There’s a new team in town
March 10, 2020
Scroll through the new PC Children's CharityTM website(Open in a new tab) and you'll be greeted by reds, yellows, greens, and blues, photographs of happy kids framed by the outlines of different fruits, and a clean design with easy-to-understand statistics and information.
The website, which launched last November, is the work of a new Digital Experience (DX) team at Loblaw Digital.
Up until last year, when this team formed, Loblaw Digital focused on supporting e-commerce—through, for example, the PC ExpressTM, Joe Fresh®, and Shoppers Drug Mart® online platforms.
"Over time, we've recognized that there are opportunities in digital far beyond e-commerce," says Jerrold Litwinenko, Director of Digital Experience. "We also need to ensure that we support digital marketing across the enterprise."
As the digital team has grown over the years—from about 100 people when Jerrold started working at Loblaw nearly four years ago to almost 400 people today—the team's skills and capabilities have grown too.
In the past, Loblaw hired agencies outside of the company to create new websites for marketing campaigns, but with the expertise now within Loblaw Digital, Jerrold says the DX team realized they could handle a lot of the work previously outsourced.
Case in point: the new PC Children's Charity site. Previously, the charity had a page on the main President's Choice® brand site. Now, it has its own standalone site.
Lisa Battistelli, Executive Director of President's Choice Children's Charity, loves the new site, admitting the previous design was plain and basic. "It was really more corporate," she says.
"As much as Loblaw is a huge corporation, we are a charity, a completely separate Canadian registered charity—one that obviously has an incredibly close relationship with Loblaw. I think this has really given us an opportunity to distinguish ourselves as being in the charitable sector as opposed to part of a corporation." The site is also mobile-friendly, with videos and animation that help bring it to life for users. Bringing this kind of work in-house allows the DX team to streamline its processes and use the same tools across the board, making building and maintaining company websites and campaigns more efficient. Another part of the digital team's work is making sure websites are accessible to all users, including people with visual, physical and cognitive disabilities and those who rely on assisted technology, such as screen readers. Mandated by the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), this work must be completed by all websites by 2021.
"The digital experience team is playing a huge role in terms of rapidly helping the organization achieve compliance through AODA, by redesigning a larger number of enterprise sites in 2020," Jerrold says.
With the charity website complete, Jerrold and his team will now be overhauling the President's Choice brand website and redesigning the Loblaw corporate site. "We as digital leaders put the user at the centre of what we build and we want to make sure that what we build services the enterprise as well," he says.
