British Red Cross: Inspiring, impactful response to need

Two weeks after launching a new Sitecore-powered donations platform designed to scale rapidly for peak demand, British Red Cross put it to the ultimate stress test: taking on 100% of online traffic generated by the One Love Manchester charity concert. Technology partner Friday had just three days to test and harden the platform before an event broadcast to 22.6 million people in 43 countries worldwide.

Over the weekend of the event, traffic was 7,400% higher than the previous weekend. During the three-hour concert itself, nearly 700,000 users visited the donation site, with peak traffic of more than 33,000 simultaneous users and up to 823 donations a minute. Despite this high demand, the platform handled an average of 398,000 requests a minute at a blazingly fast response time of just 0.1 second. Conversion rates increased by 9% overall and by 15% for mobile.

Since its launch, the platform has processed more than £6m in online donations. For the One Love Manchester campaign alone, it enabled British Red Cross to raise over £800k — £475k of that in just three hours.