Case study: How the Australian Red Cross set up a telethon in four days

When the floods hit eastern Australia earlier this year, the Australian Red Cross stepped up and organised a telethon to help raise funds for those affected communities.

Brett Wilson, CIO at the Australian Red Cross spoke to Digital Nation Australia on how the not-for-profit implemented a solution within four days to get their telethon up and running.

“Telethons aren't really our bread and butter, we might do small ones here and there. It started off as we were doing a telethon on a Monday and then it grew to the three major networks that actually combined together which is unheard of, to do a live telecast across for the telethon as well,” he said.

“Then it grew into 300 internal volunteers that would man the phones, and then we would feed into Telstra, which had another 300 volunteers, so a 600 person call centre.”

Wilson said due to these factors the Australian Red Cross had to quickly figure out how to support and uplift their technology quickly.

“How do we make sure that we've actually got enough backup plans and contingency to make sure that if something did happen on the night, that we would have the ability to continue to operate the telethon?” he explained.         

Wilson said the organisation implemented Boomi, a solution they currently work with to connect a number of different platforms and systems together that don't have API's. He said if they didn’t implement this exact solution, the telethon would’ve failed “within the first hour”.

He said, “The main reasons being is that as I said, we had about 8.5 unique users on the website doing donations every 11 or 12 every seconds.

“Boomi had the ability to provide that service plus capability, where it queued up everything that was coming through, all the transaction that we're feeding into our legacy platform in the back end. Without that in place, we never would have probably got past the first hour.”

Wilson said API requests were around 3.3 million during the time of the telethon.

“It kicked off at seven and finished officially at midnight that night. A significant amount of calls back into different systems and platforms, if you didn't have that core capability, which is Boomi in our case, you wouldn't have been able to deal with the sheer volume of that's come through as well,” he ended.