Case study

Holly Ransom’s Epic Challenge

Powering the leaders of tomorrow with an Epic online experience.

Holly Ransom is a globally renowned interviewer, author, board director and founder of the Epic Challenge. Named one of Australia’s 100 Most Influential Women by the Australian Financial Review, she has delivered a Peace Charter to the Dalai Lama, interviewed both the Obamas separately, was Sir Richard Branson’s nominee for Wired Magazine’s ‘Smart List’ of Future Game Changers to watch and was awarded the US Embassy’s Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Leadership Excellence in 2019.

In 2022 Holly launched the Epic Leadership Challenge (Epic), where she guides participants through her methodology of leadership popularised in her book ‘The Leading Edge’. Holly wanted to deliver an innovative experience different from any other online course. Her goal was to challenge and strengthen participants’ leadership skills, within a fun, motivational, and interactive community. Strategies from her leadership experience are embedded within the course to build accountability and positive daily habits.

Customers access the Epic Challenge through a ‘Progressive Web App’ (PWA), which has revolutionised how bite-sized online leadership development courses are delivered.

The challenges to solve

In 2021, the initial pilot of Epic was launched by Holly and the team to test the concept in a way that was cost-effective and accessible while still delivering an excellent experience for early adopters. Holly had been using an enterprise SaaS gamification platform and approached Blitzm to build a custom experience through that platform.

During the pilot program, Holly and the team decided that customising within the platform was too restrictive, and building something fully custom through the API wouldn’t deliver enough benefits over an original build. Therefore, Blitzm recommended building a PWA with WordPress. It can be downloaded to users’ mobiles like an app, without the upfront investment of a native application. This approach gave Holly creative control and allowed her to focus on the design and user experience.

Outside the Epic Challenge experience, an online eCommerce store was required. Paying customers are automatically signed up to the Epic Challenge after they go through a short and efficient shopping experience. They can also purchase team passes for multiple people, and purchase passes as a gift.

Design process

Blitzm had several workshops with Holly and her team, listening to her vision for the course. We translated the ideas into wireframes, then quickly brought the Epic Challenge to life through a live Proof of Concept (PoC) in a WordPress staging environment. This enabled Holly to interact with the experience and provide actionable feedback. We took an iterative approach to the design process with the UI and PoC built in parallel, so we could always see how the UI and UX worked together.

The project drew on Holly’s experience working with great companies and great brands – she understood what would work and the Epic Challenge was the optimal platform to bring her innovative ideas to life.

Blitzm’s extensive experience with WordPress and our collaborative design approach meant we were able to build the PWA within two months.

Project outcomes

​​The Epic Challenge PWA delivers most of the desired functionality so well that its performance far surpasses the initial goal of concept exploration and validation via MVP, and as such, Blitzm Design is continuing to optimise and build out greater functionality for the Epic Challenge moving forward.

• Awarded Silver in the Melbourne Design Awards
• Epic Challenge is a highly customised and adaptable solution. Once set up, the courses are ‘plug and play’, and Holly is able to create as many courses as she needs.
• A unique gamified experience, featuring: community feeds; leaderboards; badges; teams; and announcements.
• Analytics integration to provide excellent visibility over visitor acquisition, conversion, and user interactions/engagement.
• Multi-media uploads are supported for both admin and participants (text, video, images).
• Blitzm built custom reports to instantly generate reports based on defined parameters, enabling the client to track performance and target users with tailored communications.
• In-built pre and post-challenge surveys to measure participant satisfaction.
• Every challenge is like a mini-survey, from which the client can extract data and insights.
• ​​Launched to 665 users, with over 6,000 interactions by day 4.
• At the end of the first 28 day challenge there had been an amazing amount of engagement with the users. This included 1,884 badges earned,83,312 applauds given, 7,606 daily challenges completed and 840,871 points awarded.

Technology

The Epic Challenge is built using WordPress, WooCommerce, LifterLMS, BuddyPress, GamiPress, Salesforce, Google Analytics and Slack.