Sector(s)
Project Team
- SparkFabrik: Agile discovery, UX/UI design, Information Architecture, Development, Cloud and DevOps
- Fondazione Telethon: Marketing and Communications, Information Systems, Donor Care
Fondazione Telethon, recognised by Italy's Ministry of University and Research, raises funds year-round and through campaigns, the largest being the Christmas televised marathon that generates roughly 15% of annual income. Historically tied to traditional media, the foundation had invested in its online presence, but online donations were only about 3% of the annual result, and around 65% of that arrived during the marathon, exactly when the website suffered serious stability problems under load.
SparkFabrik was engaged to make the donation experience simpler, faster, and reliable ahead of the 2017 marathon. According to Telethon's Head of Information Systems, SparkFabrik was selected specifically for its in-depth technical knowledge of Drupal alongside its Agile delivery approach.
About the project
Goals
Make donating easier, faster, and safe, and above all guarantee that the online donation flow and the SMS-donation thank-you pages stay available through the traffic spikes of the 2017 televised marathon.
Challenge
Online donations ran through a form on the institutional website that became unstable under heavy load, precisely during the marathon call-to-action moments that drove most donations. The donation path needed to survive traffic peaks without putting the rest of the institutional site (including the Christmas solidarity shop) at risk, and it had to be ready in a short window before the marathon.
Solution
SparkFabrik ran an Agile co-design workshop with Telethon's marketing, IT, and donor-care teams to build a prioritised backlog, then delivered in short, transparent iterations. The team decoupled the donation form from the main website and launched a dedicated donation service as Telethon Italia's first cloud microservice, a responsive front end on an autoscaling cloud infrastructure with a content-delivery network, at very low running cost. Continuous integration and continuous delivery moved code safely from staging to production; the client validated each weekly increment, so the project shipped a week early with no separate testing phase.
Outcome
- +37% growth in online donations through the form during the 2017 marathon
- Zero downtime for the donation area and SMS thank-you pages through traffic peaks, for the first time in Telethon's online history
- The donation form simplified to four essential fields, cutting abandoned donations
- The institutional website, relieved of the donation load, stayed fully operational, including the online shop for charity Christmas products
The in-depth technical knowledge of Drupal was the reason why we chose SparkFabrik, together with the possibility of using the new Agile methodologies to manage the project.
Marco Montesanto, Head of Information Systems, Fondazione Telethon
Why Drupal was chosen
For the donation microservice itself, Drupal was intentionally not the build technology: that high-load transaction path was decoupled onto a lightweight Angular, Firebase, and Google Cloud stack. Drupal's role in this project was different, and two points matter:
- Drupal expertise won the engagement: Telethon's Head of Information Systems states plainly that SparkFabrik's in-depth Drupal knowledge, combined with Agile methods, was the reason they chose the partner
- Drupal remained the stable institutional backbone: rather than discard years of investment, the team decoupled the donation form from the main website so the institutional platform could keep serving content and the online solidarity shop, freed from the donation traffic peaks that had previously destabilised it
The community value on show is architectural: an established Drupal platform kept doing what it does well, content and commerce, while a single high-load transaction path was offloaded to a purpose-built microservice, with no replatforming and no service interruption.
Technical Specifications
Drupal served as the stable content and commerce platform for the institution, with the high-load donation transaction path deliberately kept off it and delivered as a separate, independently scalable microservice. This separation let each part evolve and scale on its own without a replatforming risk to the live site.
