Åhléns case
Operation
When Åhléns launched their first e-commerce in 2016, the choice of operating partner fell on RedBrid...
SOS Children's Villages has built and runs children's villages, schools, vocational schools, social centers, medical clinics and family-strengthening programs. The Swedish branch was started in 1972 where the main revenue comes from sponsorships, and the web is the most important channel for sponsor recruitment.
Challenge
The TV Show “A Journey For Life”
SOS Children's Villages wants to create awareness around the situation for all the children who die every day as a result of things that can actually be prevented. But it is increasingly difficult to get through the media noise. In 2012, SOS Children's Villages started the television program SOS The Mission, which then became A Journey For Life which has continued for several seasons. TV shows are a strong and emotional way to raise awareness about SOS long-term work. Work that depends on individuals who provide sponsorship.
Activity peaks during the commercial break
During these programs, the breaks are the most critical moments where hundreds of people click in to apply to become sponsors. That's when it happened. The website stopped answering calls. A disaster. It turned out that their IT supplier had not fully tested the performance of the site, but a site must always be tested for real conditions.
Solution
Stabilized website
After a couple of days, the decision was made to move the site onto RedBridge's infrastructure and management. We were able to identify where the problems were and fix them quickly. The performance had been radically improved and could be put to use again. RedBridge has since been the operating partner for SOS Children's Villages. An assignment that Redbridge is doing at no cost to the customer.
Result
It has to work when it matters
We were able to quickly establish that the solution could not scale horizontally and that the performance of the servers was too poor to cope with the pressure from visitors during SOS Children's Villages' campaigns. Our experience of transforming solutions so that they can be distributed, as well as our way of managing our own server platform meant that we could take the solution to the next step and thus support SOS Children's Villages in continuing their fantastic mission.
After the move to our environment and optimization of the solution, the problems with the site ceased and SOS Children's Villages was able to focus on driving traffic to the site again.
RedBridge is not only a supplier to us, but a partner. We work completely transparently with each other, which makes us very secure in our relationship. RedBridge is proactive, competent and very solution-oriented. We receive reports via SMS, which we have chosen as the primary reporting channel. The message states what has been noticed and what action has been taken. Many suppliers are more interested in the sale than in what they sell, but this is not the case with RedBridge. This is a relationship we want to nurture and the result is that we want to transfer even more assignments to RedBridge. RedBridge shows through concrete actions that they share our values and want to work to help orphaned and abandoned children around the world, we see this as the basis for a successful partnership.
Anders Hebert, Digital Business Developer and Online Manager at SOS Children's Villages
