Services:
Rails Development
Technology:
RoR
The Ezy Raise platform is a leading-edge global fundraising platform used for charities to run their own individually-branded online fundraising campaigns. We helped develop new key features with our senior-level developers as well as providing monthly code maintenance with CodeCare®.
"People need to have a good experience when they go to donate. And the charities participating need a good experience as well and know that the website is fully functioning all the time. We know that we have the support of reinteractive’s professionals at the drop of a hat should we need anything fixed with our site.”
Brett Macdonald, CEO
Ezy Raise
The Ezy Raise platform allows charities to control the content, communications and data for their campaign, providing an all-in-one responsive, secure and scalable platform with cutting edge UX and UI to maximise their return.
Think Dry July in Australia, Go Sober for October in the UK and Dry Feb in Canada. These campaigns raise millions of dollars for vital cancer services and have processed over one million transactions through the platform.
The platform was originally built inhouse and then an overseas development agency was hired to continue to expand the platform which, given time differences and other issues, was not without its problems.
Given the new trends in the sector, CEO Brett Macdonald was aware that they had to stay at the forefront. So hiring an expert Australian-based development agency was vital. Anything less would end up messy and be far costlier in the long run.
"We had been on a journey about how we had approached development, with many lessons learned along the way. We were running significant fundraising campaigns around the world and we needed a development agency that had the complete skill set required to support multi-million-dollar, mass participation campaigns. We knew we needed the Agile Method being applied, with full testing and no junior developers.”
Brett Macdonald, CEO
Ezy Raise
Mr Macdonald says that the main criteria in choosing a software agency to partner with was finding one with all the required expertise, including the full range of top-level skills from UX and design, to backend and operations support. They had two areas of need: senior level developers, and full hosting and operations support.
“A concern for us has always been that, with some agencies, you meet the boss and then you get handed down to a senior account manager and then it is actually the junior dev that is developing everything. And this can lead to a lot of bugs.”
“We wanted someone that could understand the kind of business model we were running and accommodate the changes we needed in a professional manner to allow us to future-proof our product”, says Brett.
“The big attraction of reinteractive was they had everything we needed in one agency. They have a well-resourced team of senior, experienced developers. They bring to the table a wide base of knowledge and expertise.”
The other big issue that reinteractive ticked all the boxes for, was their hosting experience and operations support.
“This had been an issue for us to address internally, so it was invaluable to find not only an agency for our development needs, but one which also provides expert hosting management services. Being able to call on assistance at the drop of a hat is a must for us,” says Brett.
At reinteractive, full time developers are dedicated 100% to a project until it is complete. Developers are not shared between projects so they stay fully focussed. This ensures quality at the highest level with a faster delivery rate, which is important to any business. A quality codebase up front means any future development is faster and cheaper with fewer bugs. Each client talks directly to their developer daily during the project, with a Project Manager also overseeing the project.
reinteractive follows the Agile methodology of prioritising deliverable code over processes and specifications. This is the killer feature of modern agile-based development. Reinteractive developers continually “release” an application to our staging server that the client has constant access to. At any point we can put it live and in a matter of hours it will be online and running. We work to get an application delivered and operating as fast as possible, with the viewpoint of incrementally adding features as the site matures and grows.
Each feature is then staged on reinteractive’s servers, reviewed, accepted and launched into production. It is an ‘idea → develop → stage → launch → new idea’ loop that we have found to be incredibly effective in getting clients up and running with their sites operational in no time.
Working with reinteractive has allowed Ezy Raise to expand and develop their fundraising platform. They have added two more big feature products to the platform, expanding their offerings, allowing them to open up to different revenue streams and diversify the opportunities. Valuable work is being done by charities using the platform to raise funds for important causes as a result.
"We have formed good relationships with our developers. They just get us and what we are trying to do with our platform and adding new features. We saw that straight away through the conversations. And they work really fast and efficiently.
When we came to reinteractive we had version one of the product and we knew we had many more iterations of the product to go and a lot of features we needed to change and add. We have a big roadmap we are following.”
Brett Macdonald, CEO
Ezy Raise
The operational support has been key for their platform.
“A couple of times we have had key, big crashes hitting the site and we had some issues. With the reinteractive operations team, we were able to resolve those every quickly.”
“It is knowing that a phone call or an email will get a result immediately, as opposed to hearing: ‘we will get back to you in the morning’, or someone only gets onto it in three days time. That is not what you want when you are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in one day,” says Brett.
“What have been major business critical issues in the past, we now have no concern about thanks to reinteractive. This leaves us free to focus on other business issues knowing that that side is covered and no longer a threat for us.”
"Working with reinteractive provides peace of mind and reassurance. They have helped us build a stable, leading-edge global fundraising platform that has enabled us to grow each year, helping charities around the world make a huge difference.
People need to have a good experience when they go to donate. And the charities participating need a good experience as well and know that the website is fully functioning all the time. We know that we have the support of reinteractive’s professionals at the drop of a hat should we need anything fixed with our site.”
Brett Macdonald, CEO
Ezy Raise
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