The Oregon Lottery has grown to be a significant part of the economy in Oregon, funneling billions of dollars into programs that Oregonians care about. When the gaming brand came to Pollinate, they were ready to tackle a huge job: create order, consistency and accessibility for their online presence, bringing forward a cohesive, mobile-first digital brand.
The result was a true agency-wide collaboration, with our Dev, UX, UI and Creative teams working together towards a common goal: Oregon Lottery’s first mobile app, and a brand new OregonLottery.org.
To help wrangle all the pieces, we created a vast library of flexible, easy-to-manage design elements to help keep the site fresh. Each jackpot game was assigned a flexible pattern assembled from spot illustrations by Drew Bardana, and the content library was further fleshed out with iconography and photography.
Inspired by the brightness of lottery games, color was carefully considered, with the goal to have enough contrast to pass AA-level WCAG guidelines.
Phase one for Oregon Lottery’s mobile first approach was to build an on-the-go scanning app available on both iOS and Android. We delivered, thoughtfully balancing the lightheartedness of gaming with the gravity of Lottery’s significant and tangible impact on their community partners.
In 2020, Pollinate launched the new Oregon Lottery WordPress website. We were challenged to build a secure headless static site that used WordPress as the admin, and Azure as the front-end host. Always up for a challenge, we built — and now manage — this headless website, including a custom plugin for static deployments.
With a small digital marketing team at Lottery, efficiencies and cutting back duplicate content entry was a large goal for their team. We were able to deliver on this request by creating a single admin in WordPress that was used by not just the website, but the mobile app as well. This allowed content to be entered in one place, but shared across both platforms — all controlled by APIs created in-house at Pollinate. We are always up for a challenge, and loved bringing our mobile and web development teams together to solve this one.
Launched but Always Optimizing
With a content and player approach first, the website and mobile app have never been “set-it-and-forget-it” tools for Lottery. Pollinate schedules quarterly analytics reviews of both tools, where we do a deep dive into all analytics data available from GA GTM, media campaigns, Microsoft, app stores and in-house Lottery data. This helps us steer larger conversations around optimizations, and helps us determine future road maps. These deep dives have allowed us to continue to launch new features such as single login across platforms and the Second Chance program — and helped Lottery determine more successful marketing and content driven campaigns. That’s a win for everyone!