Case study · Website development
How the Prostate Cancer Foundation launched a website redesign, an email migration, and a new microsite on a tight deadline.
The challenge
In January, the Prostate Cancer Foundation's website redesign had been sitting still for months. Their medical communications team was rewriting most of the site's content to match current research and treatment recommendations, and until that was done, the redesign had nowhere to go.
Then leadership set a date: the site had to be live by the May board meeting. That deadline became the only fixed thing about the project. The content was still being written, and the site had to launch with it anyway.
It also was not the whole job. PCF was leaving a legacy email management platform and needed close to a million records moved into a new self-hosted system, with signup on the site sorting people by who they were.
Immediately after launch they also had to open the Home Run Challenge, one of their largest fundraising campaigns of the year, on a microsite that did not exist yet, using a donation system they were also in the middle of replacing.
They came to Steward with three things that had to be true by spring: the redesigned site live before the board met in May; the email program off the old platform and running on the new one, records intact and subscribers landing in the right segments; and the Home Run Challenge launched on schedule with its own site, donation flow, and pledge mechanics.
What we did
The obvious plan was to run the work in sequence: finish the content, build the site, migrate the email, then build the campaign. Against a fixed May date, that sequence ran out of calendar somewhere around March.
We rejected it and worked all three tracks at once, tripling the team and treating the unfinished content as a moving input rather than a prerequisite. We built the site in pieces against whatever existed, managed scope so every week produced something we could finish, and assembled it into a polished whole as the final copy landed.
The email migration was not an export and an import. Close to a million records had to be filtered and reshaped before they were worth anything in the new system, so we built a custom connector that pulled from the legacy platform's API, processed and organized the data, and loaded it into the new platform.
The subscription form on the site then delivered new signups already sorted into the segments PCF's marketing team works from.
PCF also collected email opt-ins through donation forms and other communications in a separate system, which meant the new email platform would start drifting out of date the day it went live. We built a one-directional bridge that read the CRM and pulled opt-ins across as they arrived.
One direction rather than two was deliberate: a two-way sync between a CRM and an email platform creates record conflicts somebody has to referee, and nobody here had the time.
The microsite had to look like its own thing and still belong to the new PCF design. We gave the Home Run Challenge running contests, a live news feed, and a dynamic leaderboard showing which teams were ahead in donations.
Underneath it, a custom cart replaced the donation system they were leaving, handling both one-time gifts and per-home-run pledges charged against the actual game results each week.
The results
The site launched at the end of April, the week before the board meeting, with the new email platform integrated and the records moved.
A week and a half later the Home Run Challenge opened on its microsite, on schedule, with the pledge cart live for the season.
Nothing caught fire on the way. No emergency calls, no scramble the night before either launch. The board saw the redesigned site in May and loved both the design and the new functionality. The new microsite started accepting donations and pledges right on time for the start of the campaign.
“Everything you all do is great. For the agencies we've worked with, you're at the top of the list by far.”
Prostate Cancer Foundation. Visit pcf.org
Home Run Challenge. Visit the campaign site
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