My Club Lotto - Sports & Lottery Fundraising Club

Technology

PHP, WordPress

Industry

Sports & Gambling

Project Type

Portal

Country

United Kingdom

About The Project

My Club Lotto is the widest lottery platform in the UK dedicated to sports clubs. The firm changed how UK sports club supporters contribute to their favorite teams. Users can win lotteries and prizes by simply supporting the clubs, and can raise money for good causes in the UK.

Apart from that, supporters can buy match tickets, gift vouchers, and claim tickets. At the end of each month, winners are announced, prizes are distributed, and the clubs receive their funding. The winner will get the amounts and prizes for each month. Supporters can buy lottery tickets for just £1 (per week). Players can win up to £25,000 per month once sufficient funds have been raised!

Our team found the concept very interesting, but it required very careful planning & execution. A financial platform of this caliber cannot afford even the slightest miscalculation. A single-digit error in the algorithm could result in disputes, financial losses, and erosion of user trust. We approached this project with the same attention a surgeon brings to the operating theatre because that’s exactly what was needed.

Key Project Deliverables

We made a completely new user experience. These were the modules, product developments, and important milestones presented to the clients.

ZOHO CRM Integration

We have integrated the entire system with ZOHO CRM to track each lead and pass along the club’s data and their supporter data. This started real-time tracking of 1000+ club profiles and supporter segments.

Goal Calculator

Supporters can set monthly support targets with visual progress indicators on the club listing fields. This calculator also sets other goals for supporters and makes it easy to set custom limits for each fundraising.

Live Chat Module

A live chat module was integrated. Here, supporters can have a chat with the support team and get their queries resolved. It also reduced support response time, which is an important feature in such a finance-related business.

Automated Lottery Distribution

We set up algorithms and a calculation system that splits the prize winnings proportionally between clubs and individual winners. This will happen automatically once the monthly announcement of winners is declared.

Funding Module

A user-friendly interface for supporters to discover, select, and support their preferred clubs by recurring donations was made live. We developed such a funding module that you can even donate 1 EUR and become a member.

Advanced Custom Filter

Implemented advanced custom filters where the name and categories of the club cause type can search clubs. You can even search clubs by name, region, sports category, and funding cause category.

Major Project Challenges

As My Club Lotto is an entirely financial platform, it’s a huge challenge to handle even the most minor calculations. If something goes wrong with the calculation, it can cause financial risk and disputes for the organization. The platform also needs high-level data security. Here’s what kept us up at night:

The platform needed to pass supporter data, club information, and transaction histories directly to ZOHO CRM for lead tracking and analytics. The challenge was not to move the data. It was to make sure no information was lost, corrupted, or duplicated in migration.

To develop a fully automated system to transfer the winning amounts to clubs and winners. Supporters needed assurance that their money would reach the right clubs. The automated distribution system had to be transparent, auditable, and tamper-proof.

To implement the ticket-selling module and gift voucher functionality so that supporters can claim the tickets.

A lottery platform is a magnet for security vulnerabilities. Shell injection attacks, XSS vulnerabilities, and unauthorized access attempts for the surface area for attack were massive. Our job was to implement high-level data security for the clubs’ and supporters’ data and to avoid any shell attacks on the platform.

Solutions & Impact

We built a proprietary calculation engine designed specifically for lottery mathematics. As our team has developed many finance portals, we have allocated the same team to develop this portal. After development, we performed security testing for shell attacks and XSS vulnerabilities and delivered a thoroughly tested website.

Club data should come into ZOHO CRM automatically. We integrated everything with ZOHO, so supporter data syncs on all platforms. Lead tracking happens in real time as well. We have used ZOHO API endpoints and created a bridge API to pass all data to ZOHO CRM and store it here.

We have developed custom plugins for the different calculation formulations and given the admin the flexibility to change calculation logic at any time from the settings area. The system also automatically divides winning amounts between clubs and supporters upon announcement.

Next, we implemented shell protection on each file upload field and are also storing all clubs’ and supporters’ data directly in ZOHO instead of on the server. Lastly, we used a well-known PDF voucher plugin to achieve ticket selling and gift voucher features, all in a single plugin.