Chime for Change A global campaign for girls’ and women’s empowerment With life-changing impact and no time to waste, a global campaign for girls’ and women’s empowerment founded by Gucci launches with technology developed by ThoughtWorks. CHIME FOR CHANGE is a new global campaign to raise funds and awareness for girls’ and women’s empowerment.
Highlights Delivery speed and reliability – The complex site was launched on an incredibly short schedule, in support of the life-changing mission of the campaign Multiple stakeholders – ThoughtWorks worked with the many organisations and stakeholders to get scope agreed, and then maintain a strict focus on delivery Responsive design - One platform looks great on multiple devices: smartphone, tablet, desktop
Founded by Gucci, the campaign seeks to convene, unite and strengthen voices speaking out for girls and women, focusing on three key pillars: Education, Health and Justice. More than just raising awareness, CHIME FOR CHANGE uses advanced technology to connect people with causes that further girls’ and women’s issues in a large and growing number of countries around the world, and support them in a personalized and individual way. ThoughtWorks is proud to be a partner, responsible for custom software development for CHIME FOR CHANGE’s web platform www.chimeforchange.org - which is central to the movement’s mission.
Ambitious goals, fixed deadline, short on time? ThoughtWorks answers the call. The concept for CHIME FOR CHANGE was already in the design phase with London agency Mother when ThoughtWorks was contacted late last year. Gucci planned to announce the campaign at the TED2013 conference, so a fixed deadline for the web platform was rapidly approaching. After a few weeks of discussions, ThoughtWorks began to assemble a team of five consultants that included user experience experts as well as developers, to work with the designers and others at Mother focused on the campaign.
Technologies Platform code: Ruby on Rails Database: Postgresql Content Management: Refinery CMS User interface: HTML5, SASS/CSS3, used with responsive design for mobile, tablet and desktop devices Testing: Rspec Background jobs: Redis and sidekiq Caching: Memcached for caching XML feeds from external third parties. Akamai CDN for caching assets and static pages and for content delivery optimisation. Deployment automation: Capistrano and Puppet. Deployment platforms: Heroku for pre-production deployments to meet release deadlines, allowing a focus on features over infrastructure automation. Production migrated to Rackspace after the initial release, as the ongoing provider for our clients.
Chime for change A global campaign for girls’ and women’s empowerment
The team landed at Mother in mid-January. By that time, just seven weeks remained to deliver a website to coincide with the announcement of the campaign. “Those seven weeks running up to the TED2013 announcement were a tremendously busy but energizing time for all of us,” says David Tuck, Client Principal with ThoughtWorks. “There were definitely some long hours and hard work, but we were all enthusiastic about the campaign’s goals. One of the core pillars of our company and a value we all share is to put technology to work for social and economic justice.”
Seven weeks to deliver? Focus on the minimum viable product. The first release deadline was late February. The platform had to serve up video and other content with constant updates, and look fantastic on basically all popular devices—phone, tablet or desktop web. External systems integrations had to be developed and tested, including with Catapult, Ticketmaster, and to social media via links to Facebook, among others. Says Tuck, “When you have only seven weeks to get an entire site of this complexity and high level of design built, tested and deployed, a Lean approach is critical. Our first task was to get agreement on the minimum features and functions to support the announcement. That was our “minimum viable product” or MVP. From then on, it was a matter of maintaining a laser focus on scope and delivery, while still managing changes based on user and stakeholder feedback throughout development.”
ThoughtWorks met day one with key stakeholders from Gucci, Facebook and Catapult, together with Sarah Simmer of Global Philanthropy Group, who acted as product owner. This extremely condensed project inception was the start of the process of prioritising the inputs from the nine organisations involved, and working out the MVP for the planned releases.
Continuous delivery, responsive design Stakeholders and users worked with the evolving site during and between weekly showcases. Facebook, who were integral to the social media and content strategies, were part of this and provided valuable insights to the team and support for the developers throughout the project.
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By the end of the first week our team had built and deployed code that everyone could begin working with, and we had a landing page already built.
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David Tuck, Client Principal, ThoughtWorks
The ongoing feedback informed a learning process, and led to valuable changes. At the same time, ThoughtWorks’ project manager communicated steadily and clearly to make sure everyone understood that additions to the MVP had to be balanced by other things dropping down in priority, out of the MVP. Test-driven development was used, and a battery of unit and functional test cases was coded along with the site. Testing and deployment were automated, creating a continuous delivery environment so that changes could make it very quickly to the stable environment where users would run through the stories. This strategy also prepared the infrastructure for followon releases to rapidly add more functionality after the initial release, and to facilitate ongoing support. Responsive design was used by the team to save time yet deliver the same high quality user experience for the site on a tablet or smartphone as on a desktop. Responsive Design is the concept of building websites so that they are able to adapt their presentation and functionality automatically based on the capabilities of the device they are being accessed from. One website thus serves all audiences and devices.
This approach was especially relevant because of the level of attention placed on the design. To achieve the brilliant look of the site, the experts at Mother literally scrutinized every pixel, using magnifying glasses to look over prints blown up onto huge boards. “It was quite a challenge for our small ThoughtWorks team, as tweaks in design could mean significant rework in the CSS and HTML5 code to us,” says Tuck.
Nine organisations, many stakeholders The CHIME FOR CHANGE team answered to a large number of stakeholders, including celebrities and society leaders. One of the most difficult issues driven by the tight schedule was getting decisions made as quickly as necessary. “There were nine organisations, but in terms of the stakeholder map that we put together—in terms of people—it was huge.” says Tuck. “This was a website with a very high level of attention to detail. Even small changes such as a font size for a name to fit in, for instance, might mean you had to vet that with others. And there were the creative directors from the agency, and from Gucci. Sarah Simmer of the Global Philanthropy Group helped tremendously, getting access to people to make decisions and get agreements.”
Continued over.
www.thoughtworks.com
www.thoughtworks.com
Released on time. Ready for the future. The website launched in just seven weeks. Robert Triefus, CMO for Gucci, attended the final showcase and congratulated the entire team on the results.
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To have achieved the goal in such a condensed amount of time, with so many moving parts and frankly so many different organisations and stakeholders is a remarkable case study for anyone who is trying to pull something off like this.
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Robert Triefus, CMO, GUCCI
With the MVP in place, the team continued to work on the next highest value features. Two more releases followed rapidly in March and early April, including integration with Ticketmaster to prepare the site for an announcement of a fundraising concert in London featuring a number of headline acts. The platform has now been successfully transferred to a support team. Usage is being tracked in detail to allow for further learning and fine-tuning using site analytics. Because of the continuous delivery environment with automated regression testing and deployments, any future changes can be released quickly, and with confidence. ThoughtWorks is proud to have been able to contribute, and to be one of the official partners of the CHIME FOR CHANGE campaign. Many other organisations and individuals are involved. For more information, see www.chimeforchange.org/about.
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