Case Study: Bonterra GiveGab achieves long-term engagement for nonprofits with Heroku

Social Giving App Running on Heroku Drives Long-Term Engagement for Nonprofits

GiveGab is a social fundraising and volunteer engagement platform (founded in 2011 in Ithaca, NY) that helps nonprofits recruit, retain, and mobilize supporters by combining volunteer discovery, peer-to-peer fundraising, impact tracking, and gamification. The company needed a way to launch quickly with a lean team, iterate rapidly, support automated testing and deployment, and elastically scale to handle spikes in activity for large events like statewide “Days of Giving.”

GiveGab built its app on Heroku using Ruby on Rails, Node.js, a high-availability Postgres database and a suite of Heroku add-ons for autoscaling, monitoring, CI, analytics and caching, enabling fast provisioning of test environments and automated deployments. The result is a robust, easy-to-manage platform that accelerated development, kept operational overhead low, sustained long-term supporter engagement for nonprofits, and gave the team confidence to handle massive, short-term traffic surges (for example a $15M target Day of Giving).

Bonterra GiveGab

Aaron Godert

CTO and Co-Founder, GiveGab