Case Study

Serverless Donation Processing on AWS

Services Provided: Stripe Integration, Hubspot Integration, AWS API Gateway, AWS Lambda, AWS DynamoDB, React Apps

Introduction

One of our larger non-profit clients needed to overhaul their donation capture and processing systems, and they needed to do so in a matter of weeks before Giving Tuesday and the end-of-year campaigns that are vital to their organization's financial health.

Goals and Challenges

Our client's problem was multi-faceted, spanning across their payment processing solution, website integrations, and data migration and integrity between marketing and donor management systems. The problem created key points of failure in the donor tracking and retention efforts of our client.

Too much time was being spent on manually cleaning and integrating data between key systems like the payment processor, the donor data system of record, and the marketing system responsible for thanking and cultivating donors.

We met the challenge head on, focused on releasing a minimum viable product (MVP) that resolved the highest pain index problem first, and helped our client exceed their online fundraising goals for the end of the year. Our solution processed over $80,000 in a matter of hours during the critical year-end fundraising window with no downtime.

Immaculata Studios' custom donation form and processing infrastructure set up has been game-changing for us. With the new functionality set up alongside their team we have been able to A/B test and maximize our donor-conversions, and streamline internal data flow and communication within our team. This has produced more revenue for our organization as well as higher quality customer service and response rate to our donors. Other "out-of-the-box" platforms and donation processing set ups frustrated our innovative team for years. Immaculata Studios' solutions have revolutionized our online giving and we will not be going back!"

— Vice President of Strategic Partnerships, Digital Advocacy Non-Profit Customer

Solution Details

We reduced the number of systems involved to REDUCE complexity and INCREASE security and reliability.

We delivered phase 1 of the solution under severe time constraints while maintaining compliance with industry standard architecture patterns, namely, the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

We delivered a scalable, flexible, manageable, and cost-effective solution by implementing a “serverless” architecture (only “on” when in use) instead of an always-on system that requires on-going maintenance and cost even when not in use.

We laid the foundation for further iterative improvement projects related to donor acquisition, analytics, and data processing.

We built a primarily client-owned infrastructure solution while still being competitive with the cost of implementing a turn-key SaaS solution that charges based on a percentage raised.

AWS Services: S3, CloudFront, API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, Cloudwatch, SNS, and more

Customer Successes and Benefits

$11 million+ in donations processed since 2018

Judging a tree by its fruits bodes well for the solution we provided and, more importantly, our client’s mission.

Empowered by the new technologies and processes associated with the technologies, our client is free to focus on the more important fundraising tasks of targeting, creativity, and cultivation. The fruits of this new freedom are plentiful.

They are no longer worried about or resolving technical problems associated with capturing donations online, and have processed ~$11+ million in donations since our solution deployed. Now, they are focusing on the societal impact they should be focused on!

On the operations side, our client now has real-time visibility into the performance of the entire donation capture and processing pipeline, allowing quick resolutions for any issues that arise from a technical, security, or donor communications perspective.