Reliability in fundraising: a guide for high-volume donation processing

When generosity surges, your technology can't fail

Digital fundraising is increasingly real-time. A single campaign announcement, influencer post, media mention, or emergency can cause donor traffic to surge within minutes.

For nonprofits running national telethons, disaster response efforts, or year-end appeals, that can mean tens of thousands of donors visiting your website within a single day, often in concentrated bursts. Even brief slowdowns or temporary outages can translate into significant revenue loss and missed opportunities to engage supporters when they’re most motivated to give.

Reliability planning ensures that:

• Every donor who’s ready to give can complete their gift without error.
• Your team isn’t forced into manual troubleshooting during a live campaign.
• You preserve donor trust — the hardest thing to rebuild once it’s lost

How to assess your readiness for high-volume days

So how can you tell if your systems are ready for those bursts of donor activity?

Whether you build your donation technology in-house or use an online donation platform, the same principles apply. A reliable donation system should be tested, resilient, and prepared for the unexpected.

Step 1: Prepare the basics

Before diving into technical setup, start with a few simple but often overlooked steps:

• Notify your vendors early: let every provider you rely on, from email delivery to payment gateways, know that you’re expecting an increase in donor traffic and transactions. This gives them time to prepare and monitor performance on their end.
• Check service limits and quotas: review your usage caps for services like email sending, address validation, or payment APIs. For major campaigns, it’s wise to raise these limits in advance. If a service bills by usage, make sure your balance or credit is topped up.
• Prepare your website for high traffic: keep it updated, optimized, and performance-checked. Have your IT or web team confirm that hosting, caching, and speed essentials are in place.

Step 2: If you’re choosing a platform — what to ask

When evaluating donation platforms, these questions will help you gauge reliability and transparency:

• Experience: how long has the platform been operating, and have they supported large-volume campaigns before?
• Uptime: what’s their historical uptime record? Do they publish incident logs or real-time status updates?
• Preparation: how do they plan for Giving Tuesday, telethons, or major fundraising events?
• Performance under load: have they ever had to reject donations due to server overload?
• Capacity: how many transactions per second (TPS) can their system handle — and what happens when traffic exceeds that limit? Compare their tested capacity to your organization’s historical peak data.

The right vendor should be transparent, tested, and confident in their ability to deliver.

Step 3: Check system-level practices

Once those basics are covered, look deeper into the technical and operational practices that define true reliability.

At a minimum, your donation tech should have:

• Scalable infrastructure that automatically handles traffic spikes and distributes load efficiently
• Regular load testing to confirm that donation flows stay fast and stable under pressure
• Fallback mechanisms for third-party services so one vendor outage doesn’t impact donors
• Frequent backups and restoration drills to protect data integrity in every scenario
• Prioritization of real-time giving over background tasks during peak hours

These are the foundations of a dependable donation system — the structures that let your fundraising run smoothly even during record-breaking days.

Now, let’s walk through how we implement each of these practices at Fundraise Up, as an example of what reliability looks like in action.

300 transactions per second, 99.99% uptime: engineering reliability at scale

For fundraisers, few things are more stressful than seeing donation systems falter when generosity is at its peak. Even a brief outage or technical hiccup can mean lost revenue, stressed teams, and missed opportunities to connect with donors.

We’ve heard stories from nonprofits that made the switch to Fundraise Up after their previous platforms failed right at the start of Giving Season, and they never wanted to experience that again.

At Fundraise Up, reliability is built into everything we do. We design, test, and monitor our systems to deliver the same high performance whether it’s a quiet weekday or a record-breaking Giving Tuesday.

While some donation platforms have gone down during peak giving moments, Fundraise Up has never failed to process donations when it mattered most.

At a glance

• 99.99% uptime
• 300 transactions per second (TPS) in real-time (with automatic queuing that processes any overflow within the next second)
• Zero rejected donations due to server overload or downtime during Giving Season, year after year
• Trusted for high-volume live events like Stand Up To Cancer’s telethons and the everyday giving of major nonprofits such as UNICEF USA

1. Scalable infrastructure and content delivery

When a major event or crisis happens, donor traffic can surge within seconds. During the February 2023 earthquake in Turkey, for example, we saw nonprofit websites' traffic spike by as much as 5–10 times in a matter of minutes.

Traffic surge during the Turkey earthquake, February 6, 2023

What this means in practice

We design our infrastructure to handle sudden traffic spikes on nonprofits’ websites. At any given moment, tens or even hundreds of thousands of visitors may arrive. Not all will make a donation, but every one of them needs a fast, frictionless experience: pages must load instantly, Elements must render, and Checkout must open without delay.

To achieve this, we use Cloudflare’s distributed content delivery network (CDN) to serve static assets directly from servers closest to each donor.

This setup dramatically reduces latency and offloads traffic from our core systems, ensuring that even under extreme demand, giving experience is quick and reliable.

2. Load testing: the foundation of reliability

The best way to ensure reliability is to test for it long before real donors arrive.

Load testing validates that a donation system can handle the traffic, transaction volume, and API activity expected during major campaigns without slowing down or breaking under pressure.

What this means in practice

Each month, our engineering team runs load tests that simulate real donor behavior — a full checkout journey from donation to confirmation. These tests trigger every critical part of the system involved in processing a gift: front-end forms, payment gateways, APIs, databases, and background processes. The goal is to confirm that performance stays consistent and responsive, even as demand scales up.

Throughout the year, we complement these monthly checks with additional testing cycles:

• Event-specific tests: conducted ahead of high-traffic periods like Giving Tuesday or year-end giving. We also run extra tests before large customer events, such as national telethons, to verify readiness for anticipated spikes.
• Change tests: completed after major infrastructure updates, performance optimizations, or before the release of significant new features.
• Stress tests: run quarterly to deliberately push the system beyond its normal capacity, helping us identify potential bottlenecks and reinforce them before peak season.

This layered approach ensures we’re ready not just for what’s expected, but for what’s possible.

3. Smart failovers and dynamic resilience

Reliability doesn’t depend on your donation platform alone, it also relies on the network of third-party services that support it. Every donation journey typically involves several external providers, from address and email validation to payment confirmations and other background operations.

What this means in practice

In a typical “full donor checkout” scenario at Fundraise Up, multiple systems work together to complete a single gift. These may include services for:

• Address lookup and validation (Google Places, Lob, or Loqate)
• Email verification and delivery (Bird or Zerobounce)
• AI-powered personalization
• And other background operations essential to the donation flow

During high-traffic moments, any of these third-party services can slow down or temporarily degrade. To keep donations flowing smoothly, we’ve built multiple layers of resilience into our system:

• Dynamic provider switching: if one provider shows signs of degradation, we automatically reroute requests to an alternative vendor. For every major service type, we maintain multiple providers and can switch between them instantly to preserve performance and uptime.
• Deferred processing for non-critical tasks: some actions, like address validation, can safely happen after the donation is processed. When traffic spikes or an external service becomes unresponsive, we temporarily delay these non-essential tasks until the system load normalizes.

With these safeguards in place, even if an external provider experiences an outage, donors enjoy a fast, smooth, and uninterrupted giving experience.

4. Backups and data recovery

Even the most reliable system needs a plan for recovery. Backups protect critical data and ensure that operations can resume quickly and securely, even in the rare event of an incident.

What this means in practice

Fundraise Up maintains a comprehensive backup and recovery process as part of our Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) framework:

• Comprehensive coverage: all critical databases and application data are backed up and managed centrally.
• Frequent backups: incremental copies run hourly, with full backups daily and retention up to one year.
• Redundant infrastructure: data is stored across AWS and OVHcloud in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and the EU, meeting regional compliance standards.
• Regular restoration tests: we routinely verify data integrity and readiness for recovery.

5. Intelligent resource prioritization

During peak giving windows, every millisecond counts.

Fundraise Up automatically prioritizes real-time donation processing over background tasks like scheduled recurring charges. This ensures that live donations always come first, protecting both donor experience and your revenue.

Real-world success stories

From national telethons to Giving Tuesday campaigns, nonprofits rely on Fundraise Up to process large donation volumes quickly and securely, even at peak moments.

High-volume performance across the platform

• During peak minutes across the system, some nonprofits processed up to 1,000 donations per minute and 400,000 donations per month through Fundraise Up.
• On Giving Tuesday 2024, more than 3,000 nonprofits ran their campaigns on Fundraise Up, seeing +12.4% year-over-year growth in the U.S. and +28.3% in Canada.

Staying online during the AWS outage

When a major AWS outage affected thousands of websites and platforms, Fundraise Up maintained full platform functionality. Donation processing, checkout performance, and uptime were not affected.

This reliability comes from how our infrastructure is built. Fundraise Up runs on bare-metal servers distributed across multiple data centers, minimizing dependency on third-party cloud providers and protecting the platform from widespread service disruptions.

In addition, our content delivery network (Cloudflare) serves cached elements and assets globally, allowing donation pages and checkout experiences to stay live even if a regional cloud provider experiences disruptions.

That combination of distribution and intelligent routing means that even when major providers experience outages, Fundraise Up continues to operate, keeping donations flowing and trust intact.

Stand Up To Cancer

Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C) runs one of the largest televised fundraising events in North America, processing thousands of donations live on air.

With Fundraise Up, SU2C was able to handle real-time donation spikes with ease, keeping the declined payment rate at just 0.97%.

The platform’s intuitive interface cut staff training time in half, while real-time fraud detection ensured every transaction was processed safely and accurately.

SU2C has trusted Fundraise Up since 2020, running its telethons with zero downtime and consistently higher conversion rates year after year.

Sandra Schmirler Foundation

For the Sandra Schmirler Foundation (SSF), the annual telethon is its most important fundraising event.

With Fundraise Up’s high-volume infrastructure and Virtual Terminal, SSF processed donations faster and with fewer manual steps.

The impact was immediate:

• $1M+ raised in a single day, more than double the previous year
• Nearly 8,000 donations processed seamlessly
• 300% growth in recurring donors, adding $150K annually in sustained revenue
• 95% of donations processed digitally, reducing manual entry from 81% to nearly zero

“The numbers speak for themselves. I’d say to any of my nonprofit counterparts: if you’re considering Fundraise Up — go for it.”
— Darren McEwen, Executive Director, Sandra Schmirler Foundation

Pinky Swear Foundation

The Pinky Swear Foundation Radiothon supports children with cancer and their families. Before switching to Fundraise Up, legacy tools slowed down phone donations and limited payment options.

By adopting Fundraise Up’s Checkout, Elements, Virtual Terminal, and HubSpot integration, the team modernized their operations and made giving effortless for donors.

The result: a record-breaking $423,000+ raised, with 40% of day-of revenue processed through Virtual Terminal and an average donation of $237.

“This year’s Radiothon proved that removing barriers for donors leads to greater impact. Fundraise Up helped our team streamline donations, enhance the donor experience, and ultimately helped us raise more funds for children with cancer and their families. This technology is a game-changer, allowing us to focus on what matters most — providing timely assistance when families need it. Building on the success of this proven method, we are now poised to replicate the Radiothon in new markets. Our vision is clear: a future where we can say ‘YES!’ to every family who reaches out for our help.”
— Marybeth Meyer, Director of Marketing, Pinky Swear Foundation

Looking ahead: continuous readiness, continuous improvement

Reliability isn’t static — it’s a discipline of continuous improvement.

As our Engineering Team Lead from the Billing team explains, preparation evolves with every peak giving season:

“The overall trend we see is clear: the volume of online donations continues to grow every year. Each Giving Season, the number of donations we process on peak days reaches new highs.
To stay ahead, we continuously revisit our performance benchmarks and system capacity based on real-world data. Whenever we anticipate higher-than-usual load, whether from a global event or a specific customer campaign, we proactively prepare the system to handle it.
Reliability is never a one-time achievement; it’s an ongoing process of forecasting, testing, and scaling to meet the next challenge.”
— Oleg Koltunov, Engineering Team Lead, Billing

Our engineering, DevOps, and infrastructure teams collaborate year-round to ensure we’re ready for whatever your next campaign brings.

A platform you can trust when the world is watching

When your biggest fundraising moments arrive, there’s no room for downtime or uncertainty.

Fundraise Up gives you peace of mind — knowing your campaigns, donors, and mission are supported by technology built for the moments that matter most.

Because when the world shows up to give, your platform should be ready to rise with it.