Building a bulletproof online voting platform & website: The All-Star Mile
How we helped increase the longevity of the racing industry through the power of Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) and platform engineering with an online voting platform and website.
Customer
- Racing Victoria
Project
- The All-Star Mile – Australia’s only fan voted race
Objectives
- Attract a new audience to the racing industry
- Design an online voting platform and website that could handle high volumes of traffic on and off peak
- Build a seamless, multi-channel digital experience across website, email and text
- Construct a range of end-to end consumer journeys across the All-Star Mile Campaign
Approach
- Build a secure, audit-proof digital voting system
- Website development
- Design Multi-channel SFMC journeys to engage multiple customer segments (email and text)
- Mobile validation through SFMC
Outcome
- 135,097 votes Australia and New Zealand wide
- 96.5% validation rate of voters, halving last year’s rate
- Over 30% female voters
Horse racing in Australia has traditionally attracted an audience comprised of males aged between 45-65. Racing Victoria sought to expand into other customer groups through the introduction of the inaugural All-Star Mile in 2019. By introducing an online voting platform and website for fans to choose race participants and increase social engagement, Racing Victoria was able to attract new prospects from all demographics to the racing industry. Our team partnered with Racing Victoria for the second year to create the platform that would allow Australia’s only fan voted race to function.
Using Amazon Web Services, our team built a highly secure online voting platform from the ground up that is auto scaling and healing with cloud first design and the ability to handle high levels of user traffic. For the second year running, a Big 4 Advisory cyber and hacking team tasked with auditing the platform was again unable to penetrate the system.
“The All Star Mile was designed to attract a new and more diverse audience, which was achieved for the second year in a row with over 30% female voters. This could not have been delivered without the teamwork and collaboration between Racing Victoria and Unico – our team more than halved the number of unverified votes from last year, worked on tight deadlines and had to adapt to meet regulatory constraints”
– Marcia Allan, GM Customer Strategy & Engagement, Racing Victoria.
Racing Victoria’s goal of building fan engagement for the All-Star Mile was conducted through SFMC. Unico had previously helped Racing Victoria increase their SFMC capabilities allowing them to effectively build journeys for their subscribers. These journeys helped elevate the engagement levels with Racing Victoria which enabled them to send consistent multi-channel messaging to new audience’s generated by the All-Star Mile.
A final voting tally of 135,097 was a remarkable result during a summer that was devastated by unprecedented bushfires. Racing Victoria offered their support to the bushfire crisis by pledging to donate $1 for every vote received. In addition, they also donated all 93 horse nomination fees of $500 totaling $46,500 to the Good Friday Appeal.
If you would like to find out more about Unico’s All-Star Mile secure website and online voting platform, please contact Evan Harridge.
Evan Harridge
Director of Innovation and Enterprise