The late New York City novelist Paul Auster wrote: “Expect the unexpected, they say, but once the unexpected happens, the last thing you expect is that it will happen again.”

We definitely always plan for the unexpected, but we also set up continuity and contingency plans, positioning them at the ready for any occurrence.

Of course, the very nature of unexpected things is that sometimes they happen, no matter how much anyone tries to anticipate them. We still do our absolute best to game out every scenario (it’s called "load testing”; more on that below). You can rest assured that we move mountains to eliminate any chance that the unexpected catches us by surprise.

With that in mind, we want to share a bit more about the workarounds we have developed in case the unexpected does happen.

Our latest failsafes

We have spent years building and refining digital fundraising tools that make charitable giving via the internet easy, intuitive, fast and secure. Even joyous. Our daily imperative is to ensure that those pages are operational 100% of the time. 

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 rely on, we now 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." While we don’t anticipate needing this, this failsafe is an option to guarantee a nonprofit's ongoing fundraising.

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.

Managing issues

We hope never to implement any of the above. One way of doing so is routinely testing our systems, ensuring that we identify and solve potential issues in advance. Another way is maintaining open lines of communication with our member nonprofits and their donors, answering questions and quickly identifying and fixing any bugs.

Load testing

“Load testing” is how we performance-test our system, simulating especially high demand. Over time, we have been developing traffic patterns that more and more accurately reflect reality. In these tests, we intentionally stress the platform to identify its breaking points and then develop fixes against those scenarios. 

QA testing

Whenever we add anything to our systems – anything: major or minor new features, large and small improvements, bug fixes – our quality assurance (QA) engineers rigorously test what is being added. In her own words, one of our QA engineers, Alexandra Lunga-Ceban, describes her work as follows: "I'm an inspector who makes sure the new stuff works before it gets to the users. Basically, I'm the last line of defense between you and chaos.”

Customer support

We emphasize timely and effective customer support as a key component of the service we provide. Our skilled, experienced and tight-knit customer support team is the front line of help and we take special pride in their human touch at a time when tech support can sometimes feel too automated. We recently shared news of the team’s 100,000th conversation, speedy response times and high customer satisfaction score.

Learn more about how Give Lively supports its members through the customer service team, online resources, collaborative product development, webinars, trainings and pre-recorded courses.