Keeping our fingers on the pulse for St John Ambulance Victoria
- Visual Design
- Web Development
- eCommerce
- Hosting
- Support
- Umbraco CMS
- User Experience
How do you successfully engage a diverse audience for a vital service?
St John Ambulance is Australia's leading provider of first aid training and first aid services. The organisation has been operating for over 130 years, from starting the first ambulance service to setting Australian standards for first aid training and education. St John Ambulance Victoria is the Victorian arm of the national organisation.
In 2019, St John appointed Calico to redevelop their new consumer website as part of a broader digital transformation project.
The most pressing objective of the new website was to help generate income, primarily through managing bookings of First Aid Training, First Aid services at events, soliciting donations, and driving product sales.
One of the key challenges was to provide a great user experience for multiple types of users that need to perform separate tasks on the site. St John is a complex organisation and their audience covers a diverse spread of the Victorian public, including volunteers, donors, schools, workplaces, potential employees, current employees, event organisers, and patients.
Ultimately, the site needed to preserve the St John brand and reflect its respected reputation in the community and across the world, while also integrating with several third party solution providers.
Calico’s solution was based on gaining a detailed understanding of the multiple end-users and their user journeys. We undertook a deep UX phase that allowed us to run workshops with multiple departments, as well as with customers. These findings and insights drove decision making and enabled the design team to plan and structure the services based on need and impact on the business.
We chose Umbraco 7 for the CMS, which allowed us to build the development on a robust, enterprise-grade CMS with plenty of marketing tools out of the box.
The outcome has been very positive, with marketing and operations running more effectively through the site, and both course conversions and time spent on site increasing significantly.
Following the late 2019 launch, Calico has continued to work with St John Ambulance Victoria to enhance and grow their website even further.
In 2020, St John had to quickly adapt to the COVID-19 lockdowns and move towards online learning. Calico assisted with this by designing new booking flows to allow for some classes to be bookable and taught via a Virtual Classroom and Webinars (integrated with Moodle). When the lockdown concluded, some classes also needed to be split into partial online and partial face-to-face teaching.
We also improved the user experience for corporate customers by introducing a ‘pay on invoice’ payment option. Additionally, PayPal and ZipPay were integrated and released as new payment methods for the general public who book classes via the website.
With a long future ahead of them, many more exciting and ambitious improvements are being planned, with Calico and St John working together to bring them to life.
Visit the St John Ambulance Victoria site now to discover the full experience Calico developed.
