Christmas Challenge 2011 – An Apology from the Big Give

The 2011 Christmas Challenge launched at 10am, Monday 5th December. As expected thousands of wonderful donors keen to make the most of this opportunity flocked to the site to have their donation doubled. Here at the Big Give we had planned well in advance for these numbers and had put several safeguards in place to ensure that the high number of site visitors would not cause our server to crash.

Prior to the Challenge we had spent hours, weeks and months improving things from last year, and we were happy that a system had been implemented that would not let us down. However, one small error undid all of the work which we had done.

The configuration of one of the systems contained an error which we were unable to detect until the site reached capacity. As a result, the systems we had in place to manage the number of site visitors failed and the server crashed.  As a result many donors were unable to make their donation and so we took the decision to re-launch at 10am, Tuesday 6th December. This was designed to give charities the opportunity to let their donors know of the situation, where possible.

We take full responsibility for what happened yesterday and offer our sincere apologies for the disruption caused to both donors and charities.

Since the problems occurred we have worked tirelessly to identify any donor  issues, contact all participating charities and resolve the website difficulties. We will continue to provide the high level of customer support that we pride ourselves on, as well as pledging to do everything in our power to help charities make the most of the Challenge from the re-launch at 10am, Tuesday 6th December.

We appreciate your understanding and ask you to join us once more to make this  Challenge a huge success.  You have our promise that we will be working non-stop to make up for the website problems experienced by some on Monday. Please continue to support the hundreds of organisation taking part in the Challenge, whose dedication and commitment to a myriad of causes is the cause of celebration that the Big Give Christmas Challenge is all about.

To read all about the Challenge and view of list of participating charities, please click here.

Warmest regards,

Ashley Bowe, Managing Director