A national online-giving event suffered a meltdown yesterday after its main software provider suffered major problems, prompting an apology from the technology company and outrage from participating nonprofits and their donors.
Give Local America, which marked its third year Tuesday, aims to unite community giving days on the same day. The bulk of the community foundations and United Way chapters participating in Give Local America 2016 purchased online-giving software from Kimbia, the Austin-based company that launched the event in 2014.
But around 10 a.m. Eastern time, the technology provider began seeing that donation forms were loading slowly or not at all, preventing donors from giving and angering nonprofits, many of which spent months preparing for the event. Last year, the event raised $68.5 million for about 9,000 nonprofits in roughly 24 hours. This year’s event had grown to 13,000 participating nonprofits — and they were anticipating higher numbers.
“We are quite honestly just devastated at the turn of events and the perfect storm that happened,” said Mary Anne Gunn, vice president of marketing at Kimbia.
Ms. Gunn was hesitant to point to any one cause of the outages, saying it’s likely that multiple factors came together. Engineers believe the root cause was a hardware issue on one of their database servers, which hampered the company’s ability to deliver forms and process donations, she said. In addition, Kimbia had added a mobile app and a new system for presenting data, which may have overwhelmed the servers.
“Because it was happening sporadically at first and then it continued to get worse, it was difficult for our team to fully understand and diagnose the issue,” she said.
Scrambling for Alternatives
Forty-seven communities participating in yesterday’s event used Kimbia’s platform. Prices for the software range from $2,500 to $15,000, based on the size of an organization and the scope of the services purchased. About 3 percent of donations go to Kimbia, and many community foundations charge additional fees for credit-card processing.
Several community organizations, including GiveLocalNYC, the Big Give Houston, and Give Local Greater Philly, participated for the first time. Some communities moved established giving days to the Give Local date, abandoning other technology partners to work with Kimbia.
The Pittsburgh Foundation’s Day of Giving program has raised more than $40 million over the past six years. The foundation announced yesterday it would suspend its event and reschedule for a later date.
Others extended the events an additional 24 hours, through Wednesday, collecting donations through other channels.
The Sacramento Region Community Foundation, for example, set up a phone bank to accept contributions for participating nonprofits and encouraged the groups to accept gifts through their own websites or phones.
The Silicon Valley Community Foundation held its Silicon Valley Gives yesterday on the donation platform Razoo, avoiding the technological snags. The event brought in more than $7.8 million for more than 1,000 nonprofits.
Damaged Reputations
Nonprofits and donors took to social media and Kimbia’s website to air their frustrations. Some requested the company remedy the issue and refund the fees it charged with each donation.
Others said refunds wouldn’t go far enough.
“The damage that has been caused to our reputation today and the extra work caused to our organization in having to develop an alternative giving means ‘on the fly’ far exceeds that cost,” wrote Judy Sjostedt, executive director of the Parkersburg Area Community Foundation in West Virginia.
Some were concerned the snafu would have implications for nonprofits beyond this single giving day.
“This is a public-perception disaster for online donations,” one commenter wrote.
Around 10 p.m. Eastern time, Kimbia issued an online apology saying that “the past 10 hours have been some of the most painful of our lives,” adding that the company “will work tirelessly to earn back your trust in our capabilities.”
Ms. Gunn says Kimbia plans to do a more thorough review to understand what went wrong after the extended giving days have concluded. Discussions of reducing fees are on the table, she says.
This is not the first time a crowdfunding site has failed during a time-limited giving day. In 2013, Minnesota’s statewide GiveMN day experienced technology problems through the giving platform Razoo after the rush of donations overwhelmed its servers. Charities that experienced difficulties during that event were offered a 1 percent rebate on credit-card transaction fees.
And yesterday in South Carolina, the Coastal Community Foundation experienced similar tech issues with another software provider. After using Kimbia software the past two years, the foundation switched to a custom-built site from a local start-up called Bidr for its Lowcountry Giving Day. That site was also overwhelmed and the foundation extended its giving day into mid-day Wednesday.
