Comic Relief lifts e-donations
The charity will now be able to process 20,000 donations per second
Comic Relief 2007 has expanded its online payment processing systems and increased donation capacity five-fold since the last event in 2005.
The charity expects to handle 800,000 transactions through its call centre, web site and interactive television services for the event on 16 March, compared with 200,000 donations in 2005.
The organisation has dispensed with manual systems and integrated Cisco’s secure session handling and load-balancing Application Control Module into the Comic Relief network.
Martin Gil, head of new media at Comic Relief, says demand for digital services is increasing.
‘We have a much larger UK public with access to broadband and consuming their media through digital channels, so that has led to greater demands on our digital media capability in processing donations,’ said Gil.
He says payments need to be authorised in real time because donors may be less enthusiastic about paying up a week later.
‘In the past we were taking huge volumes of donations on paper but the new system gets the money in the bank quicker.’
Donations from 120 of the charity’s 155 call centres will be processed online by 10,000 of its 13,000 volunteer call handlers.
The new network can process up to 20,000 transactions per second compared with 100 per second in 2005.
‘At the busiest time between nine and 10pm when the most emotive content is broadcast, we expect to process 300,000 transactions and authorise them in real time in the space of 15 minutes,’ said Gil.
‘We load-balance the sessions by running them across a number of servers and the new technology makes the decisions about which server to send a session to.’
Philip Howard, research director at analyst Bloor Research, says when dealing with spikes in transaction volumes, single processors can get overloaded and the obvious solution is a load-balancing facility.
‘It is just like online gaming sites, where you need multiple servers and low bands across them because kids get out of school and all log on to various sites, which creates big increases in traffic,’ he said.
What do you think? Email [email protected]
Further reading: