What happens in the event of a service disruption?
Our goal is to make charitable giving via the internet easy, intuitive, fast and secure. Even joyous. Our daily imperative is to ensure that fundraising pages are operational 100% of the time.
To do this, we attempt to game out every scenario and eliminate any chance that the unexpected catches us by surprise. But we also have contingency and continuity plans, such as workarounds to guarantee nonprofits’ uninterrupted ability to raise funds.
Our current failsafes
Reduced features fundraising pages
Every fundraising page is composed of numerous features. The tech that underpins this is complex. During a significant service slowdown, whether it’s due to our own code or to a third-party service, we have the ability to disable non-critical fundraising page features, such as the progress thermometer, leaderboard, list of recent donations and the media (images and videos) that appears in or above the description.
A banner at the top of a page with reduced features will advise that "At this time, our fundraising technology is experiencing degraded service. This page is a streamlined fallback to ensure our uninterrupted ability to raise funds.”
Back-up fundraising pages
If a service disruption becomes so serious that we are unable to display fundraising pages, we have developed a minimalized checkout form hosted by Stripe, our primary payment processor. Donors will first visit a landing page explaining that there is a platform disruption.
The landing page points to the Stripe-based back-up donation form instead.
