Case Studies

Wendy’s High School Heisman

About Wendy’s High School Heisman

Since 1994, Wendy’s High School Heisman has honored more than 600,000 of the nation’s most esteemed high school seniors in partnership with the Heisman Memorial Trophy®. Like The Heisman Memorial Trophy, Wendy’s believes in the pursuit of athletic and academic excellence with integrity. Every year, Wendy’s High School Heisman and The Heisman Trophy Trust team up to recognize more than 5,000 of the best high school seniors and rewards $120,000 to schools across the country. The culmination of this process takes place in December in conjunction with the National Heisman Memorial Trophy presentation during Heisman Weekend in New York City.

Client

The Challenge: Traffic Spikes Crashed Winner Announcements

Each year the Wendy’s High School Heisman attracts more than 100,000 applicant athletes from around the country. As each wave of winners are announced, students, friends, parents, and school officials perform millions of web searches over the course of a few hours. This places quite the load on both the web and database servers. Prior software partners were not able to keep the website performing during these high load times, so Wendy’s turned to the development team at Switchbox to keep their site up and running during this period. Switchbox partnered with Rattleback, an exceptional Professional Services Marketing Agency, who focused on the web application’s design.

The Solution: Cloud Solution for Peak Traffic and Security

A custom cloud based solution was built and managed personally by the team at Switchbox developed specifically to handle high-traffic scenarios. WordPress was chosen as the core CMS supported by a custom web application to facilitate searching, reporting, and data aggregation. These new systems were able to update data on winners in real-time, including updating photography and video as winners were announced in New York. In addition, the new environment was built with data integrity and security in mind, safely storing copious amounts of student data and private information in adherence with COPPA and FERPA security requirements.

The Outcome: Flawless Performance Elevated Award Ceremony

Since their launch, the new Wendy’s Heisman website and backing web application have performed flawlessly allowing for drastically increased response time for data retrieval and enhanced site performance. Rattleback, meanwhile, has maintained a high level of quality and response time to Wendy’s ever-evolving marketing efforts as the High School Heisman award ceremony grows in reach and popularity. Wendy’s’ team was so pleased with the new site that they flew the Switchbox team to New York for a Heisman ceremony – a truly great experience. Thank you to Switchbox’s partner, Rattleback, and to Wendy’s for making such a positive impact on the lives of High School athletes around the country.

The Technology & Services That Went Into Creating

Workflow Management

Data Integration

Custom Reporting

Load Testing