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Beyond Blue

Beyond Blue is one of Australia’s most well-known mental health organisations. It needed to evolve its digital experience for help-seekers and transition away from a legacy CMS on Sitefinity. One of the first sites to be built on Sitecore XM Cloud, this project was a collaboration between Beyond Blue, Sitecore and Luminary.

Client:

beyondblue

Tagged:

Charities & not for profit , Health

Platform:

Who We Helped:

The challenge 

As one of Australia's leading mental health organisations, Beyond Blue’s mission is to work with the community to leverage digital solutions to improve mental health, making it easier for people to feel better, get well and stay well. However, it was being hampered in achieving this mission by a website that had been built on a platform that was in sunset support and had become costly to update and maintain. 

The site was presenting a blocker to Beyond Blue’s near and long-term aspirations of making it easier for people to access high-quality mental health support earlier. 

To address these issues, Beyond Blue decided to move to Sitecore XM Cloud, a platform that would allow it to leverage the performance and interoperability of headless CMS architecture. Among the factors that led to Sitecore XM Cloud being chosen were its scalability, security, scope for future omnichannel content delivery, and its ability to facilitate a microservices architecture approach.

What we did

Luminary worked collaboratively with Beyond Blue and SItecore to migrate the site from the existing platform (Sitefinity) to Sitecore XM Cloud. The project needed to be completed in a very tight timeframe, in order to be finished before the sunsetting of support for Sitefinity.

  • Among the services Luminary provided as part of this project were:
  • Sitecore XM Cloud workDesign, cross-browser and UI quality assurance
  • Load testing
  • Content population
  • Re-design using new Sitecore XM Cloud components 
  • SEO and analytics support
  • 301 redirects, and
  • Web chat and email support styling and fixes.
Picture of the Beyond Blue interface against a blue background

Quick Stats

Australians live with anxiety

Australians live with depression

Australians take their own lives a year

Picture of the Beyond Blue interafce on iPad

The result

The new platform is a foundational piece in Beyond Blue’s ongoing strategy to deliver cutting-edge digital services to enable all Australians to achieve their best possible mental health. It offers improved search functionality, far greater ease of content administration, better security, scalability, and the ability to use best-of-breed microservices to deliver features such as personalisation and more robust data management. 

Picture of the Beyond Blue pages on six iPhone screens

The site was delivered on time and under budget and achieved the key aim of creating a foundation for future growth and development of the experience. It was won a Sitecore Experience Award for Best Transformation Experience.

The collaborative efforts of Luminary, Beyond Blue and Sitecore were recognised by former Beyond Blue Chair and former Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, who praised the project for not only being delivered on time and within budget, but with no negative impact to the community with the transition.

The speed of delivery was largely necessitated by the looming end-of-support date for Sitefinity, but was also a testament to the highly effective working relationship between Sitecore, Beyond Blue and Luminary. 

In terms of Lighthouse ratings, mobile performance – which is a critical metric for the organisation – has gone from red to green, with 91/100 for accessibility (+8.3 above industry standard), 93/100 for best practice, 100/100 for SEO, and much faster load times (measuring 6x faster across key pages according to Speed Index). 

Additionally, key Beyond Blue service functions have improved, including:

  • The Wellbeing action tool showing a 50% increase in engagement rate
  • NewAccess page views increased by 35% and enquiries increased by 40%
  • Comparative Core Web Vitals Assessment also reflected significant improvements across mobile and desktop.
Picture of Beyond Blue desktop and mobile interface against a blue background
“Clear alignment around the objectives of the project, the deep emotional connection to the work that Beyond Blue does, coupled with the understanding of the impact to the community if it had not been delivered, were critical factors. These all led to a highly collaborative, connected and action-biassed mindset, by which all parties came together – that was where the magic happened. There were many times where it looked a little tenuous, but that mindset kept the momentum, drive and constant narrative of ‘it’s going to be tight, but we’ve got this’ - and everyone did.”

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