Project Symphony.

World Vision New Zealand is one of Aotearoa's largest child sponsorship and humanitarian organisations, with public fundraising programmes spanning child sponsorship, emergency appeals, gifts and wills, regular giving and a national supporter base measured in the hundreds of thousands. The organisation embarked on a multi-year transformation called Project Symphony to replatform its customer data and marketing technology stack, retire a legacy CRM and email setup, and move to a modern data warehouse and customer data platform that would let the fundraising and marketing teams work from one trusted view of the supporter.

Stitch was engaged as the customer data, marketing automation and performance media partner for Project Symphony, working alongside the WVNZ delivery, data and fundraising teams.

The legacy stack was doing exactly what a legacy stack does. Supporter data was scattered across a Snowflake warehouse, a separate CRM, HubSpot for email, GA4 for analytics, and a paid media setup that could not see past last-click. The fundraising team could not build audiences across that mess. The lifecycle team could not trigger comms off behaviour. The performance media team could not optimise toward the metrics the board actually cares about.

On top of that, a not-for-profit cannot waste a dollar. Every cost per acquisition number had to defend itself against the alternative of putting that dollar into the field. The new stack had to deliver a unified supporter view, journey-grade orchestration, clean conversion measurement, and a paid media programme that could be defended in front of a board.

We architected the data foundation around Twilio Segment as the customer data platform, with Snowflake as the warehouse, and Customer.io as the lifecycle engine. Stitch built the full Segment tracking plan, designed the data layer, ran the implementation through Google Tag Manager, and stood up the identity resolution that joined web behaviour, transactional data and supporter records into one profile. The platform was wired so that Snowflake-resident supporter data could be combined with real-time event data inside Segment, then activated downstream.

On top of that foundation, we ran a programme of journey design workshops with the WVNZ fundraising and marketing teams. We mapped the supporter lifecycle across single gift, gifts and wills, child sponsorship onboarding, the Chosen sponsorship journey, emergency appeals and the supporter portal. Each journey was specified as audience definitions, triggers, exit criteria and the events needed to support it. We then migrated the HubSpot audiences into Segment and rebuilt the email programme inside Customer.io.

Alongside the platform work, Stitch took over the paid media programme across Meta Ads and Google Ads, plus above-the-line planning for the major campaigns. Conversion tracking was rebuilt from the ground up around product-specific events, so a child sponsorship completion, a one-off donation and a gifts-and-wills enquiry were measured separately rather than collapsed into a single purchase event. Campaign optimisation was aligned to the actual fundraising goals, not the platforms' default conversions.

• Single supporter view live across Twilio Segment, Snowflake and Customer.io
• Audience migration from HubSpot to Segment delivered and validated
• Tracking architecture rebuilt around product-specific conversion events for child sponsorship, gifts and wills, emergency appeals and one-off donations
• Journey design and build workshops delivered across single gift, gifts and wills, child sponsorship onboarding, Chosen lead nurturing, supporter portal and emergency appeals
• Paid media programme across Meta Ads and Google Ads, plus above-the-line planning for major campaigns
• Engagement rate on organic search lifted year on year despite reduced session volume
• Stack: Twilio Segment, Snowflake, Customer.io, GA4, Google Tag Manager, Meta Ads, Google Ads, Looker Studio
• Timeframe: 2023 to early 2026

Not every transformation finishes the way it starts. What stayed true through Project Symphony was the brief Stitch was hired against. Unify the data, run the lifecycle, defend every dollar. We built it, we ran it, we measured it.