Raisely: Expanding digital channels to help nonprofits reach more donors and maximize fundraising
About Raisely
Raisely helps nonprofits kickstart their digital fundraising campaigns and collect donations online. With a mission to help charities raise more money online, Raisely’s fundraising platform offers a variety of easy-to-use templates for nonprofits to create branded websites and empower supporters to promote the campaign. The company helps nonprofits raise millions every week through its campaigns. Raisely itself is a certified B Corp and covers its operating expenses through optional contributions.
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Contact usRaisely helps nonprofits reach new audiences through digital fundraising with a highly scalable and reliable web application on Google Cloud.
Google Cloud results
- Processes 35 million events with Datastore and Cloud Functions for real-time updates to users of Raisely’s platform
- Saves 30% on compute costs by traffic-switching on App Engine
- Analyzes 1.5 TB worth of activity logs with BigQuery to examine usage patterns and keep data secure
Prevents website downtime with App Engine and the Google Cloud operations suite
Online platforms have proven an effective way for nonprofits to raise funds, with a 10% increase in donations in 2019 compared to the previous year. But when COVID-19 led to charity galas and marathons being postponed until further notice, these platforms became not just an additional way to raise funds, but a mission-critical one. So what about nonprofits that don’t have digital channels?
Raisely knows that nonprofits often have limited money and human resources to spend on building new fundraising channels. That’s why it provides a website building platform that simplifies campaign design and creation to help them launch branded fundraising websites in minutes, and for free. Instead of charging nonprofits for their fundraising website creation, Raisely asks donors to chip in a small additional fee to cover the platform’s costs, along with add-on features such as being able to reach donors via email and text, and customer relationship management (CRM) tools to manage and analyze people's interactions.
“Raisely is a mission-critical service for nonprofits. Every minute we’re offline means a loss of potential funds because supporters can’t donate or share a campaign with friends. We use App Engine and the Google Cloud operations suite to gain more visibility into our application and prevent downtime.”
—Tom Maitland, Chief Executive Officer, RaiselyRaisely can experience sudden traffic spikes on its platform when a nonprofit sends out an email blast or if a campaign goes viral. Previously, it buffered for unexpected traffic by over-provisioning cloud resources, but this led to inflated server costs. The setup also meant that Raisely’s lean team needed to spend much of its time monitoring the platform, allocating resources, and ensuring minimal downtime.
The organization realized that its existing setup wasn’t sustainable if it wanted to help as many nonprofits as possible. So, in 2018, Raisely turned to Google Cloud to improve its site reliability, reduce the infrastructure burden on its IT team, and keep its running costs low.
The core of the new solution is App Engine, which provides a fully managed environment allowing developers to focus on building features for Raisely’s users instead of worrying about allocating infrastructure resources. “Raisely is a mission-critical service for nonprofits. Every minute we’re offline means a loss of potential funds because supporters can’t donate or share a campaign with friends,” explains Tom Maitland, Chief Executive Officer at Raisely. “We use App Engine and the Google Cloud operations suite to gain more visibility into our application and prevent downtime.”
In addition to these key solutions, Raisely uses BigQuery ML for data analytics, Datastore, and Cloud SQL for its databases, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) for web hosting, and Google Workspace to help its employees collaborate with nonprofits and each other. It also uses Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring to track the health and performance of its platform.
“Deployment on App Engine was a breeze. For the migration, we tested our code in a staging environment and deployed it in production for users within two hours. What’s more, we saved 30% on the application’s running costs by traffic-switching on App Engine, instead of standby servers in our legacy cloud environment.”
—Tom Maitland, Chief Executive Officer, RaiselyOptimizing cloud resources to reduce overheads
In its legacy environment, Raisely paid for more capacity than it needed, as a way of minimizing potential downtime. If the team needed to resolve a technical issue quickly, it would deploy its application to a standby environment using the additional capacity. But most of the time, those cloud resources would be idle. Raisely needed a solution to help it use resources more efficiently and keep running costs low.
As a first step, Raisely built a proof of concept to make sure that App Engine and GKE were suitable for its needs. It successfully tested a prototype on App Engine and GKE, with consistent performance and stability. After running a load test of more than 10,000 concurrent users by sending simultaneous artificial traffic to its web application, Raisely was confident that Google Cloud could scale beyond expected loads and help it to deliver on its 99.95% uptime promise.
“Deployment on App Engine was a breeze,” says Tom. “For the migration, we tested our code in a staging environment and deployed it in production for users within two hours. What’s more, we saved 30% on the application’s running costs by traffic-switching on App Engine, instead of standby servers in our legacy cloud environment.”
“We currently store 40 million records in our events database, and we expect an increase of 10 to 20 million a year. Without Datastore, the growing amount of data would be costly and difficult to manage.”
—Tom Maitland, Chief Executive Officer, RaiselyAuditing database activities to secure sensitive data
During a fundraising campaign, it’s important for nonprofits to maintain the awareness and interest of potential donors, far beyond the initial campaign launch. To keep the conversation going, Raisely offers the ability for users to set up a webhook, which delivers data to other applications as it happens. This enables users to post real-time information on their profile page when a significant event happens, such as a new donation or a subscription for regular giving. Raisely uses Datastore to securely hold event webhook data for hundreds of nonprofits, while Cloud Functions pipes the events to the relevant systems such as marketing automation to drive donations or reporting for user activity tracking.
Datastore is also a hub for Raisely’s microservices, ensuring the delivery of real-time messages such as receipts and notifications for thousands of donors. “We currently store 40 million records in our events database, and we expect an increase of 10 to 20 million a year. Without Datastore, the growing amount of data would be costly and difficult to manage,” says Tom. “Datastore scales automatically and Cloud Functions ensures the webhooks are delivered in a timely fashion, even when we're dealing with hundreds of thousands of notifications per minute.”
To keep data secure, Raisely uses BigQuery to analyze 1.5 TB worth of activity logs, such as new user registration and logins.
“We host important data for our customers such as donor information and donation amounts, so we need to know when and who accesses it,” says Tom. “We use Cloud Logging and BigQuery to track all audit log entries to monitor for intrusions. It’s critical for our users and the security of our platform that we can investigate any anomalies or unusual admin activity on their behalf.”
Internally, Raisely uses BigQuery to evaluate how a particular feature or API endpoint is performing. It also shares performance insights through webinars to help nonprofits make data-driven decisions when running fundraising campaigns. The team typically runs analytical data models over fundraising profiles, looks into donation amounts and frequencies, and puts together benchmarks from the data across all campaigns on Raisely.
Collaborating effectively in a non-traditional workspace
Raisely runs an entirely remote workforce that relies heavily on Google Workspace features such as Google Drive for storage and Google Docs for collaboration. It stores all its files, from business proposals to project management spreadsheets, on Drive. Platform users and employees can view and create comments on shared documents, which helps to keep everyone on the same page.
“Traditional file servers are obsolete for our virtual office. Google Workspace gives us the flexibility to securely access our Google accounts from anywhere and get the tools we need,” says Tom. “We don’t always get to meet our users in person, but we can easily share and collaborate on Docs and Google Sheets, no matter where we are.”
Gmail integration with Raisely’s Pipedrive CRM also helps the sales team improve customer engagement by using the inbox as a centralized dashboard for sales activities, so they know when to send what information to the user or a prospective user.
Helping nonprofits raise money on a global scale
As it grows, Raisely’s goal is to help raise $1 billion for nonprofits by 2025. To make this happen, the organization continues to enhance its platform with new features such as gamification, enabling fundraisers to engage donors in fresh and exciting ways.
“Our release cadence has doubled since moving to Google Cloud,” shares Tom. “We’re now exploring ways that Google Cloud can bring our platform closer to our users by speeding up content delivery at the network’s edge.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Raisely
Raisely helps nonprofits kickstart their digital fundraising campaigns and collect donations online. With a mission to help charities raise more money online, Raisely’s fundraising platform offers a variety of easy-to-use templates for nonprofits to create branded websites and empower supporters to promote the campaign. The company helps nonprofits raise millions every week through its campaigns. Raisely itself is a certified B Corp and covers its operating expenses through optional contributions.