The staff at Miracle Babies struggled to manage their outdated website platform. With Clarety Community, they found a solution that allows them to do so much more.

Every year in Australia, around 27,000 babies are born premature. Tragically, up to 1,000 lose their fight for life. The Miracle Babies Foundation offers vital services to support these premature and sick newborns, their families, and the hospitals that care for them.

Providing valuable online information, support services, advocacy, and advice is a core part of
the organisation's mission. So when frustrated staff were wasting their valuable time updating an obsolete website, Miracle Babies decided it was time to weigh up its digital options. Instead of just building a new website, the foundation decided to move to a single
comprehensive platform that could manage all its services and communications: Clarety
Community.

An obsolete website with overseas support

Miracle Babies CEO and Co-Founder Kylie Pussell says her organisation's old website was
“funded a while ago, and it was quite outdated”. “It was really hard to use, and had a clunky back end. It definitely wasn’t user friendly. Our staff were spending a lot of time trying to make even small, minor changes.”

When things went wrong (and this happened often), the company that provided technical
support for the old website platform was based overseas. This created additional headaches for staff. “It was really hard to get our timezones aligned. A lot of staff time was needlessly wasted on that, which made it challenging for them to complete other parts of their role.
“It certainly made sense to find something that was more user friendly, so more of our staff
could do their own updates. Each department could be more involved in making updates and keeping it all up-to-date.”

Hidden digital challenges beneath the surface

While building a new website was front of mind, there were a number of hidden digital
challenges the foundation also faced.

For example, Miracle Babies manages a number of communications channels beyond just its
website. These range from sending out email newsletters and organising events, to handling
incoming inquiries and volunteer applications.

“With our services, a lot more is happening digitally [because of the pandemic]. So to be able to communicate with people and have more staff members able to communicate directly with their groups was vital,” Pussell says.

To fund its critical services, Miracle Babies relies on the support of its donor community. The
foundation needs a fundraising platform that can provide these generous supporters with a
great donor journey experience.

“We had to rely on a lot of different third-party platforms for fundraising. The steps to donate or become part of a fundraising event team were quite lengthy, and involved a lot of click
throughs.” Behind the scenes, Miracle Babies needs a robust CRM database system that can underpin all its communications channels. It has to be sophisticated enough to support many different stakeholder groups, including mothers, volunteers, caseworkers, health care workers, and hospitals. Yet it also has to be user friendly for staff.

Why the only answer was Clarety Community

After getting quotes from a number of different platforms and providers, one option stood out above the rest: Clarety Community.

With Clarety Community, Miracle Babies found an Australian partner who can deliver the
modern, custom website it was looking for. As well as being user friendly, the platform’s website management tools deliver a host of vital features, such as search engine optimisation, analytics, and more.

But Clarety Community is much more than just a website management tool. It’s one unified
platform that manages all facets of stakeholder engagement.

That means Miracle Babies no longer requires separate systems for CRM, website
management, e-commerce, donations, online shopping, events, peer-to-peer fundraising, SMS, email, direct mail, or reporting. With Clarety Community, one unified platform takes care of it all.

Best of all, everything integrates seamlessly across the Clarety Community platform – including the website.

“Clarety Community just really brought everything together for us,” Pussell says.

“To have the database built in, to be user friendly, to be able to have multiple people making changes and updates, it really just makes sense.”

Knowledgeable local experts

Having the best technology is one thing, but it means little without expert local support to get it up and running. After all, who wants to wait for tech support staff on the other side of the planet? Because Clarety Community is based in Australia, Miracle Babies now has access to support from experienced local experts with a deep knowledge of the nonprofit sector.
“Right along the way, they were always approachable. We sorted through any issues that we
had, we talked about them, we moved through them and we found the solution,” Pussell says.

Collaboration between Miracle Babies and Clarety Community's teams was a seamless
endeavour.

Clarety Community Fundraising Solution Specialists Raphael Macagnan and Mienli Tang
brought their strong expertise in the nonprofit sector to the project.

"Working from home was becoming the new normal. We had been working from home prior to this change, therefore we were able to help clients become comfortable and seamlessly transition into the change,” Macagnan says.

Building on the strong foundations of its unified platform, the Clarety Community team created a customised solution that met all of Miracle Babies’ needs – now and in the future.

“I think for us, building out our new website was probably our biggest challenge, because it is so content heavy. We have so much information. As a charity, we provide a lot of different avenues of support to professionals, hospital units, and families,” Pussell says.

Key users within the Miracle Babies Foundation team showed a lot of initiative and were willing to teach others within their team.

"We had a very limited amount of time to bring across a large amount of content. We worked
together with Miracle Babies, as we do with all our clients, to help prioritise what order the
content needed to come across and determine which sections of the website to prioritise,” Tang says.

"Miracle Babies Foundation had a seperate website for the Miracle MoonWalk event and,
despite having two separate websites, they are both managed within a single Clarety login."
The project began in May 2020, the websites were up by October, and were officially launched in November. “It was pretty quick, because once each area was built by Clarety, we could build out the pages and input the content,” Pussell says.

The Miracle Babies Foundation staff quickly embraced the platform; they were willing to learn and open minded about change.

A comprehensive solution for Miracle Babies

Thanks to Clarety Community, Miracle Babies now has one central hub through which all its
communications and services are managed. This allows staff to spend more time focusing on helping premature and sick newborns, instead of battling outdated systems.

“It's pretty much our go to. Everything comes through Clarety Community now. All our inquiries, volunteer applications – basically anytime someone communicates with us through the website, it's all coming through Clarety. We're communicating through it as well. So our EDMs now go out through Clarety,” says Pussell.

“What's been really good for all our different departments is the way that Clarety segments
groups, so we can communicate with many different groups of people on what their interests are. So that's been a real benefit.

“We've been able to really improve our standards around registrations, attendances, and
communicating things around our services, so it's been great.”In terms of fundraising, having all donations and donor communications come through one unified platform allows supporters to experience a much smoother donor journey.

“Bringing [all our fundraising] into our own website with Clarety Community has made a huge difference. It's just much easier to manage, it's easy to see everything in one snapshot. It's certainly simplified the donor journey, and the participant journey.”

New horizons open up with Clarety

As well as providing a more integrated and streamlined way to deliver its existing services,
moving to Clarety Community has opened up new possibilities for Miracle Babies.
For example, the Foundation is now considering the Clarety Community smartphone App to
better connect mothers, volunteers and caseworkers.

The Community App is already in use by other community organisations in Australia and
overseas and connects directly to the Clarety Supporter Engagement Platform.
Another major benefit of the shift was it gave doctors and families better access to vital
information.

“We developed a new information hub as well. So we didn't only just move across what we had already, we've really improved and enhanced it.”

If you’re looking to upgrade your nonprofit’s website, Pussell highly recommends choosing
Clarety Community’s unified platform.

“It's been exciting for us to see a lot of dreams and ideas that we had come to life, because we couldn't do a lot of the things we wanted to do in the older website.”