Grid speeds up Sport Relief dash for cash

The charity running last weekend’s Sport Relief campaign doubled its capacity for processing donations across the internet by implementing grid technology.

The aim for the latest fundraising was to have all donations – whether through call centres, interactive TV or the web site – processed to banks online, up from only 50 per cent last year.

The organisers are now able to see the budget and start work faster, said Martin Gill, head of new media at charity Comic Relief, which runs Sport Relief.

“The software lets us monitor donations in real time. Information is fed back to viewers and to us, so we immediately know how much money we have to spend,” he said.

“We can get the cash out of the door faster. Paper-based donations could take three to four months to transcribe, but online ones can take a couple of days.”

The main priority was to ensure the donation process went right first time, as even a small amount of downtime can reduce the donations received. It needed software that could support thousands of operators performing the same task simultaneously across multiple locations.

The grid technology supplied by Oracle is used across the organisation’s network, using spare resources where necessary. If there is a sudden peak in internet donations, a less used server can handle the surge.

“It provides us with an infrastructure that lets us change the scale of our operations very quickly and securely,” said Gill.

Comic Relief also gets a better insight into the fundraising process, with details of the regional spread of donations and the time they were made.

Some 600,000 donations were processed by the web-based system during the live broadcast of Red Nose Day in 2007 and £3m was collected online during Sport Relief 2006.