App Partnership with Humanitarian Aid Nonprofit
- Custom Software Development
- $200,000 to $999,999
- Quality
- 5.0
- Schedule
- 4.5
- Cost
- 4.5
- Willing to Refer
- 5.0
"They've got tremendous chops on the back-end server side of things."
- Other industries
- New York, United States
- 10,001+ Employees
- Phone Interview
- Verified
3 Sided Cube has worked with the client to develop 10-12 apps, all of which are available on both the Android and iOS platforms.
3 Sided Cube has consistently met the client’s high standards for functionality, understanding that these apps cannot afford to crash. The client has seen 8.7 million total downloads, with one app reaching number two for free apps in the App Store and another winning the Webby Award for Best App.
A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.
BACKGROUND
Introduce your business and what you do there.
We are a humanitarian aid nonprofit organization. I work in the Health and Safety Division. My team is responsible for the product development and product management of mobile apps across the entire organization. My title is Senior Director of Health and Safety Digital Engagement.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
What business challenge were you trying to address with 3 Sided Cube?
We have about a four-year history with 3 Sided Cube. We’ve launched probably 10 to 12 different apps with them, the majority of which have been met with incredible success. Because we’ve launched apps across all the different verticals within our organization, each app we’ve done has had their own business objectives.
Starting with the first two that put us on the map, we launched a first-aid app that they had worked on with our British counterpart organization. We took that and tweaked it for U.S. audiences based on our first-aid pedagogy. We launched that, and we got an amazing reception for the app.
Then, the next app that we did was for hurricane preparedness. The business objective there was to deliver a complete hurricane preparedness tool with as much capability baked into the app in case your power goes out or the cell service goes out, to deliver the best possible tool to be prepared right before, during, and after a hurricane. It also had the ability to plan ahead for the next hurricane season. That was an incredibly complex app. The interesting thing was that we launched that mid-August of 2012 I believe. Two weeks after we launched it, Hurricane Isaac hit down South, and then that October was when Sandy hit.
We launched this real-time alerting app, and all of a sudden it’s being tested in arguably one of the largest hurricanes or storms the country has seen in 100 years or so. As a testament to how well it did, there were numerous user reviews saying how much it helped them through it, but from a sheer app success lens, we made it to number two of all free apps across Apple’s App Store. That was immensely successful. We got great metrics and learnings by watching how people use the app, the emails we received, the user reviews, etc.
In March 2013, we launched a tornado app, which was even more challenging because with a hurricane, you know a hurricane’s coming a week out. With a tornado, you only know that it’s coming when you hear your town’s tornado sirens go off, and you have a matter of minutes, if not seconds, to get to the lowest point of your house. That was a whole other challenge, to make sure that these tornado alerts got out and then that we would be able to make a siren alert significant enough that it could potentially wake people up. After we launched the app, May 2013 was when those tornadoes touched down in Moore, Oklahoma and really devastated that area. We literally had emails saying, “Your app saved our life because the alerts went off. The siren in your app went off before my town’s sirens went off. I was able to get to safety, so it literally saved our lives.”
Like I said, there’s been plenty of highlights since then culminating this past May or June. With 3 Sided Cube, we won a Webby Award for Best App for our blood donor app. In between there, we’ve had a lot of successes with 3 Sided Cube.
SOLUTION
What was the scope of their involvement?
Everything we’ve done has been available on iPhone and Android. On a technology aspect, especially with tornadoes, when an alert goes out, users are going to their apps, everything’s converging on the servers at one time. 3 Sided Cube has had to learn how to optimize their whole back-end system for that, in order to make sure it doesn’t go down, because that’s one thing that they know is non-negotiable, these apps cannot go down. Not only are they phenomenal on the app side, they’ve got tremendous chops on the back-end server side of things.
How did you come to work with 3 Sided Cube?
We were taking our first foray into apps, and the British organization really liked what they did for them. We thought it was pretty clean and simple, and to be honest, the price was really good, especially as a non-profit. The price was attractive.
How much have you invested with 3 Sided Cube?
The prices for the apps have ranged. We never have just launched one of these apps and just let it sit. Because we see them as valuable tools, I actually used to work constantly, perpetually updating them. So, we have basically done apps in a whole range of amounts.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?
I mentioned hitting number two of all the free apps. For us, that was tremendous, obviously. In four years, we’ve done 8.7 million downloads across the board, which to us is pretty phenomenal. We know our preparedness apps are working thanks to the emails and user reviews we receive.
With the blood donor app, the organization takes blood donations, and we sell that blood to hospitals. That’s the organization’s overall biggest revenue driver. We launched it two years ago and it has the highest show rate of any channel for this organization. What we’ve found is donors that make appointments through the app have the highest show rate, meaning those people actually make the appointment and then show up most frequently. Whatever the blood donor app is, it’s 10 percentage points higher than the next one down, which is probably the website. Not only do the app users have the highest show rate, they also have the highest production rate, meaning that we are able to get more blood from the app-based donors than the other channels as well. Again, it’s a ten-percentage point difference between the next highest channel.
What distinguishes 3 Sided Cube from other providers?
There’s a few things. First of all, it’s creativity, problem solving, and business understanding.
We’re a very close partner in the overall user experience of the app, the concept, what tools are going to be in there, and what features will be created. The thing that we always are impressed by is that 3 Sided Cube will always make the app do whatever we want it to do, but in a way cooler or better looking way than we had anticipated. This is what I mean by creative.
As far as problem solving, there are times when we will ask them to do something and sometimes they will come back and explain why they’re not going to be able to do it. More often than not, they come back with a solution to the problem at hand when we really push on them.
From a business partner perspective, they quickly understood the importance of our projects, especially the preparedness apps with the alerts, the blood donor apps, the nature of what we do, and the nature of the users of our apps. They get it. Especially with developers, you don’t always want them talking to the internal client. Sometimes my team is the internal client, but for other apps, they’re talking to other internal teams. There are different internal teams who don’t think like we do, but we never have had an issue.
Is there anything 3 Sided Cube could have improved or done differently?
I think from a project management process perspective, we’ve found ourselves almost trying to do too much too quickly. Sometimes we just needed to step back, stop for a second, and analyze things. It’s a matter of them not wanting to say no to us, of course. They’re a great partner and they feel the success.
Another area for improvement is QA [quality assurance]. Because of the nature of the apps, especially the preparedness ones, people’s lives were literally depending on those apps, so my team would do more than UAT [user acceptance testing]. We’d QA the apps, and we almost admitted we were too hard on them. We wanted perfection. Because of that, they eased up a bit on the QA because they knew we were doing it. We always knew this was a problem, and we’ve had extra resources come on to help us QA, but we’re moving away from it and are working with the 3 Sided Cube team to move more of the QA back to their team.
RATINGS
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Quality
5.0Service & Deliverables
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Schedule
4.5On time / deadlines
"I don’t think we’ve ever missed a hard deadline that we’ve given them. Now, it may not have been pretty getting there, but I don’t think we’ve ever blown a hard date we’ve given them."
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Cost
4.5Value / within estimates
"It’s usually pretty fair, and they’re good about sticking to budget with every project."
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Willing to Refer
5.0NPS
