In 2022, Marketing Decisions were nominated for the ISV Partner of the Year Award in the 2022 Oracle Markies Awards. This is the story behind our submission.
Have you ever received an SMS to let you know that you’ve just saved a person’s life?
No?
Well, 339,173 Australians have this year. And we’re behind it.
We are Marketing Decisions, and through our custom Oracle Marketing Cloud Eloqua apps, we have supported Australian Red Cross Lifeblood to change the lives of Australians each and every day with life-saving blood and plasma donations.
And that’s pretty bloody amazing.
For our team at Marketing Decisions, there has never been a project that has hit so close to home as our work with Lifeblood.
Bill McNamara, Director and Founder of Marketing Decisions explains, “For Lifeblood, a tailored and seamless customer experience for their donors is so important. Their product is blood and the result of producing that product is human lives being saved.”
There is no human element more important than one which involves saving lives. And that pressure was a continual factor for all involved at both Lifeblood and Marketing Decisions.
As an agency, we discussed many times how important this work was. This wasn’t just selling products or tickets or raising revenue. This had a very real, very important end goal. As a team, we did not take this lightly.
What we could never have imagined was just how real this would be for us. One of our team, Maddie, went on maternity leave not long after we secured Lifeblood as a client. She had an unexpectedly traumatic birth which saw her lose a massive amount of blood and needed to be taken in for emergency surgery. During this, she needed two blood transfusions in order to save her life.
Maddie explains, “I remember when Lifeblood had come on board with us as a client. We’d all been discussing how important their work was, but I never thought that I would be the one on the receiving end, desperately needing blood.”
“When my son was born, I lost of lot of blood and had to be wheeled into emergency surgery. I remember thinking that my husband and son might be on their own, and not knowing how long that might be for.”
All of a sudden, this work became very, very real for our team.
Marketing Decisions designed and built a suite of custom Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud apps in support of driving blood donations through the enabling of exceptional donor experiences. Many of these apps are now in use by other Oracle clients worldwide.
We developed in-house not just a single solution, but a suite of apps for Lifeblood, built on the Eloqua AppCloud Framework and now listed on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. This allows for these apps to be dragged and dropped into the automation flow of any Eloqua campaign or program. When invoked, these apps utilise Eloqua’s REST and Bulk API services to extract, transform and load data specific to the app’s required functionality.
These apps included our Data Writer app, SMS Connector, Call List Generator and Add to Calendar.
All of this resulted in over 1.6 million lives in the past year being changed with life-saving donations. That’s 1.6 million mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, wives, husbands, sisters, brothers, best friends, next door neighbours.
And for us, it was one of our very own colleagues.
Marketing Decisions was an obvious choice for both Oracle and Lifeblood as pioneers in the space of developing custom Eloqua apps and innovative campaign work. Marketing Decisions has been a trusted partner for organisations around Australia and worldwide since 2007 and worked with brands including Optus, Qantas, Ernst and Young, Network 10, Australian National University, Google and University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US.
