What started with a redesign of the DC Lottery website has led to an agency of record relationship beginning in 2022. For 40 years, the DC Lottery has been making players’ dreams come true—but more importantly, the Office provides economic vitality to the District of Columbia through its gaming products and charitable gaming activities.
DC Lottery engages DC’s Creative Agency
Problem
The DC Lottery wanted a more dynamic and engaging website with added functionality. First, we needed to migrate content to Drupal from a proprietary content management system (CMS) that didn’t allow them to easily manage content or create new pages. For non-conforming content, they were forced to build separate microsites, which was a huge burden on their teams. And even though the majority of traffic came from mobile devices, the site wasn’t fully responsive or accessible.
Solution
For the site rebuild, we chose Drupal, an open-source platform with robust functionality and flexibility, so DC Lottery would never be trapped within the confines of a proprietary CMS. The process included migrating database content dating back to 1984, including 3.5 million drawing numbers all in different formats, hundreds of games, scratchers, winners, and prizes. Not to mention accommodating the thousands of active daily users.
Content & User Engagement
DC Lottery has a large gamut of different games, programs, events, and information across its site. Through our Discovery research, we learned that the large majority of users come to the website to check winning numbers for games they had played. We increased user engagement to entice users to explore the site beyond just checking their numbers by crafting a new information architecture, developing a content strategy, and writing SEO-friendly copy for key pages.
Site Features
It was a key priority to make sure that anyone in the DC community could use the site – so we built the site to be accessible, 508 compliant, and fully responsive for any device. Additionally, the backend management of the site supports creating new pages and adding new content (the site is updated about every 5 minutes, almost 24/7). On the front end, the look and feel is an exciting, dynamic expression of the DC Lottery brand.
Virtual Event Platform
We expanded the core website to support DC Lottery’s strategic pivot to virtual events, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, by creating a custom virtual events platform within their site. We developed a custom, separate user dashboard to empower site managers to edit and run virtual events in real-time directly within the Drupal CMS. Learn more about our event services here!
Impact
Overall, the DC Lottery site was rebuilt to better serve the DC community who play the lottery as well as the needs of the site content management. This beautiful, accessible site has moved the needle for several KPIs. DC Lottery has extended their partnership with us to include continuing enhancements to the site as well as events, marketing, advertising, and more!
