Double Good Case Study

Double Good

Located in Chicagoland and popping 15,000 pounds of handmade, ultra-premium popcorn every day, Double Good is innovating the way fundraising is organized and executed. Using the Double Good app, fundraising teams set up virtual “pop-up shops” where they can sell popcorn by sharing a link with friends and family, and keep 50% of the sales. Double Good then ships made-to-order popcorn directly to buyers, so there is no paperwork or product to handle.

From youth athletic teams, organizations of color, charitable foundations, and much more, Double Good is committed to their mission of “creating joy,” and enabling small and large non-profit groups to fund their desires to “do good.”

Business Challenge

One of the most significant operational challenges in fundraising is effective communication within a team. Traditionally, fundraising communication is conducted via SMS, third-party group chats, or even email. However, when Double Good interviewed their customers, the response was that these methods are often messy, disorganized, and do not provide the logistical control fundraiser organizers require to most effectively raise money. This is particularly the case with larger events. Ultimately, organizations wanted centralized control without having to leave the app.

Seeing an opportunity to innovate, Double Good sought to create a rich chat experience for their users to leverage, thus driving greater profits for their causes. However, from the project’s onset, Double Good recognized that they were not a chat developing company. “How do we go about building chat? We’ve never done this before,” said Anton German, CTO/CPO of Double Good. While the company considered every angle “just to have a better understanding of build versus buy,” German states that there would be “too much we would have to give up on our product roadmap” to develop chat in-house. German adds that “it wasn’t just the task of building chat that was the issue, it was also the maintenance of it” as well.

Double Good’s steadfast mission has always been to “spread joy,” and functionalities such as their virtual platform paired with chat were only meant to be enablement tools for their end-users, not the primary product itself. According to German, “that’s where the idea of evaluating an API started. If something is not part of our core business model, is there an API available that we can tap into? That’s how we found Sendbird.”

Why Double Good Chose Sendbird

Double Good had firm requirements in selecting a chat API vendor, the first being design flexibility. For DoubleGood’s Head of Design, “a must have was customization. With Sendbird, on the front-end there was no enforced UI structure for us,” allowing the team full creativity in terms of design, and a “seamless rolled out product.”

German states that other considerations such as “uptime, low latency, and react native support,” were also strong factors, but primarily “being able to have larger channel groups” was the first priority.

Double Good did not necessarily want to build out all the bells and whistles in the first iteration, so the team sought to “ensure that even with a large amount of chat members in the group, it would still work without a distracting experience.” German elaborates that the team ”wanted to roll out the MVP quickly and then keep improving upon it as the company progressed and grew.”

After evaluating several platforms on the market, “Sendbird checked off all the boxes,” and Double Good selected Sendbird because of its seamless design, rich and customizable feature set, and ability to implement and roll-out quickly.

Results

To date, Double Good has raised over $90 million for schools and small organizations, all through the magic of its popcorn product and generous business model. With its mobile app and virtual pop-up model changing the fundraising landscape, chat has proven to be an invaluable component in Double Good’s success in building community within their user base and enabling organizations to further benefit their causes.

Greater connections and camaraderie between users has translated into increased retention rates, as “we’re obsessed about user experience,” says German, “and we measure everything around engagement, making sure that it elevates that fundraising experience. Sendbird helps our retention because when users come to fundraise with us, robust chat is something they don’t expect, and that’s why we call it ‘the delighter.’ We feel like it builds a tighter connection with our customers by allowing that community to form very quickly.”

Staying true to Double Good’s product roadmap and timelines, Sendbird Chat was fully implemented in just two weeks. Even against aggressive timelines, German states that the Double Good team was proud “to have been able to get chat into the hands of users and get feedback quickly.”

Speedy implementation meant significantly reduced time to market as well, with German elaborating that Double Good “definitely shaved off at least two months in the initial rollout.”

Furthermore, even with the tribulations of the COVID-19 pandemic, business had increased with the high demand for virtual fundraising. “We have noticed as more organizations have come to fundraise virtually and can’t meet in person, chat is a great way to announce a fundraiser, to communicate, to coordinate. We’ve seen a significant spike in usage.”

Finally, with Sendbird, Double Good could eliminate “the overhead and burden of building and maintaining chat” and instead focus on “unlocking joy” for their users and concentrate directly on fundraising. Sendbird is helping Double Good deliver on its promise of creating joy in today’s digital market.

1) Since day one, Sendbird has partnered with AWS to establish itself as a leading conversations platform that enables a secure, global, and scalable in-app conversation experience. Sendbird is an AWS advanced tier technology partner operating 45+ AWSnative services in 9 regions. Thanks to Amazon’s AWS Auto Scaling and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud services, Sendbird manages massive digital traffic sending billions of messages monthly. Using Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Route53 geolocation functions, Sendbird ensures reliable global traffic distribution. Sendbird also leverages AWS CloudFormation to automate its servers’ management in each region efficiently. Lastly, AWS Elasticache and Amazon Aurora allow Sendbird to achieve millisecond latency and data storage for over 300 million monthly active users. Sendbird’s world-class conversation platform architecture and technical foundations are certified by AWS.