Track Your Impact | Red Thread Innovations

At a glance

At a Glance
Track Your Impact, a key initiative by WE Charity and its corporate partners, is a platform that empowers consumers to connect their purchases with meaningful global change. Initially, the platform was slow, difficult to maintain, and lacked scalability. RTI was brought in to rebuild the platform with a focus on scalability, performance, maintainability, and user experience.
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Service: Product Growth & Evolution

Expertise

Product Strategy

Technical Architecture

Web Development

User Experience Optimization

Technology

Headless CMS

Gatsby static site generation

Challenge

The Track Your Impact platform was designed to allow consumers to see the real-world impact of their purchases. Special products from corporate partners came with a unique code directing people to branded impact pages, which showcased the causes their purchase supported. The initial implementation was plagued with challenges, including slow load times, poor architecture, and inefficient onboarding of new corporate partners.

Solution

Red Thread Innovations rebuilt the Track Your Impact platform from the ground up, implementing a scalable architecture with a headless CMS. We leveraged static-site generation to significantly improve performance and provide users a more seamless experience. Our solution helped streamline the onboarding of new corporate partners and enabled the Track Your Impact team to operate more efficiently.

Result

The revamped Track Your Impact platform achieved a 400% increase in load times, 100% uptime, and was successfully scaled to manage thousands of products and corresponding product codes. The Track Your Impact team gained full control over content updates and page creation, allowing them to map pages to product codes effortlessly. This streamlined process enabled Track Your Impact to onboard new corporate partners in just a single day instead of weeks and efficiently manage campaigns for brands like 7-Eleven, David’s Tea, and Hershey.

Building for Scale

We started with a comprehensive technical audit of the existing codebase, architectural design, and infrastructure. Our team identified critical inefficiencies and bottlenecks affecting both performance and scalability. We used the audit as the starting point for designing a scalable architecture capable of managing thousands of products and product codes, and enabling seamless expansion as new corporate sponsors emerged.

Agile Delivery for Rapid Value

We employed a sprint-based process to accelerate development and deliver continuous value. Each sprint was geared towards rapidly implementing and refining features that aligned with Track Your Impact's immediate and long-term goals, and regular demos ensured that our progress was in lockstep with the business’s evolving needs. This iterative process enabled us to meet critical timelines for major campaigns with corporate sponsors.

Enabling Efficiency & Autonomy

To empower the Track Your Impact business unit, we implemented a robust headless CMS, improving how content was managed and deployed across the platform. This allowed the team to swiftly create, update, and map product codes to impact pages without relying on developers. The headless CMS significantly reduced onboarding times for new corporate partners, transforming a process that once took weeks into one that could be completed in a single day.

Enhanced Performance & Uptime

To ensure optimal performance and reliability, we implemented static-site generation, which dramatically improved page load speeds by 400% and eliminated issues with downtime. By generating static HTML and CSS pages that were served through a CDN, we ensured that users experienced fast, consistent access across the site and all impact pages.

Deepening Connections To Causes

We implemented a cleaner, more intuitive information architecture to better highlight the local and global impact of purchases. Features included impact story banners, hyper-local maps showcasing community-level effects, and a near real-time progress tracker. These improvements made it easier for users to see how their contributions were making a difference and deepened their connection to the causes they supported.

Amplifying Reach with Social Sharing

Users could seamlessly share the causes their purchases supported on social media, encouraging wider community engagement. This feature was designed to amplify the visibility of both the causes supported and the corporate partners involved. By integrating social sharing, Track Your Impact empowered consumers to spread awareness and increase the overall impact of the campaigns.