Sitecore Symposium 2025: Modernizing Shriners Children's Digital Experience

Written By Tod Szewczyk

Tod Szewczyk and Anthony Watts seated on stage in a fireside-chat format at Sitecore Symposium 2025, with an audience watching in the foreground and a presentation slide titled "The Shriners Children's framework" displayed on screen beside them.

Joined Anthony Watts, Digital Marketing Director at Shriners Children's, on stage at Sitecore Symposium 2025 to discuss how Shriners Children's is modernizing its patient and donor digital experience on Sitecore XM Cloud. We covered why mission and message have to align before growth follows, why the "digital front door" has to open flawlessly when every click could lead to care, and why a stable platform needs to support patients and the people behind the mission at the same time.

We walked through Shriners Children's full journey to get there. Before 2018, the organization had a limited digital footprint and a "free equals low quality" perception problem to overcome. Its first-ever ad campaign and 2019 website remediation generated more leads than the system could handle, which led to the 2022 relaunch of ShrinersChildrens.org and an eventual migration off a fragmented legacy platform onto XM Cloud to support their Vision 2035 roadmap. We closed with the three-part framework that guided the transformation: start with Purpose, anchoring every platform decision in who you serve and why before deciding what technology to use; build the Platform for where the organization needs to be three years out, not just where it is today; and keep People, patients, donors, and the staff behind the mission, at the center, since the technology is there to amplify impact, not to be the point of the exercise.

Tod Szewczyk
Born in New Jersey, bounced around the east coast as a kid: South Carolina, New Jersey, Maryland and then upstate New York. Moved to Chicago for high school. Stayed in Chicago for college. Co-Produced one of the original sound art festivals in Chicago, In the Eye of the Ear with Steve Barsotti. Scored a few plays in between. In 1998, married photographer Amanda Sudimack and moved to Denver to work at RR Donnelley. Helped companies in Denver, Paris and London go public. In 2002, moved back to Chicago where son Emmet was born. Moved over to Leo Burnett as a print buyer in the same year. In 2008, traded city dweller status to (close-in) suburbanite and daughter Zoe was born. In 2013, moved up the ladder at Burnett to VP. Now spend most of my time finding new ways to connect interesting companies with the agency under the brands Leovative (blog and events Leovative, FutuRetail/FutureShop). Believer in the idea that the fastest route to innovation lies in making novel connections, from the book Where Good Ideas Come From. Have had the great fortune of working with amazingly talented people that have expanded my thinking of what is possible. Looking forward to what's next.
www.todszewczyk.com
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Consolidating a fragmented digital ecosystem at a multi-hospital academic health system