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The non-profit sector has been uniquely affected by the pandemic by being one of the only sectors which has seen the most significant increase in demand for services whilst experiencing the biggest challenges in funding. However, it is not only the demand for services that has increased but also the demand for technological improvement within charitable organisations to improve digital capacity and respond to the need for moving more services online.

As Forbes highlights, Technology doesn’t just help nonprofits engage with donors and track outcomes, but it can also make them run more efficiently by streamlining their reporting and compliance procedures, increasing communication and cooperation (both internally and with outside stakeholders) and allowing them to allocate resources more effectively.

One of the crucial priorities for the Big Give over the last few years has been to maintain and improve tech whilst being a resource-constrained not-for-profit organisation. Today, we’re using tech-for-good to ensure that we can continue to bring charities, philanthropists and the public together to multiply their impact.

As referenced in CircleCI’s recent report, The Big Give utilises two different notification services in our workflow. The Slack orb and the Jira orb are used to keep our team continuously updated on the status of projects. We have found that early alert is key to keeping MTTR (mean time to recovery or mean time to restore- the average time it takes to recover from a product or system failure) as low as possible.

Some figures include:

Noel Light-Hilary, Tech Lead at The Big Give, shared the following:

“The Big Give builds and maintains several web apps and microservices to support match-funded charity campaigns at scale. As a tiny technical team, automation is the only way we could achieve this while maintaining high quality and Continuous Integration and Delivery plays a crucial role. Motivations for the updated web platform we launched in 2019 include prioritising security and stability and reducing avoidable custom code. But with Continuous Integration, we’ve also increasingly been able to focus on getting improved experiences to our charities, donors, and champion funders as soon as possible.

Our platform is now flexible enough to respond to new funding needs without code changes. Keeping our CI pipelines in a good place also allows us to be pragmatic and to quickly and safely adapt our apps if needed, even when things change mid-sprint. This has helped us accommodate new requirements in response to the unpredictable times facing our charities and partners in recent months.”

About CircleCI

‘CircleCI is a continuous integration and continuous delivery platform that can be used to implement DevOps practices. The 2022 State of Software Delivery Report represents the most extensive collection and evaluation of developer engineering productivity data in the world: over two years of data from over a quarter of a billion workflows, representing almost 50,000 organisations from more than 100 countries, building over a quarter of a million projects on the CircleCI platform. Their research team examines this data each year to gain insight into the DevOps practices used by software teams globally.’

You can read CircleCI’s full 2022 State of Software delivery report here.

Big Give is the UK’s #1 match funding platform. We match donations to multiply generosity and create a lasting impact in the world. Big Give has raised over £200m for thousands of great causes through the power of match funding. Find out more.