World Vision Case Study

World Vision Canada is a charitable organisation dedicated to improving the lives of children around the globe, as well as supporting the communities where they live. Begun in 1947, the charity works in nearly 100 countries focusing specifically on helping children and families overcome poverty and injustice. One of the primary ways in which World Vision Canada supports its mission is through child sponsorship. Donors can visit www.worldvision.ca to find a child to sponsor and then stay connected to that child through letters, videos, photos and more. World Vision Canada selected Webtrends Optimize to help improve its website to better focus on the needs of donors while saving time and money by reducing development costs.

“Working effectively and efficiently is important in any organisation, but in an organisation like ours it seems to be infinitely so,” said Chantal Tomlinson, Vice President of Technology and Innovation for World Vision Canada. “Keeping costs low is critical to our mission, and leveraging digital channels helps us do that.” As the importance of its website has increased, so has the need for digital testing and optimisation to ensure the site is giving visitors a great experience. Tomlinson said that in the past, her team often relied on intuition and assumptions to drive changes to the website, which didn’t always result in the right decisions. “We needed science to go along with marketing savvy,” she said.

World Vision Canada had been using Webtrends Analytics for years, but when the charity switched from an on-premise solution to Analytics On Demand, it opened the door to other Webtrends data-driven solutions. Optimize – a platform that can run multivariate, A/B and split tests to identify what works and what doesn’t on a website – offered World Vision Canada an opportunity to enhance its online experience without guesswork. “In the beginning, we wanted to use the Optimize tool and run the tests ourselves,” said Tomlinson. “We quickly realised that was short-sighted. The expertise of the Webtrends Optimize team is very valuable and it has made us much more comfortable and successful. “Webtrends data helps us know where donors are going and how they are navigating the site,” she continued. “Analytics is the foundation – then we build with Optimize. We can prioritise where to test – sometimes it’s on simple things like the placement or colour of a button. Other times, we run complex tests related to a number of elements like messaging and layout.”

World Vision Canada has used Webtrends Optimize to run tests that have resulted in conversion lifts and made subsequent changes to its website based on those results. Also of value have been tests showing what doesn’t work well on the site, allowing World Vision to avoid the costs of development for new pages and content updates. Webtrends Optimize and World Vision Canada are moving forward with a roadmap for testing for the coming year, with the ability to adapt and change as new insights are uncovered. “Webtrends Optimize has been instrumental in helping us understand how people use our site and improve it,” said Tomlinson.