Claranet rolls up its sleeves for BBC’s Children in Need

Managed Services Provider (MSP) Claranet has teamed up with Peugeot, as part of its corporate social responsibility programme, to support their work with BBC’s Children in Need, hosting the microsite for their annual charity car wash event, ‘The UK’s Largest Car Wash’.

Running since 1980, Children in Need is the BBC's corporate charity in the UK. They provide grants to projects throughout the UK, which focus on children and young people who are disadvantaged. Peugeot began fundraising for the charity in 2012, launching ‘The UK’s Largest Car Wash’, for which they invited their customers to ‘Get Sudsey with Pudsey’, at over 200 Peugeot dealerships across the country.

To mobilise support for the campaign this year, Peugeot has launched a stand-alone website, and turned to Claranet to host it on their infrastructure as a service platform, the Virtual Data Centre (VDC). The microsite (www.pudseyscarwash.co.uk), which went live in October and runs through to December, is a fully interactive portal through which supporters can find and organise local charity car washes, learn about the project and, importantly, donate money.

Steven Fahey, PR Manager at Peugeot, said: “Our online presence and digital communications strategy is central to our fundraising work with Children in Need. Without a fully operational and reliable website for the campaign, we would risk missing out on important donations and support for the charity, something that we couldn’t risk. Due to the nature of the campaign, traffic to the site can change rapidly. This meant that we needed a hosting partner that could handle these demands and keep the site running smoothly. Having worked with Claranet since the start of this year, we had seen their Virtual Data Centre service in action, and knew that they would be the right provider for this project.”

Claranet’s cloud platform (VDC) is designed to handle the sudden surges of interest that are part and parcel of the Children in Need campaign. The platform gives Peugeot the ability to scale the site to their needs, to cope with times of peak demand, while the resilience of the service ensures that the highest levels of availability and uptime are maintained.

Claranet UK’s Managing Director, Michel Robert, added: “Claranet’s cloud platform ensures that Peugeot’s microsite can cope with spikes in traffic, which are driven by calls to action on the Children in Need programme. Working with the team at Peugeot, Claranet can work out the likely impact of planned programmes and advertising schedules, and dynamically increase compute capacity to meet peak traffic. Corporate social responsibility and charities hold an important place in our company ethos, so we are delighted to be able to participate alongside Peugeot to support such an important and worthwhile cause.”