Case Study: Charity: Water achieves scalable fundraising and real-time water monitoring with Heroku

Clean Water Nonprofit Runs Fundraising and Field Service Apps on Heroku

charity: water is a nonprofit that funds clean drinking-water projects worldwide and runs a peer-to-peer fundraising platform and field-service apps to monitor wells. Facing an aging PHP/Java backend that limited agility, integration with payment and ledger systems, and the ability to support sensor-based field monitoring, the team decided to rebuild to speed development, lower operational cost, and better support product evolution.

They replatformed core systems to Heroku using Ruby on Rails and Heroku Postgres, adopted add‑ons and CI/CD workflows (including Review Apps), and integrated third‑party services and Salesforce. The move eliminated the need for a dedicated DevOps hire, accelerated releases, and enabled a sensor-driven dispatch monitor app that now aggregates data from about 900 sensors in Ethiopia—improving field monitoring, operations, and the organization’s ability to scale.

Charity: Water

Matthew Eckstein

VP of Engineering