Preventing online donation disaster

If you’ve ever developed an online fundraising campaign, you likely spent countless hours organizing and promoting the event. However, no matter how much planning and preparation you put into your fundraiser, one thing could unexpectedly dismantle the entire operation — technical difficulties.

Luckily, you can take steps to protect your event from donation disasters. If you’re not sure how to handle high-traffics, follow along with our comprehensive guide. 

Why high traffic surges cause website crashes

When a successful fundraising campaign brings a high volume of visitors to a website, technical issues may occur. There are three primary reasons for these crashes:

1. Lack of resources: A crashed website may simply lack the infrastructure necessary for supporting high traffic levels. Too many system requests can exceed your site’s processing capacity resources, resulting in low performance.
2. Bottlenecks: Your website may have points of system congestion that inhibit overall performance. High online traffic puts pressure on these bottlenecks, impacting website function.
3. Unpredicted traffic surges: When websites see unexpected rises in web traffic, each customer experience adds pressure to the website’s infrastructure, resulting in processing power overexertion.

So, how do you make sure your fundraisers can handle increased traffic?

How to avoid online donation disaster

The key to combating fundraising technical difficulties is to use a fundraising management system with built-in high-volume resilience for your website, with strong infrastructure to better handle increased traffic. Consider these things for any technology your considering to avoid online donation disasters:

• Reevaluate servers: Even if you assume servers are equipped to handle web traffic surges, this might not be the case. You should confirm your partner’s server has enough space for website growth and isn’t limited by data caps.
• Update software: When software is updated, ask what safeguards are in place to ensure your fundraising website can handle high traffic without crashing and safeguard your donors’ information against data breaches.
• Uptime: Your online donation provider should have dependable uptime capabilities, preventing services from failing during the donation process.
• Verify web host load capacity: Your website host should be able to process large traffic volumes resulting from successful campaigns. 
• Back ups: It’s wise to work with a web hosting service to back up your web data. Backups ensure that even if your website goes offline due to technical difficulties, you can easily get it up and running again.

GiveSmart’s industry-leading fundraising software exercises strong high-volume resilience while enabling organizations to host unlimited fundraising events. Our platform utilizes top-rated technology that delivers data-driven insights, integrations, and exceptional privacy and security to help nonprofits reach their fundraising goals.

Learn more about GiveSmart

You can minimize fundraising technical difficulties with top-of-the-line software from GiveSmart. We’re proud to have raised over $4 billion for our 4,800+ nonprofit partners, helping them reach their fundraising goals.

Contact us to learn more about our solutions today!