The response to the Haiti earthquake appeal has continued the trend for donors method of choice to donate being online. The immediacy and ease of response the online channel gives enables people to donate whilst they are moved by the harrowing pictures they see on the news.
Do spare a thought though for the web and online fundraising teams supporting the major relief and emergency websites. During appeals like these, the usage and donation levels spike to in some cases several thousand times normal levels.
To keep the site performing well at such times requires a difficult balancing act for a charity between the infrastructure needed to cope with the peaks and reasonable ongoing costs when such infrastructure may not be used for most of the time.
One approach is to be reactive and to bring on stream additional capacity during the emergency and I expect several hard working web and hosting engineers have done just that over the past fortnight.
Another approach we have developed with the British Red Cross is to build in a high capacity donation system alongside the main website which takes over during times of emergency to optimise the use of the existing hosting infrastructure during the emergency.
Whichever approach is used requires hard work, dedication and smart thinking and we should offer a collective thank to those people working quietly behind the scenes during this appeal.
