The Challenge
OneBlood is a not-for-profit organization that provides safe, available, and affordable blood donation to more than 200 hospital partners and operates more than 80 donor centers across Florida, Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina. Additionally, OneBlood also deploys nearly 200 of its signature Big Red Buses for blood drives across its service areas. OneBlood has continued to grow through acquisition, with the Red Cross comparably the only blood donation and supply organization close in size at a national level. With this rapid, ongoing growth, OneBlood was faced with the need to modernize and scale their operations - including their main, public facing website, OneBlood.org.
On a consistent basis, OneBlood handles massive amounts of data that includes donor information, blood information, and donation appointments - making paramount the need to streamline the analysis, insight, and tracking of this data and associated key metrics. With 150 blood drive campaigns running on a daily basis in different cities and states across the Southeast - each requiring unique marketing content and strategy - the need for an all-encompassing digital solution was critical.
After outgrowing their previous websites, OneBlood required an overhaul of its online presence that included:
- A CMS Platform that enabled the OneBlood marketing team to control the user experience from end to end;
- Clean, modern, and responsive web design;
- Massive content and data migration from existing servers;
- Location-based search and directions to Donor Centers;
- Site migration to new secure servers in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud;
- Integration with the E-Donor API in conjunction with Haemonetics;
- Ability for users to create an account, login, update their account, view and schedule appointments and get location based directions to blood drives;
- Ability for the marketing team to create custom marketing campaigns for each blood drive.
The Solution
OneBlood partnered with DigitalUs to craft a digital solution that met all of its organizational needs. With complex integration requirements, this first of its kind endeavor was achieved leveraging the robust enterprise content management system Solodev CMS 8, as well as the award-winning team of designers and developers at DigitalUs.
To gain a better understanding of OneBlood’s needs and requirements, DigitalUs held multiple stakeholder sessions with key members of the OneBlood team and organization to ensure comprehensive project scope alignment. With a detailed and agreed upon precise project plan in place, DigitalUs immediately set to work on this tremendous undertaking. The overall project duration was in excess of three months and included web design, custom application development, CMS deployment, content migration, and integration and extension of the Haemonetics E-Donor API.
DigitalUs also used Solodev CMS 8 to build custom applications for OneBlood to meet the needs of their website. This included the following functionality:
- Video Manager
- QR Code Manager
- Share Your Story
- Board Members Directory
- FAQ
- Featured Donors
- Home Page Slider
- Donation Center Locations
- Press Releases
- Promotions and Promoted Blood Drives
- Blog
E-Donor API Integration. DigitalUs worked closely with Haemonetics, a global provider of blood and plasma supplies and services, to successfully integrate the E-Donor API. Able to provide access to all of OneBlood’s donor information, the Solodev CMS integration harnesses this incredibly powerful API to deliver on all of OneBlood’s needs and requirements. While functionality of the API was already extensive, both companies collaborated to enhance the API to enable site users to have a full “donor portal” at their disposal. This included the ability to login and review donation history, blood type, medical history, blood pressure, cholesterol, search for donor centers based on location, donor eligibility, and appointment scheduling.
AWS Migration. In partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and leveraging the “All-in AWS” Solodev CMS platform, DigitalUs migrated OneBlood’s online presence to the AWS Cloud using Solodev’s state of the art importing tools allowing the importation of any data source. Built on the most secure infrastructure on the planet, Solodev CMS and the AWS Cloud provide OneBlood with the security, scalability, and server configuration required for them to rapidly scale as required.
Video Delivery. OneBlood has its own team of multimedia journalists, and as such there are many professional videos created daily, all of which required hosting by OneBlood. To accomplish this, DigitalUs combined the storage and bandwidth of AWS, streaming services of Wowza, encoding services of Zencoder, and data management of Solodev, to provide a multi-platform integrated solution.
This makes it a simple process for OneBlood’s multimedia team to upload raw videos though the Solodev CMS interface, starting the automatic process of encoding through Zencoder. The compressed videos are then sent to the Wowza engine hosted in AWS, and once the process is completed the video is available to be published directly to the site. The OneBlood team can now set up videos in-house for online streaming without the use of a third party hosting tool such as YouTube or Vimeo.
Solodev CMS. By leveraging the functionality of the Solodev CMS 8 platform and its robust integration abilities, where the website and associated applications were actually built, DigitalUs enabled OneBlood’s website to function as an extension of the marketing team.
Data Capture. The contact form on the OneBlood site is a harmonious mixture of Solodev CMS workflows and integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Since different requests are handled by different departments, some are sent into the Microsoft Dynamics CRM which is managed by the OneBlood marketing staff, while other requests, such as questions about Hosting a Blood Drive, are managed by Solodev CMS, notifying the appropriate parties via workflows when submissions are entered.
The Results
DigitalUs unified the OneBlood brand online through web design, application development, content migration, Solodev CMS deployment and the use/extension of the E-Donor API. THe delivered and deployed solution enables OneBlood to drive the customer journey from homepage visit to appointment scheduling and all the way to an actual blood donation.
-Emily Eike, Math Teacher, Orange County Public Schools
