Rapid prototyping for the real world in 10 days
Alpha International, the organisation behind the globally renowned Alpha course, approached us with an ambitious challenge. Alpha, known for its open discussions about life, faith, and meaning, attracts over 1.3 million participants annually across 100 countries, it is already highly successful in reaching and engaging people right across the spectrum.
However, Alpha’s ambitions don’t stop there, in conjunction with their new 2033 vision to reach 100 million people they approached scout+redeem to help deepen engagement, retention and ultimately understanding through the Alpha course journey.
The Challenge
The process kicked off through a hybrid in-person and online Design Sprint spanning three countries to delve deep into the opportunity space and gather insights from across the disciplines of Alpha and their guests.
Using a clickable prototype model we gathered feedback from previous and potential Alpha guests to prove out assumptions and learn about further engagement pain points.
However, even with a strong discipline and practice of gathering guest insights, the real proof had to be in the midst of a 10-12 week journey of guests attending Alpha.
With Alpha running through term times we knew we had to act fast to catch the beginning of the next and arguably busiest Alpha term, September through to November, else risk running development cycles through Christmas to catch the January term and miss a whole feedback testing cycle.
The Solution
Our in house engineering team stepped up to the challenge bringing together tools we had been developing over the previous year. This enabled rock solid content delivery and rapid implementation. Our initial efforts in this area took three months from start to finish. Later iterations were shortened to three or four weeks, but to meet the current deadline, we had just two weeks.
The Design Sprint gave us a strong start and a clear mvp feature set quickly formed. Small adjustments to this allowed us to turn around the development from design to app store in just ten days, comfortably meeting the go-live window for early courses. This allowed Alpha to sign up 10 churches to be beta testers for the first ever Alpha companion app, offering support with further resources, answers to common questions, recaps of content and a deeper engagement opportunity to ask questions and reflect on what guests were discovering.
Test
Further tooling allowed us to run additional experiments throughout the course using the app as a vehicle for feedback, surveys and insights that hadn’t been possible before. Releasing into the September term further allowed iterations through into January building confidence and to experiment further, all the while gathering feedback from both guests and host churches to gain product market fit and confidence in the success of reaching the ambition of further growth for Alpha.
The Impact
The project has now gone to the next level of scalability and is able to cope with a variety of custom Alpha rollouts, as churches refine and shape Alpha to their context. The next step is a more international rollout across a much larger set of churches, prior to a mature product being more freely available. All the while setting Alpha up for the challenge ahead of reaching 100 million people over the next 8-10 years.
