Challenges

Our deep dive into the existing email landscape revealed several critical challenges:

• Inconsistent Branding & User Experience: Emails lacked visual cohesion. Different campaigns and departments used varying styles for fonts, buttons, and layouts, creating a disjointed brand perception and confusing recipients.

• Slow & Inefficient Production: Designers and marketers were constantly rebuilding common email elements. This "start from scratch" approach led to excessive time spent on repetitive tasks, significantly slowing down campaign deployment and approval processes.

• High Error Rate & QA Headaches: Manual email coding and design frequently resulted in rendering inconsistencies across a multitude of email clients (especially problematic ones like Outlook) and devices. This necessitated extensive manual quality assurance and last-minute fixes.

• Lack of Scalability & Flexibility: The absence of a standardized system made it incredibly difficult to rapidly launch new campaigns or quickly adapt to urgent communication needs, limiting our organizational agility.

• Technical Debt & Maintenance Burden: Existing email templates were often outdated, inefficiently coded, and difficult to update, creating a significant maintenance burden.

• Dependency on Design/Dev Teams: Non-technical team members were heavily reliant on designers and developers for every email build, creating bottlenecks and preventing them from self-serving even minor adjustments.

• Achieving True Responsiveness: Ensuring consistent and perfect display across all device sizes and email clients was a persistent struggle without a robust, responsive framework.

My role

As a Senior Digital Designer at Children's, the initiative to overhaul the email communication strategy was a key focus. Prior to this project, the email creation process was a significant bottleneck. Teams across the organization were building emails from scratch, leading to inconsistent branding, inefficient production workflows, and a high rate of rendering errors across various email clients and devices. This fragmented approach hindered the ability to scale communications effectively, slowed down campaign launches, and consumed valuable design and development resources in repetitive, low-value tasks. The primary goal was to establish a unified, efficient, and highly scalable system that would empower content creators while ensuring consistent, on-brand experiences for a diverse audience, including donors, patients, and staff.