After Giving-Day Tech Failure, Kimbia to Make Amends

Nearly a week after thousands of outraged nonprofit officials realized their online-giving-day software was failing, the technology provider announced plans to settle some of their losses.

Charities that participated in last week’s Give Local America event hosted by Kimbia will receive some refunded fees, free fundraising workshops, and the online-giving technology at no cost through year’s end.

The company, which has hosted the event annually since 2014, sold its Giving Day software to 47 community foundations or United Way chapters that participated in the May 3 event. Base prices for the software range from $2,500 to $15,000, and nonprofits pay additional processing fees.

Engineers believe the problem, which resulted in donation forms loading slowly or not at all, was a hardware issue on one of their database servers. The company continues to review what went wrong.

“After a thorough review of events, we will be better able to communicate a specific plan to ensure that an incident of this kind will not occur in the future and our partners, nonprofits, and their donors can be confident in our ability to help them achieve their goals,” said Daniel Gillett, Kimbia’s chief executive, in a statement.

Kimbia will waive about $370,000 in fees — roughly one-third of what it would have received from this year’s Give Local America event. For nonprofits in most participating communities, that means 1.99 percent of funds raised will be deducted instead of 2.99 percent.

The company will provide its online-giving software at no cost for the rest of the year to each participating nonprofit. Charities will still be responsible for paying credit-card processing fees.

Mr. Gillett said he would forfeit his salary for the next three months and donate it to organizations that participated in the giving day.

In addition, Kimbia staff will develop and provide free monthly online-fundraising workshops beginning next month.

Despite the technology failures, the 13,000 nonprofits involved in last week’s event raised more than $50 million nationwide. Last year, the event raised $68.5 million for about 9,000 charities.