INDUSTRY
- Remove this line item and any irrelevant categories
- Health & Social Care
- Manufacturing & Construction
- Facilities Management
- Mining
- Not for Profit
- Government
- Energy & Resources
- Education
- Tourism & Travel
PROJECT TYPE
- Customer engagement
TECHNOLOGIES USED
D365 Customer Insights
Microsoft Power Pages
Microsoft Copilot
Background
The Aurora Education Foundation (Aurora) is an Indigenous organisation dedicated to providing education and employment services to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples across Australia. For more than 15 years, Aurora has created pathways for more than 1500 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander high school students, interns, undergraduates and postgraduates, enabling them to achieve their educational and career goals. Aurora’s vision is to create a society where Australia’s First Peoples are inspired by and connected to opportunities that empower them to realise their full potential.
The Challenge
Aurora sought to strengthen engagement with the community through their Customer Engagement (CE) system. This ambition led to a strategic partnership with Velrada to modernise their legacy platform. With engagement growth as the primary objective, the project was designed to deliver three critical requirements:
- Rebuild the Dynamics 365 solution: Implement a streamlined and scalable business process to reduce manual tasks and errors, enhance operational efficiency and improve outreach to current and prospect students.
- Integrate marketing automation and AI: Deploy a robust marketing platform to manage the segmentation, targeting and positioning strategies to drive growth and deepen community engagement.
- Implement a multi-channel engagement platform: Establish a centralised content management solution to ensure ease of use and better presentation control, allowing Aurora to communicate effectively across multiple channels.
Velrada’s Solution
Aurora was utilising a Dynamics 365 solution, and this engagement aimed to optimise its functionality to enhance operational efficiency while retaining existing features and valuable data. Velrada’s approach focused on rebuilding and refining the data model processes, ensuring a streamlined and scalable platform.
The solution rebuild and optimisation scope included:
- Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys (Marketing)
- Built-In SMS Solution (Twilio)
- Event Management for Camp/Engagement Days, Event Promotion and RSVPs
- Power Pages Portal – Web Forms
- Surveys
- Business Process Flows
- Automations (Power Automate)
As part of the deployment, data from the current production environment was migrated to the new Dynamics 365 production environment, providing Aurora business users with a single source of truth for stakeholder information. This enabled segmentation, prospect targeting, and personalised service positioning, supported by advanced analytics for comprehensive reporting on member data and engagement activities.
Go-Live was a hive of activity from Velrada and they ensured we were walked alongside throughout the process. The launch was so smooth some staff described it as anti-climatic, which was a massive win in the internal project teams eyes. The Velrada team have been thoughtful and patient throughout the process and always bring a solution-focused approach to their work.
Jesse King – Head of Impact and Data
Outcome & Impact
The project delivered significant enhancements, including inbound and outbound SMS functionality, a new scholarship portal built on Microsoft Power Pages, and a complete CE system rebuild. These improvements have empowered Aurora to operate with greater efficiency and will allow them to connect with their community in even more impactful ways, supporting their ability to scale outreach and deliver on their mission. These changes improve the experience for Indigenous participants and families engaging with Aurora programs by creating ensuring engagement is effective, consistent and timely.