Carrying The Load
As Click & Pledge's transaction volumes have soared, so also has the company's need to boost performance. "You get mathematical problems when you triple volume every year," Kami laughs. There's no way to handle it with one server in cluster mode. Click & Pledge now has its own data center, with a primarily Cisco infrastructure.
For help with performance, though, Click & Pledge turned to Coyote Point Systems. Donation traffic typically spikes on certain dates, such as Election Day or Dec. 31. You can't be down for maintenance on those days, Kami says.
Click & Pledge wanted to be able to do necessary upgrades without interrupting service. In addition, Coyote Point's compression technology processes requests and sends the request back to the user compressed, which speeds response time. "Today's browsers all do decompression in real time," Kami says, "so the user has no idea" that any of this is happening.
Similarly, Coyote Point puts the SSL certificates on the load balancer instead of the servers, making upgrades much easier. "We have 50 servers, and it's difficult to update security certificates on them all without causing problems." With the certificates on the load balancer, Kami says, "We upgraded in the middle of the day, at 12:30pm, and no one knew. One person was on the old release, and the next person was on the new one."
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A Plus Side
Despite its challenges, Click & Pledge also has some advantages. Foremost, Kami says, is the fact that the company's customers typically don't require the exchange of goods. The money is sent for donations, memberships, and conference admissions, so there are no deliveries, inventory, or returns to worry about. "That makes life much easier," Kami sighs, and allows a company with just 10 full-time staffers to serve 9,000 customers.
And what does Kami predict for donations in 2009's troubled economy? "Our business is still doubling from last year," he says. But he predicts that some organizations will have trouble raising money this year, while others will do fine.
"For organizations that look only at the donors' wallet," he says, "they are seeing a decrease." But organizations that don't concentrate on the donation, but instead build relationships with donors, are likely to do better. "People give money to friends, not to people they don't know," Kami says. "Volunteers statistically donate more."
When people donate money, he adds, in return they expect you to fulfill your promise: "I take care of the homeless," for example. People have to trust that relationship, and in today's networked world, all the info on whether an organization is fulfilling its promises is very easily available. To keep donors' trust, Kami says, organizations need to say: "Don't ask me" about what we're doing. "Go ask Google."
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Fredric Paul is publisher/editor-in-chief of bMighty.com and SmallBizResource.com.
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