Case Study: World Elephant Day achieves scalable, no‑downtime global reach and increased donations with Amazon Web Services

World Elephant Day Reaching the World with the Cloud

World Elephant Day is a global awareness campaign launched in 2012 to spotlight the urgent threat to Asian and African elephants. As the campaign’s reach grew—millions of social impressions and tens of thousands of site visitors on the day—its website repeatedly crashed during peak traffic, causing hours of downtime and missed engagement and donations.

The organization migrated to AWS using nonprofit grants to build an elastic, cost‑efficient site that stayed up during peak traffic. The result was a faster, more reliable user experience, higher donations, and broader global participation—including remote communities taking conservation actions like planting trees to reduce human–elephant conflict.

World Elephant Day

Patricia Sims

Founder