Last Thursday, February 11, Impact Foundation held its most successful Giving Heart’s Day event to date with a total of $8.2 million raised in 24 hours. Over 37,109 donations at impactgiveback.org were given to 326 charitable causes in North Dakota and Western Minnesota, far surpassing last year’s $6.9 million raised.

For anyone participating in Giving Heart’s Day, it seems simple. Go to Impact Foundation, find the charity you want to support, and click donate.

But what many do not know is that behind-the-scenes, there is a staff of technical support working tirelessly to ensure that everything continues to run smoothly. The fact that the server does not crash is, in fact, very impressive (Anyone remember registration in college? A nightmare.)

Behind the Scenes: The Tech

Leading the behind-the-scenes tech staff is Shane Neuerburg, co-founder of the real-time payment processing system known as Dwolla. Dwolla, founded in 2010, saw over $1 billion in transactions by 2014. No doubt, Neuerburg knows how to handle massive amounts of online payments.

He first began working with Dakota Medical Foundation two years ago, to help re-design the platform behind Giving Heart’s Day. Neuerburg picked Bismarck-based company Todaymade to begin building a new, custom designed platform to handle all the giving.

“Prior to Todaymade, we were in a traditional environment,” Neuerburg said. “Anytime you click, a request was sent to the server and the page is generated and built. With the architecture we’re using now, the app is bundled into a couple files, browser pulls those files down, and from there clients browser handles the navigation between pages. There’s no server to server requests.”

Basically, it simplified the process a lot more and reduced the likelihood of the server crashing. Donors can now easily donate to the charity of their choice, and the charities can track the amount they have raised in real-time through Impact Foundation’s back-end platform. The browser sends out notifications every minute with the updated numbers.

Neuerburg said its unlike anything he’s worked with before.

“There’s not a whole lot of people that have systems that scale like this,” he said. “It’s tough to find people who have done that kind of thing.”

His time at Dwolla has well prepared him for projects like this, Neureburg said.

“When you get your company featured on a major news network and prime time, you get a massive influx of visitors. I have experience going from relatively zero to 100%,” he said. “When you suddenly have 2,000 visitors on your site, there are traditional bottlenecks.”

On a day with as much traction as Giving Heart’s Day, the preparation begins the day before. Here’s a walk through, according to Neureburg:

Behind the Scenes: The Play-by-Play

Day Before: Everything goes into Giving Heart’s Day Mode. Start scaling up the systems, get the countdown time up, and scale up resources.

Midnight: It’s safe to assume everyone is checking for the millionth time to make sure it all works. They each submit their donations, monitor the process. Try and get some sleep between then and 5 AM. One person is monitoring the entire time.

Day of, 6:00 AM: All hands on deck. A trickle of e-mails begin to come in.

9- 11:00 AM: Code Red. This is the most critical point of the day, with the majority of donations coming between these hours. All engineers and developers are monitoring each issue which comes in, ensuring the process continues as smoothly as possible.

Afternoon: Giving continues to flow. Impact Foundation also accepts donations in person and offers hot cocoa and treats to those who come in to the building to make their donations. Throughout the day small issues pop up and the team has to put in “a hot fix” as Neureberg said, to get it resolved.

6 – 7:00 PM: All major problems have been resolved. Team can finally take a breath.

11:30 PM: Champagne toast. Another Giving Heart’s Day coming to a close.

11:45 PM: This isn’t usual, but this time a straggler with an urge to give before it was too late wandered into the building. Technically the offices close at 7 PM, but on Giving Heart’s Day… what the heck, why not.

Next Day, 1 AM: Giving Heart’s Day is officially over. They stay open until 1 AM to account for those in Mountain Time. They display the Thank you page, and everyone goes home to get sleep.

Sara Stolt, Director of Strategy and Initiatives for Dakota Medical Foundation, is the only one who may not have gotten any sleep, Neuerburg said.

At 6:30 AM, Stolt posted on Facebook with the final amount given and a huge thank you to all the Giving Heart’s Day team donors and teammates.

“To the amazing Giving Hearts Day team, Tami Rust, Scott Holdman,Pat Traynor, Sarah Arntson, Amanda Sayre, Jessica Ueland, Dave Sena, Shane Neuerburg, Shannon Wiedman, I just can’t say enough about the work you all did to make this day possible,” she wrote. “I will end with a tremendous feeling of gratitude.”

As for Neureburg, he plans to continue iterating the system as Giving Heart’s Day grows. He’s back in Colorado now, where he lives with his wife and kids. But he plans to be back in Fargo for Giving Heart’s Day 2017. Until next year!

 

Photos courtesy of Impact Foundation, Sara Stolt and Shane Neuerberg.