Every year in Australia, around 27,000 babies are born premature. Tragically, up to 1,000 lose their fight for life. The Miracle Babies Foundation offers vital services to support these premature and sick newborns, their families, and the hospitals that care for them.
Providing valuable online information, support services, advocacy, and advice is a core part of the organisation’s mission. So when frustrated staff were wasting their valuable time updating an obsolete website, Miracle Babies decided it was time to weigh up its digital options.
Instead of building a new website, the foundation decided to move to a single comprehensive platform that could manage all its services and communications: Clarety Community.
An obsolete website
“It was really hard to use, and had a clunky back end,” says Miracle Babies CEO and Co-Founder Kylie Pussell of the old website. “It definitely wasn’t user-friendly. Our staff were spending a lot of time trying to make even small, minor changes.”
When things went wrong, the company providing technical support was based overseas, creating more headaches for staff. “It was hard to get our timezones aligned. A lot of staff time was needlessly wasted on that, which made it challenging for them to complete other parts of their role. It certainly made sense to find something that was more user friendly, so more of our staff could do their own updates.”
Hidden digital challenges
While building a new website was front of mind, there were a number of hidden digital challenges, from sending out email newsletters and organising events, to handling incoming enquiries and volunteer applications.
“With our services, a lot more is happening digitally [because of the pandemic]. So to be able to communicate with people and have more staff members able to communicate directly with their groups was vital,” Pussell says.
To fund its critical services, Miracle Babies relies on the support of its donor community, but they lacked a fundraising platform that could provide these generous supporters with a great donor journey experience.
“We had to rely on a lot of different third-party platforms for fundraising. The steps to donate or become part of a fundraising event team were quite lengthy, and involved a lot of click throughs.”
Miracle Babies needed a robust CRM database system to underpin its communications channels. A system sophisticated enough to support all the stakeholder groups (mothers, volunteers, caseworkers, health care workers, and hospitals) as well as user-friendly for staff.
The only answer
After getting quotes from a number of different platforms and providers, one option stood out: Clarety Community.
With Clarety Community, Miracle Babies found an Australian partner who can deliver the modern, custom website it was looking for. As well as being user friendly, the platform’s website management tools deliver a host of vital features, including search engine optimisation and analytics.
But Clarety Community is much more than just a website management tool. It’s one unified platform that manages all facets of stakeholder engagement. That means Miracle Babies no longer requires separate systems for CRM, website management, e-commerce, donations, online shopping, events, peer-to-peer fundraising, SMS, email, direct mail, or reporting. With Clarety Community, one unified platform takes care of it all. Best of all, everything integrates seamlessly across the Clarety Community platform – including the website.
“Clarety Community just really brought everything together for us,” Pussell says. “To have the database built in, to be user- friendly, to be able to have multiple people making changes and updates, it really just makes sense.”
Knowledgeable local experts
Having the best technology is one thing, but it means little without expert local support to get it up and running. After all, who wants to wait for tech support staff on the other side of the planet?
Clarety Community is based in Australia, so Miracle Babies now has access to support from experienced local experts with a deep knowledge of the NFP sector.
“Right along the way, they were always approachable. We sorted through any issues that we had, we talked about them, we moved through them and we found the solution,” Pussell says.
Collaboration between Miracle Babies and Clarety Community’s teams was a seamless endeavour. Clarety Community Fundraising Solution Specialists Raphael Macagnan and Mienli Tang brought their strong expertise in the nonprofit sector to the project.
“Working from home was becoming the new normal. We had been working from home prior to this change, therefore we were able to help clients become comfortable and seamlessly transition into the change,” Macagnan says.
Building on the strong foundations of its unified platform, the Clarety Community team created a customised solution that met all of Miracle Babies’ needs – now and in the future.
“I think for us, building out our new website was probably our biggest challenge, because it is so content heavy. We have so much information. As a charity, we provide a lot of different avenues of support to professionals, hospital units, and families,” Pussell says.
“We had a very limited amount of time to bring across a large amount of content. We worked together with Miracle Babies, as we do with all our clients, to help prioritise what order the content needed to come across and determine which sections of the website to prioritise,” Tang says.
“Miracle Babies Foundation had a seperate website for the Miracle Moon Walk event and, despite having two separate websites, they are both managed within a single Clarety login.”
The project began in May 2020, the websites were up by October, and were officially launched in November. “It was pretty quick, because once each area was built by Clarety, we could build out the pages and input the content,” Pussell says.
Key users at Miracle Babies showed a lot of initiative and were willing to teach other team members. Miracle Babies Foundation staff quickly embraced the platform; they were willing to learn and be open-minded about change.
A comprehensive solution
Thanks to Clarety Community, Miracle Babies now has one central hub to manage all the Foundation’s communications and services.
“It’s pretty much our go-to. Everything comes through Clarety Community now. All our enquiries, volunteer applications – basically anytime someone communicates with us through the website, it’s all coming through Clarety. We’re communicating through it as well. So our EDMs now go out through Clarety,” says Pussell.
“What’s been really good for all our different departments is the way that Clarety segments groups, so we can communicate with many different groups of people based on what their interests are. So that’s been a real benefit.
“We’ve been able to really improve our standards around registrations, attendances, and communicating things around our services, so it’s been great.”
Having all donations and donor communications come via one platform allows donors to experience a much smoother journey.
“Bringing [all our fundraising] into our own website with Clarety Community has made a huge difference. It’s just much easier to manage, it’s easy to see everything in one snapshot. It’s certainly simplified the donor journey, and the participant journey.”
New horizons
As well as providing a more integrated and streamlined way to deliver its existing services, moving to Clarety Community has opened up new possibilities for Miracle Babies.
The Foundation is considering the Clarety Community smartphone App to better connect mothers, volunteers and caseworkers. The Community App is already in use by other community organisations in Australia and overseas and connects directly to the Clarety Supporter Engagement Platform.
Another major benefit of the shift was that it gave doctors and families better access to vital information. “We developed a new information hub as well. So we didn’t only just move across what we had already, we’ve really improved and enhanced it.”
So, if you are considering upgrading your organisation’s website, Pussell highly recommends Clarety Community’s unified platform. “It’s been exciting for us to see a lot of dreams and ideas that we had come to life, because we couldn’t do a lot of the things we wanted to do in the older website.”
