Everyone knows you can get anything over the Internet these days, but what people may not know is that it's just as easy to give as it is to get. With the click of a mouse, you can now give to charity without writing a cumbersome check and hunting for an elusive stamp.
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In order to accept your pledge and process it properly, a certain amount of infrastructure must be in place at the receiving end: the online 'giving system' that will process your gift. A couple of prerequisites for this system infrastructure are security and scalability. As the donor, you have to feel secure enough to whip out the credit card and start typing in those magic numbers. If there are thousands of like-minded, charitable people like you doing the same thing at the same time, the system must be scalable. In other words, it must be adjustable to handle the sudden burst of network traffic. And, of course, the system must be reliable; there's no room for error or downtime in this century.
PipeVine Giving Systems Integration, a not-for-profit organization based in San Francisco, handles money for the philanthropy industry. PipeVine leverages Sun technology to collect, distribute and report charitable funds. It manages all manner of donations and pledges with its Sun ONE environment, which is powered by five Sun Netra T1 servers. There is much to keep track of: where the money came from, who it goes to, if a corporation is matching an employee's gift, reporting it at tax time and so forth.
PipeVine's customers are both corporations and other non-profits, such as Bank of America, AT & T, Chevron Corporation, United Way of the Bay Area and many more (see "Sidebar: Client List"). Its flagship product is an online pledge form called PledgEdge, which allows donors to specify the payment method they wish to use and other instructions for giving.
The specifics of each donation process varies with each corporation. PipeVine has managed and processed Bank of America's (BofA) nationwide employee-giving campaign since 1993. In addition, PipeVine provides support for special campaigns; BofA became a PledgEdge user this year, PipeVine processed AT&T's nationwide employee-giving campaign using paper and electronic pledging, and PipeVine also processed employee-giving campaign and matching gifts for Clorox.
"Efficiency is everything, which is why we leverage technology," says Lamm. Also, computers keep internal costs down, because "manual labor is the most expensive part of doing business," Lamm added. In fact, PipeVine estimates the Sun servers do the work of 15 full-time people -- the size of a small company.
PipeVine receives many donations to process from its partnership with Network for Good (www.networkforgood.org). PipeVine has provided online processing, reporting and customer service for all donations made through Network for Good Web sites since its inception in 1999. At that time, the original partnership consisted of PipeVine and AOL Time Warner and was called Helping.org. Late in 2001, that duo was joined by Cisco Foundation and Yahoo! Foundation. So today, Network for Good is made up of Cisco, Yahoo, AOL, and Helping.org.
"From the J2EE [Java 2 Enterprise Edition] side, what's helping us is the component-type structure," says Lamm. "When PledgEdge goes online in September, any company's employees can go and fill out donations. We can distribute this application as portlets. It's built via EJB [Enterprise JavaBeans], so we can take the components and distribute them."
"We can reuse things, [which] is cost-saving and helps with the quality. It's paying off," he says.
Reusability saves PipeVine's staff from repeating work; once a piece of code is written, it can be used and re-used by others as a staple or building-block.
"Reusability helps when I hire new programmers," Lamm explains. "They have a library of components we already built. We're building a library of EJB components specific to our industry. [Programmers] can work at building new stuff and not reinvent the wheel. They just learn the API [Application Programming Interface]."
Lamm cites Sun ONE as the door to a new era of efficiency. "The programmers don't have to learn about the platform. This would be impossible without Sun ONE J2EE," he says.
PipeVine prepares its Sun network for the holidays and tax deadlines, knowing that seasons of giving mean more demands. Network for Good experiences significant traffic increases during the last two months of the year. Generally, about 20 to 30 percent of PipeVine-enabled donations take place during that time.
With the scalability of the Sun network, PipeVine was prepared for almost anything.
"We do have increased traffic during the holidays and especially when we get near the tax season," Lamm says. "Our Sun technology implementation helps us handle large traffic increases in that the J2EE architecture we have in place is scalable. We also have load-balancing capability enabling us to add additional Sun servers to the server farm to handle the additional traffic demands."
After the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, PipeVine experienced unprecedented network traffic. Although fake charities sprung up, nothing deterred people from the need to give and offer help. The outpouring of empathy is now part of American history, and proof of that outpouring's authenticity was visible in PipeVine's frenzied leap in network traffic. "Prior to the disaster, we received maybe 10-20 transactions per week through Network For Good," Lamm says. "It went to 800 transactions per minute."
Lamm adds that the Sun network did not blink an eye. "It was all done on Sun servers and Java (J2EE). They handled the jump in business. We were able to react. We just had to increase the memory and make modifications on the Java code. We made these changes in a matter of hours," he says.
"Network for Good had put together a collection of telemarketers and a Web site and phone number to call to make donations," Lamm says. "We handled all the transactions. We created a page that telemarketers had access to from their computers. They directly keyed in the immediate transaction."
Another 9/11-related benefit was the John Lennon telethon, which was broadcast on Oct. 2, 2001 on TNT and WB. PipeVine processed $30,000 in donations for this event. "For the John Lennon telethon, which was really put together as a tribute, not a fundraiser, the Helping.org website was flashed a few times and it was a straight web donation without any phone banks," Elliott says.
Because partner Network for Good is also on Sun servers, PipeVine is able to take advantage of the Sun ONE environment to streamline the donations process, reducing the number of paper pledge-forms. "We handled 350,000 paper pledge-forms," says Lamm. "This year will be a smaller number. Because Network for Good transaction services are being done on Sun servers, we handled 50 percent of all online donations for Sept. 11 causes."
"PipeVine.org is on Sun servers," Elliott adds. "In that capacity, we process all donations for Network for Good, Helping.org and LibertyUnites.org, which combined reflected about half of all (aforementioned) non-American Red Cross donations on the Web."
Translated to a dollar amount, PipeVine processed more than $22 million online. "In addition, we processed over $3 million in workplace donations to Sept. 11th funds," Elliott says. PipeVine also processed funds for the Red Cross, Salvation Army, Firefighter Funds and other charitable organizations.
Although Sept. 11 donations petered off at the end of 2001, Elliott says people are donating in record numbers to a variety of funds. Although they are not donating directly to Sept. 11 charities, the tragedy set off a national awareness for giving online.
"Sept. 11 was a huge turning point in online philanthropy," says Elliott. "A year ago, Internet giving accounted for less than one percent of all charitable donations, but that number went to approximately 15 percent for all donations supporting Sept. 11. The immediacy of the Internet, combined with the readiness of Helping.org, Network for Good and LibertyUnites.org, enabled people to give immediately. PipeVine moved the donations quickly so they got into the charities where they could be used within days," Elliott says.