Established in the mid 90’s, this UK charity serves as a financial grant giving body that runs funding programmes for sporting facilities nationwide. The organisation exists to give UK citizens the chance to benefit from sport and physical activity, regardless of who they are. The non-profit organisation is focused on inclusivity for all, and is passionate about welcoming people from diverse backgrounds – including gender, income, postcode, ability – into the world of sport. The charity is determined to unlock the advantages of physical activity for everyone, removing existing barriers to sport, and addressing society’s biggest challenges through doing so.

The customer engaged Bluewave to analyse an IMS build that had been started by various development partners in the past, but had stalled and was yielding unsatisfactory results. Our experts were brought in to inherit the task, continue developing it, and make some key improvements. This included analysis into what was recoverable and reusable from the existing build, what technical debt had already been built up, and what methods of upskilling were required for the customer’s internal teams and existing stakeholders. Not only did we plan to run detailed workshops around this update, but we also resolved to outline and present a realistic Phase One Experience Site deliverable that would vastly improve upon it – all within an agreed deadline.

The charity required a Phase One pilot of a working, fully branded interactive portal, with multiple complex processes, with a brief deadline. Following our initial investigations, Bluewave’s experts discerned that this client would greatly benefit from an Experience Cloud implementation, to provide the customer with a fully customised Experience Site for users to interact with. Experience Cloud helps customers create connected websites, portals, and applications at speed – allowing users to interact with customers (or in the customer’s case – citizens or grant recipients) across multiple channels. Audience engagement is a key factor within Experience Cloud, as it empowers customers to interact with their audience across multiple interactive touchpoints, and track progress with cases and forms – all powered by the world’s #1 CRM. Additionally, elements of Salesforce Core functionality were also worked into this build.

Due to the aggressive timelines and complexity of the build, Bluewave agreed to inherit the customer’s current sandbox build and deploy an environment strategy that would allow continuous development and version control, for potential future projects and ongoing builds. The solution was partly influenced by the fact that there were many existing API connections to Netsuite that the charity wanted to utilise, as well as that the core objects involved in the build were in a salvageable state, if given enough attention. 

Bluewave’s experts built out the customer’s IMS Experience Cloud portal to provide an end user interface. This Experience Site would be used to submit and manage funding applications, replacing a lot of Custom Form Titan interfaces. We also implemented Salesforce-recommended flows for best practice, scalability and future proofing. Bluewave has worked closely with the customer to ensure familiarity in terms of the look and feel of the portal, allowing it to sit within the organisation’s ecosystem seamlessly. We also utilised the Bluewave Tracker tool to provide transparent information to our customer’s internal and technical team, allowing them to monitor the progression of items raised during the course of the project.

The Bluewave Way is our agile implementation process, which has led to the delivery of over 250 successful Salesforce projects and engagements over the last decade – with this customer’s digital transformation being counted amongst them. As we were working with the customer’s existing system, communication was key to develop an understanding of how the system was initially used, and how the charity’s stakeholders could benefit from specific improvements. This also helped during the workshopping stage of the engagement, as well as post-build, when our experts were on hand to walk the charity’s users through the new system and ensure they had the skills necessary to get the most out of it.

Through our agile methodology, we remained in constant communication with the customer, working flexibly to meet their needs, even as they changed during the project. Working in an agile manner, our technical experts were able to complete aspects of the build quickly, ensuring that smaller tasks were completed without any hindrance, while larger aspects of the project were tackled collaboratively.

Bluewave was able to successfully deliver everything listed in the customer’s technical specification, within the agreed timeframe. Additionally, our experts went above and beyond to evolve what was initially agreed as an MVP implementation and system update, into a more mature, full Phase One deliverable: a working Experience Site for the charity. This development has removed the need for post-go live optimisation in many functional process areas. To date, Bluewave has brought the build to the final stages of the UAT cycle and are helping with Recs and Decs optimisation, supporting the data load and preparing for deployment to production once testing has been signed off.