: Brett Wilson
Title: Chief information officer
Company: Australian Red Cross
Commenced role: February 2021
Reporting line: COO
Member of the executive team: Yes
Technology Function: 48 staff

Trusted for over 100 years by people and communities in need, especially during disasters and emergencies, Australian Red Cross faced a potentially reputation-damaging risk due to its data architecture not being up to scratch.

Although in the middle of a digital transformation to enable the more efficient use of technology to achieve its mission, Australian Red Cross was yet to address several challenges posed by how it stored and used data.

Its donor data was siloed and fragmented, which limited opportunities to diversify and grow revenue through optimisation, predictive models, and dynamic segmentation. Meanwhile, supporter communications, including fundraising campaigns, relied on significant manual handling of customer data, which not only drove inefficiencies and higher, but crucially, posed privacy-related risks.

“Little thought was given to data architecture,” chief information officer Brett Wilson tells CIO Australia.

In response, Wilson and his team started a journey in 2022 to deliver a customer data platform (CDP) for Australian Red Cross.

“It was envisioned to bring a single unified view of customers based on their interactions with our digital channels and stitch together several data sources,” says Wilson.

“An MVP [minimal viable product] approach was decided to be the best approach to gain the most amount of value from the platform early rather than trying to get every piece of functionality into the platform.”

Through the customer data platform, provided by Optimizely, Australian Red Cross can now aggregate customers’ transactional history with their behavioural data from the website, email, social and other data sources. This has enabled the development of marketing automation campaigns to drive fundraising revenue and engage on a personalised basis with each donor.

“With so much marketing noise, personalisation is the key to engagement,” says Wilson.

“Personalisation at scale is the goal to enable data-driven experiences, automation of processes, data integrity and compliance, drive engagement and conversion, and create ‘always on’ marketing campaigns.”

Deeper customer understanding

Key functionality on the platform was delivered in April 2023 and facilitated a deeper understanding of customer behaviour, says Wilson.

The platform has enabled the Australian Red Cross to “stitch” the identity of customers and track their behaviour across various channels including its websites and call centre.

“The ability to stitch together identity data has enabled the ability to suggest relevant donation price points to individual known customers that reflect their donation history to increase their average donation amount,” says Wilson.

“The results are beyond what was expected,” he adds, with over 2,000 supporters stitched or established with a CDP profile.

The organisation also discovered that 92% of donors and 8% of all website visitors had an existing relationship with the Australian Red Cross, while it found that 20% of all donors had donated from paid marketing activities.

The customer data platform will allow the organisation to start using marketing automation later in the year, enabling Australian Red Cross to diversify and grow revenue by delivering dynamic content and multivariate testing to optimise performance through personalisation.

Digital emergency plan

Meanwhile, Red Cross also wanted to use technology to help in its core mission of helping communities prepare for emergencies and disasters.

Although it already had an app called Get Prepared which aimed to help people prepare, this offered little more than a checklist tool. 

And so a cross-functional project team was created bringing together the technology, digital and marketing team to upgrade the app so it could offer a digital plan to help people prepare for emergencies or disasters.

The key benefit of a digital approach to an emergency plan is that it can help guide and nurture users with nudges and reminders to complete and download the plan to their device.

“There is a plan to expand the app over time to include a wider range of preparedness resources and annual reminders to review your plan,” says Wilson.

Combining the app with the customer data platform has enabled Red Cross to add basic marketing automation and customer journey EDMs to personalise content for users.

Addressing long-term needs

In his time as CIO, Wilson has led major improvements in cyber security, privacy and business applications at the organisation.

Plus, he has transformed the technology team which had a track record of underdelivering on projects.

“Previously, there was a real disconnect between what the business required and what the technology team provided,” he says.

Wilson has since introduced solid business disciplines and a collaborative approach and works closely with operational leaders to address the long-term needs of the organisation. He has put in place an engagement model to overcommunicate and provide a transparent process on how to work with the technology team.

He has also established a technology steering community to ensure the direction of technology is business-led. As a result, stakeholders now have a clear understanding of why principles such as security and architecture are in place to protect the organisation.

This has been achieved in a cost-constrained environment where every dollar the organisation saves can be applied to serve those in need in the community.

Louis van Wyk