The days of the collection bucket are over. As consumer expectations have been shaped by Netflix, Uber, and Amazon, excellent customer experience is increasingly important. Donations need to be as quick and simple as taking coins out of your pocket. Pushpay’s end users must have a frictionless giving experience, or they might not donate.

David Corbett, Senior Engineering Manager of the Giving team at Pushpay, explains, “We facilitate donations between people who are wanting to give and our customers. So, if they see an error when using one of our applications, or they're unable to give, they're unable to be generous at that moment, which might be a lost opportunity. So, that person may never want to try again. That means lost money for our customers and the Pushpay business.”

This trust in Pushpay’s reliability is why so many customers select Pushpay as their giving platform of choice.

The resilience story is our strongest selling point. Our ability to know when things are going wrong with our system and respond quickly is part of that story. We need a highly available, highly resilient platform with high-quality releases going out.

David Corbett - Senior Engineering Manager

Pushpay maintains a resilient system with 360-degree monitoring

Excellent user experiences are always front of mind for Pushpay, and monitoring is an essential part of that strategy. At any one time, the company receives logging data from hundreds of white-label apps, multiple web stacks, and back-end services. That’s a lot of data to sort through—too much to manage and prioritize manually.

“We needed an error monitoring tool integrated into our system so we could get visibility into errors separated from all the logs,” David explains. “The logging data was spread across different servers and systems which made it difficult to get visibility into critical issues that came up and needed to be addressed. One of our main goals is to have insight and act on an issue before anyone reports it. We want to know about problems as soon as they occur, which is why we implemented Raygun.”

“We have people using our app 24/7, so there's always a steady stream of data. We have a massive amount of logging and being able to leverage Raygun Crash Reporting as part of that process gives us confidence that we are releasing quality software. It also allows us to react quickly when we notice something isn’t right,” said David.

Confidence in the quality of releases helps improve the customer experience

As Director of Mobile Engineering for Pushpay, Julian Spora is “obsessed with delivering customer value.”

To maintain a steady stream of high-quality releases for customers, Pushpay practices continuous delivery and the team ships updates to their products multiple times a day. The team finds Raygun’s Deployment Tracking feature useful for catching errors in their continuous delivery pipeline before they affect end users.

“It doesn't matter how much infrastructure and support you have, there's always going to be edge cases with things you haven't captured.” Julian elaborates, “When we release any updates, we tag it as a deployment in the Raygun dashboard. This enables us to see any new errors that are coming through and see if the deployment was good or if we need to look into an error spike.”

Raygun gives us the ability to know about issues so we can respond quickly and give our customers the best experience that they deserve and expect.

In one particular case, David recalls shipping a new release and getting an error alert from Raygun just four minutes after they made the deployment. David recalls, “Raygun let us know there was something wrong with our SMS system. With Raygun in place, we were able to respond to it incredibly quickly. Every second counts—it would have had a much bigger impact if it was allowed to linger in the system.”

Pushpay’s dedication to customer experience shows in the glowing app store reviews. Some customers increase giving by 15% per month, and one customer reported 300 more sign-ups in just one month facilitated by Pushpay’s reliable and frictionless platform.

Monitoring what matters will continue to be a focus of Pushpay to enable charitable giving for their fast-growing user base. David summerizes by saying, "Raygun gives us peace of mind that our software is working as expected for our customers."

About Pushpay

Pushpay’s mission is to bring people together by strengthening community, connection, and belonging.

Pushpay provides a donor management system, including donor tools, finance tools, and a custom community app, to the faith sector, non-profit organizations and education providers in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Pushpay’s leading solutions simplify engagement, payments, and administration, enabling customers to increase participation and build stronger relationships with their communities.

The giving that Pushpay facilitates represents a significant amount of good being done in local communities, such as funding for orphanages, food drives, homeless shelters, and drug rehabilitation, to name a few causes.