St John’s Lottery

Established: 1883 (Australia) | 1885 (South Australia) | 1951 (State Ambulance Service) | 1992 (Transition to SA Ambulance Service)

“The movement traversed the vast Indian Ocean, bringing St John Ambulance to Australia in 1883 and to South Australia in 1885. Since then, the organisation has evolved from its first-aid origins to establishing the state ambulance service in 1951. It later transitioned the service over to SA Ambulance Service in 1992 so that St John could once again focus on first aid provision, social inclusion, and youth development.”

Employees: 193 staff and 953 volunteers
Headquarters: Unley, Adelaide, South Australia
Website: www.stjohnsa.com.au

St John Ambulance SA remains committed to empowering South Australians with life-saving skills and community care, while continuing to evolve through digital innovation, inclusive services, and sustainable fundraising initiatives such as the St John’s Lottery.

Running a charitable organisation depends on community support – donations, volunteers, partnerships, and commercial activity. To diversify income, St John Ambulance SA sought a sustainable, independent fundraising channel that could supplement traditional efforts and help fund vital first-aid, youth, and inclusion programs.

In 2019, the organisation decided to launch its first charity lottery, but needed a technology partner capable of delivering a secure, scalable, and compliant digital platform. The solution had to support everything from ticket sales and payments to memberships, marketing, and regulatory reporting – all while handling massive traffic spikes from national TV broadcasts and maintaining total data integrity.

Key challenges included:

• Security & integrity – protection against fraud and malicious attacks targeting high-value lotteries.
• Performance under load – managing avalanche-level web traffic during live call-to-action events.
• Complex payment & ticketing workflows – multiple purchase paths, gifting options, and PCI compliance.

Cost control – maximising every dollar raised by keeping development and infrastructure lean without compromising quality.

At launch, neither St John’s nor The Distillery knew how large the lottery could become, so the teams adopted a staged, iterative approach – testing, learning, and scaling with every release.

Phase 1 – Proof of Concept

The Distillery delivered a customised WordPress / WooCommerce solution to get the first lottery live quickly and cost-effectively. This pilot validated audience appetite, proved the commercial model, and established operational foundations for future growth.

Phase 2 – Scaling & Hardening

As the lottery’s success grew, so did the platform’s sophistication:

• Introduced dual-layer edge security via Cloudflare’s global Web Application Firewall and DDoS protection.
• Implemented load-balancing and queuing systems to manage concurrent users during broadcast peaks.
• Partnered with WP Engine for managed, scalable hosting with major-event support.
• Integrated New Relic performance monitoring for real-time diagnostics and optimisation.
• Added call-centre integration, enabling trained operators to handle sales and support in a PCI-compliant environment.
• Built custom reporting, marketing, and BI dashboards to track conversions, manage members, and monitor financial and regulatory performance.

Phase 3 – National Expansion

The platform evolved to run multiple lotteries per year across Australia, supporting new features such as:

• Membership and subscription management
• Multi-choice prizing
• Marketing integrations for CRM and campaign automation
• Live calls-to-action tied into national TV broadcasts such as Carols by Candlelight

This progressive build ensured technical resilience, compliance, and user trust while allowing St John’s to reinvest more of each lottery’s proceeds back into the community.

Over five years, St John’s lottery has grown from a local trial into a nationally recognised fundraising program – powered end-to-end by technology built and maintained by The Distillery.

Key outcomes include:

• Expansion from one pilot lottery to two national lotteries per year.
• Introduction of membership programs and multi-choice prizing, increasing participant engagement.
• Seamless management of massive real-time traffic surges from national TV promotions.
• Five years of secure, stable, and compliant operations with zero major outages.
• Continuous reinvestment of proceeds into life-saving and community initiatives across Australia.

The partnership exemplifies how smart, scalable technology can empower not-for-profit organisations to achieve long-term financial independence and amplify their social impact.