Case Study: RaiseDonors safeguards donation platform during high-traffic events and boosts performance with Cloudflare

How RaiseDonors Uses Cloudflare to Safeguard Their Site During High-Traffic Events

RaiseDonors is an online fundraising platform used by nonprofits for more than 18 years, hosting up to 7,000 active donation pages that process large volumes of donations. As a high-profile payments system it regularly faces malicious bot activity and automated credit-card testing, forcing a tradeoff between allowing legitimate donors through and blocking fraud—especially during peak events like Giving Tuesday.

RaiseDonors implemented Cloudflare’s WAF, CDN, Argo Smart Routing, SSL for SaaS, API-driven access rules, and Workers to detect and stop attacks, speed page loads, and manage custom domains and redirects. During a recent 72-hour Giving Tuesday the WAF blocked over 18,000 attacks, Cloudflare’s caching and Argo made pages load 28% faster than the industry average, an on-the-fly API block stopped an attack after 12 fake submissions, and the platform saw average donation amounts rise over 40% with conversion rates up more than 13 percentage points.

RaiseDonors

Chris Mechsner

Co-Founder