Avoiding The Lift and Shift Mentality: Leukaemia Foundation Teams Up with The Lumery

The Leukaemia Foundation is a national charity dedicated to helping people living with blood cancer. Forty-seven Australian men, women and children face a blood cancer diagnosis every day and the bold goal to ensure zero lives are lost to blood cancer by 2035 is at the centre of everything the Leukaemia Foundation does.

The Leukaemia Foundation’s Supporter Experience team inspires supporters by delivering peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns; the World’s Greatest Shave is one of them, through which brave supporters raise critical funds that go directly toward helping people living with blood cancer. The World’s Greatest Shave supporter journeys are underpinned by emotive, uplifting and richly engaging email touchpoints from acquisition through to retention. Each journey ensures that supporters feel empowered every step of the way.

Previously, creating emails/journeys for such large and complex events involved a fragmented MarTech stack with manual and time-consuming processes to manage them. As the Leukaemia Foundation’s events such as the World’s Greatest Shave scale and develop in complexity and maturity, the supporter experience needed to be orchestrated more efficiently and fluidly.

Making a move to Salesforce Marketing Cloud

In 2019, the Leukaemia Foundation set out to migrate their World’s Greatest Shave supporter journeys into their recently acquired Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform. With some false starts including templating issues, data-schema and journey-logic issues, the migration was put on hold, reverting to the legacy platform. In 2020, they tried again with a laser-focused plan including the development of a modular email framework and relevant data schema to power dynamic journey logic — and successfully migrated.

The Supporter Experience Manager at Leukaemia Foundation, Thomas Boxall, explains “With previous experience working on modular templates, I knew firsthand this solution would overcome many of our issues. My priority then became finding an agency that had an all-encompassing marketing automation background to successfully execute the migration across to our Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform and work successfully alongside Salesforce CRM”.

Email modular templates vs. email modular framework

While major email marketing providers support basic templates, the Leukaemia Foundation required rich and dynamic content for their supporter experience. After thoroughly understanding the requirements, The Lumery proposed a range of ways the charity could elevate what their Salesforce platform delivered.

The Lumery’s Experience Design Lead, Paul Moran, explains “To enable the Leukaemia Foundation team to take on creating email communications in a scalable and efficient manner we worked closely with Marketing Automation to get more out of the platform’s capabilities. The Experience Design team & Marketing Automation team at The Lumery worked together to ensure we found a tailored middle ground between creative freedom & technical efficiency”.

So, what is the difference between an email modular template and modular framework?

Email modular template: HTML building blocks that are used by developers to create emails. There is an element of HTML development required to create these and they rarely live on platform as a master file.

Email modular framework: utilises the platform to create emails inside that platform rather than HTML development in a code editing program. A framework enables a higher level of scalability and future proofing by using a single HTML source for each module.

Finding a partner that from the outset understands marketing automation requirements is crucial. If those elements aren’t there, then the email solution may not have the correct considerations for data and html build.

“During this engagement, we collaborated around our business problem to ensure we found the right solution. Having worked with other marketing-automation focused consultancies in the past, the attention to detail and best practice is something The Lumery excels in. From the outset, everything was thoroughly planned and considered so the entire project ran smoothly” states Boxall.

Enabling the best supporter journey experiences

The Lumery came around this project with an augmented team of experts with skill sets across experience design and marketing automation. Coupled with their expertise in Salesforce platforms, The Lumery were able to build out the modular framework and data schema that enabled migration of the World’s Greatest Shave email journeys into Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

The Lumery’s Marketing Automation Practice Lead, Valentin Lotrean, explains “from the onset of this project the Leukaemia Foundation and The Lumery agreed to steer away from the common ‘lift and shift’ mentality of migrating journeys and campaigns. This enabled the optimisation of journeys and related data, while taking advantage of the new features available to the Leukaemia Foundation in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The result was a series of simplified journeys, that allowed for more flexibility and less maintenance overtime, while still maintaining or improving the customer experience”.

On a final note, Boxall says “a modular framework has been a game-changer for us. We no longer wait for agencies to produce individual templates or troubleshoot issues. This new system architecture enables us to work how we need to, to continue creating valuable experiences for our courageous supporters”.

The Lumery teams that supported the Leukaemia Foundation:

• Marketing Automation
• Experience Design

Get in touch with The Lumery team today.