Case Study: Good Friday Appeal achieves A$6M telethon donation processing and real-time reporting with Google Cloud Platform

Good Friday Appeal:delivering a donation app for The Royal Children’s Hospital

Good Friday Appeal is a long‑running Australian charity that raises funds for Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital through year‑round activities culminating in a high‑profile 15‑hour telethon. Faced with costly, hard‑to‑maintain legacy systems, the organisation needed to consolidate donor management, payment reconciliation and reporting into a single cloud app that could run with minimal administration most of the year but scale to handle heavy traffic and more than A$6M in donations during the telethon.

Working with Google Cloud partner 3wks, the charity built a cloud‑based donation app on Google Cloud Platform using App Engine, Cloud Datastore, Cloud Storage and BigQuery, plus memcache, task queues and streaming to support real‑time analytics. The result: reliable, high‑performance handling of spikes during the telethon (A$6M in a 12–18 hour window), fast response times, minimal support overhead, and accurate real‑time donor and payment reporting for stakeholders like the Seven Network.

Good Friday Appeal