Overview

Big Kahuna Fundraising provides fundraising programs to schools across Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. When the company grew significantly in the past year, it put tremendous strain on their existing legacy infrastructure. To meet their customers' needs, the Big Kahuna team decided to replatform their website and replace warehouse and fulfillment systems.   

The Approach

As a fundraising site, Big Kahuna had significant custom needs for both its back-office capabilities and online experience. All orders on the website would need to be associated with a school and a student to ensure the correct allocation of funds and orders. Orders needed to be attached to the correct student and inventory options needed to vary based on the delivery location. 

The Challenge: Satisfying the Informational, Shopping, and Accessibility Needs of Different Stakeholders

Big Kahuna Prime Fundraising chose Virid as their Shopify Plus Agency partner based upon Virid's track record in delivering high-performing ecommerce websites that incorporate the latest industry best practices for usability and technology, as well as providing the complex systems integrations that achieve back-office accuracy and efficiency.   

Sales, Communications & Reporting for School Administration, Families, and Individuals

Schools and family groups needed a variety of reports based on different group levels. Schools also needed to be able to manage different aspects of the sales as well as track top sellers and communicate with their student families. Extensive reporting needed to be available at the school, classroom, individual, and family level. Teachers needed to see sales tracking for their students and administrators needed to view sales on a school level, by grade, or as individual classrooms.  

Creating Order and Delivery Convenience though Online Shopping 

Schools also have options for product sales and delivery methods. Students can fundraise through the website with a code or through door-to-door selling. Schools can also choose how orders will be delivered to the recipients. Schools can customize sales to allow for delivery to the school, to the customer directly, or allow recipients to choose their preference. This is also available at the family level. If a parent only wants items delivered to the customer’s home, they can exclude other delivery options.  

Available products vary between fundraisers and some required specific shipping options. For example, should a customer choose for their items to be delivered directly to their home as their method of delivery, perishables will not appear as a category. This ensures items arrive in good condition. This order attribution and product constraints required significant customization and integration throughout the site.   

Student Sales Identification and Tracking

In order to accurately track fundraising, shoppers need to be able to connect their purchases to the student. Virid ensured that the correct student is linked throughout the shopping process using the unique identifier. Shoppers on the site needed to be able to find the student whose fundraiser they were supporting and the ability to switch between students at any point if desired.

Keeping Customer Stakeholders Engaged and Satisfied

Big Kahuna Prime offers rewards to students, classrooms, and families when they complete fundraising goals. Some of these rewards may be a pizza party once a goal is met or a party limo ride for their friends. Each reward had complex business rules that applied differently to individuals and families and the solution needed to be customizable for each fundraising event. 

The Outcome

Virid was initially asked to build the Shopify Plus website as well as the custom integration to the third-party warehouse management system. When the scope of the account management and reporting functionality grew beyond what their new third party wanted to support, Virid stepped in to fill the gap. Constructing a custom client relationship management (CRM) system for Big Kahuna Prime and its stakeholders creates an improved user experience on both the front and back end. Additionally, different users have access to features and information specific to their role or relationship to the fundraiser.  

Virid migrated the Big Kahuna site to a new online store built on the Shopify Plus platform, assisted Big Kahuna in selecting third-party applications, developed custom applications where necessary, and performed the required integrations. The UX of the website was vastly improved with easy product search and filtering, product cross-sells, and enhanced product categorization.  Team operations were simplified and fundraiser management for schools was brought online for the first time.   

The result is an easy-to-shop user experience, data and operational efficiencies across the order management and fulfillment operations, the industry-leading support services provided by the Shopify Plus partnership, and a cost-efficient total cost of ownership that combine to satisfy the needs of an enterprise-level online business.