Good Friday Appeal | Case Studies

How automated scaling in the cloud captured floods of donations to help sick children.

$4M

Donations

Processed in < 15 hours

0 Minutes

Downtime

For the entire event

Real time financial reporting during telethon

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Challenge

The Good Friday Appeal raises over $17M for sick kids each year. A quarter of that comes in a single day, when their annual telethon is broadcast Victoria-wide.

In 2014, the organisation was using a grab bag of legacy systems to manage donations and donor information. These systems were difficult to operate, expensive to support, and almost impossible to enhance.

Competition in the non profit space is intense, and a frictionless donor experience is critical.

To grow, the Good Friday Appeal needed a simple, integrated, web based donor platform. One that could reliably process low volume payments 364 days a year, and then scale to accommodate the telethon spike. And enable workers and volunteers to log details of cash donations collected from the public.

Competition in the non profit space is intense, and a frictionless donor experience is critical.

SOLUTION

Applying GrowthOps’ unique ‘beyond agile’ approach, our analysts teamed with users to strip out unnecessary features and focus on the core capabilities needed to capture, manage and analyse donors and payments, and reconcile payments with the relevant bank. This minimised waste and accelerated delivery.

Our engineers identified the Google Cloud Platform as an ideal environment for the new application. Automated scaling would ensure spikes in traffic were managed without disruption. Building on the Google App Engine, we could automatically cache static images, web pages and Javascript files close to users in different locations. This sped up response times and reduced load on virtual machines and databases.

We utilised Google Cloud Datastore to run a highly scalable database and provide rock solid transactional support. And made heavy use of App Engine Task Queues to process large numbers of requests simultaneously.

Outcome

In just 5 months the new platform was iterated, tested, and live. Our cross discipline product team had created an easy-to-use, rich application running on cost-effective, reliable and scalable infrastructure.

On the day of the telethon, the application scaled as designed and processed over $4M of public donations without a single drop out or delay for the duration of the event. Using Google BigQuery, we delivered real-time reporting that ensured the donation updates were more timely and accurate than ever before.

On the day of the telethon, the application processed over $4M of public donations without a single drop out or delay.

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