Red Nose Day 2005

Red Nose Day 2005 was a hugely successful project for both Can Factory and Comic Relief.

Can Factory was ultimately responsible for the entire technical delivery of one of the world's largest E-Commerce platforms and the E-Commerce Applications that ran on it.

This huge amount of work was broken up and managed as two projects.

Platform
The platform project was responsible for rebuilding the existing platform used in Sport Relief 04. This involved replacing and updating firmware, hardware and infrastructure as well as designing and implementing networking solutions and failover plans. Security and scalability were a key concern. Three centres were set up spanning the country with over 60 Sun boxes working together performing various roles.

The result was a secure, reliable platform which will serve Comic Relief for years to come.

"It is a huge platform capable of handling very high loads securely" said Warren Kerrigan, CEO of Can Factory and Comic Relief's Technical Project Manager for RND 05. "Considering the attack experienced recently on the DEC website we were even more concerned than in previous years. Security has been a priority and we have had the help of some very smart individuals all working their hardest for Comic Relief."

Can Factory partnered with Sun, Cisco, Energis, Saviso, SkyNet and Oracle to achieve this.

Application
Can Factory's internal development team was responsible for developing applications to fulfill Comic Relief business requirements. They worked with the Comic Relief team throughout the campaign, refining their requirements and then designing, implementing and delivering the final solutions.

Can Factory worked to use and improve on the components developed for Sport Relief 2004 to develop the applications required for Red Nose Day 2005.

These applications include:

• User Profile
  Reused from the Sport Relief campaign the User Profile system was revamped with only minor changes and a new design.
• Payment Application
  The payment application was integrated with Comic Relief's payment partners to process transactions in real time. This had to be extended from when it was used in Sport Relief to manage encrypted data from a payment partner.
• Public Web Donations application.
  Used primarily in conjunction with the telethon, the donation application collects and processes public web donations. A specially designed Queuing system ensures that transaction details are captured even if exceptional high load is experienced or if a database or network failure occurs. This ensures that transactions that are not processed in real time are queued and processed duly without loss of data. Special checking is done to prevent duplicate transactions.
• Call Centre Donations Application
  Following the success of the pilot in Sport Relief, the Call Centre Donations application was used by over 40 Call Centres on the telethon night. The money is taken in real time straight into Comic Relief's account. This aids Comic Relief in eliminating weeks of Call Centre administration collecting money following the event.
• Digital TV donations
  Sky viewers were able to use their red button to donate to Comic Relief. Can Factory worked with DITG and the BBC to achieve straight through processing of interactive TV donations using Can Factory's unique payment queue system.
• Online Shop
  The Online shop was selling Red Noses, T-Shirts and other associated merchandise. The shop would register users and collect delivery and billing information from them as they proceeded with a purchase. Orders could be tracked through logging in to the user profile system. A quarter of a million pounds of stock was sold through the online shop.
• Charity Events
  The charity events system allowed users to register their own charity event with Comic Relief and then invite people vie email to sponsor them. Online sponsorships were processed and cash in hand sponsorships could be paid online via their online charity event. Approximately three thousand such events were registered.
• Moderation Application
  A moderation application was built to allow Comic Relief to moderate the creation and updates to charity events created by the public. New events and updates to existing ones were submitted to a moderation system used by Comic Relief to accept or reject their submissions. Emails were sent to users that had submitted changes informing them their changes had been processed.
• Import Export Application
  Application used to export various pieces of data required by Comic Relief such as registered user emails for a promotional email and shop orders. The import engine allowed the import of shop order information so online shoppers could keep track of their orders.
• Administration System
  A secure administration system was built to allow Comic Relief to administer the data that they captured throughout the campaign. Admin users could search, view and edit data as well as view relevant reports for each application component (users, shop, events, and donations).

Each of these applications helped Comic Relief raise more money than ever before from New Media channels. More importantly they have been designed and written in such a way that Comic Relief will be able to continue to reuse and adapt the components as their business requirements change and develop.

Head of development Joe Trewin said "All the applications have been built on top of Can Factory's existing internal libraries which adds robustness and speeds development. We have used the latest technologies and tools to engineer solutions which are scalable, secure and robust and give Comic Relief a good foothold to continue their E-Commerce development."

"It is wonderful to work on such a rewarding project for a charity with Comic Relief's reputation." Trewin added.