High profile campaigning
Every year, the NSPCC offers Letter from Santa to parents and grand-parents. For a small donation, they are able to personalise a letter that will be addressed and sent to the child from Santa.
The adult creates the letter online. A paper letter is generated and sent by post directly to the child, adding some special Christmas magic to their anticipation. They also have the opportunity to download the letter on a PDF format.
A team effort on testing, with scarce resources
In previous years, the NSPCC handled all the testing for the website internally. But its digital product team had a limited range of devices they could test on. By asking the wider NSPCC team to help, they could broaden their access to device. However, with long testing scripts, it was still a challenging task. The testing typically took three weeks to complete, and errors would creep in, despite the team’s best efforts.
In 2020, Covid restrictions and remote working meant that the digital product team couldn’t access other devices previously provided by colleagues. The NSPCC had a strictly limited time to test the site and achieve resolution for any issues without incurring extra costs.
“Testing for Letter from Santa is a massive burden… with the speed and volume that Digivante achieves, it was such a relief to have them working with us.”
Lee Bellingham, Digital Project Manager, NSPCC
Making a precious experience perfect
For such a high profile product, in an already competitive market, it is vital for the user journey to work well across the widest range of browsers and devices. Lee Bellingham, Digital Project Manager at the NSPCC, was concerned about the pressure on his team. The NSPCC needed to make the most of its investment in developing the Letter from Santa campaign. It could not risk user disappointment and failed orders due to a poor digital experience.
On a recommendation, Lee spoke to the QA team at Digivante. It was clear that using Digivante’s professional testers would be a lower risk option.
By outsourcing the testing to Digivante, Lee could guarantee that it would be completed over two days by Digivante’s community of testers, across a weekend. As well as comfortably and effectively meeting the deadline, this freed the NSPCC’s internal team to carry out other urgent testing on their payment system.
Confidence to meet a crucial deadline
Digivante’s flexible approach provided Lee with peace of mind during the testing process. In the event of delays, Digivante always had capacity to move the testing time and still meet the deadline. The Digivante Portal tracked the test results clearly: reported errors were fed back to the web agency via Jira tickets. The internal team could log backend test results in the Portal too, keeping all the reporting in one place.
For total clarity, Digivante’s professional testers shared videos of discovered errors, as well as detailed step-by-step guides to reproduce the issue. As all of the testing was carried out on a range of real devices and browsers important to NSPCC, all of the issue reports provided browser and device-level detail. The NSPCC’s web agency was delighted to receive accurate, thorough explanations, which speeded up their ability to correct the issues.
With Digivante’s testers on the team, the NSPCC knew they could reliably raise all issues within the limited time. Just as importantly, they had confidence that the site would work as expected when it launched.
The proof of the (Christmas) pudding…
The NSPCC was so happy with Digivante’s work that they have engaged the same services for their Letter from Santa 2021 campaign.
Lee said, “Doing all the testing for Letter from Santa is a massive burden of work and though we do test as well, there’s no way we would be able to do so at the speed and volume that Digivante achieves. It’s such a relief to have them as our testing partner on Letter from Santa.”
