CGI partnered with Racing Victoria to develop an online voting platform and website to attract a new, younger audience to the racing industry.

Summary:

  • Development of a secure, high availability, high traffic capacity online voting platform
  • Automation of a multi-channel digital experience across website, email and text
  • SFMC Customer journey mapping and mobile validation
  • Processing of 135,097 votes Australia and New Zealand wide
  • 96.5% validation rate of voters, halving the previous year’s rate
  • Successfully attracted a new younger, more diverse audience to the racing industry
  • Increased female voter participation to over 30%

The challenge

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.

To broaden the demographics racing appealed to and attract new prospects, Racing Victoria introduced a peoples race in which fans choose their own participants. The All-Star Mile required a robust online voting platform and website for fans to submit their votes and engage with the event digitally.

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.

The solution

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 native 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 Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC). CGI had previously partnered with Racing Victoria to improve their SFMC capabilities by teaching them how to build customer 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 totalling $46,500 to the Good Friday Appeal.

 

The project referenced in this case study was delivered by Unico, which CGI acquired in March 2022.