Everybody Loves Friday5: The Crowdfunding Platform for Nonprofits

Exaltation of Larks is proud to work with Friday5, a Los Angeles startup we think is worth paying attention to. Friday5 is an innovative crowd-funding platform that helps take the guesswork out of finding worthy causes and making tax-deductible donations.

Members who sign up at Friday5.org enter their credit card information, select the amount they want to donate to a nonprofit each week, and then receive a weekly email detailing which cause Friday5 has carefully curated for that week’s crowd-funded donation.

In short, Friday5 is helping change the world — one Friday at a time — and they’ve been praised in publications such as Forbes and PandoDaily.

Exaltation of Larks has worked with many nonprofits over the years but the opportunity to work together with Friday5 and support a new nonprofit each and every week was one we couldn’t pass up.

The role that we have with Friday5 is twofold: we provide the technical expertise and project management needed for Friday5’s online operations, and Christefano Reyes, an executive at Exaltation of Larks, serves on the Friday5 board and helps guide and advise the technical direction for the company. “Exaltation of Larks has a long history of working with both startups and with cause-based organizations,” Christefano said, “and our work with Friday5 has been a a great match for both companies.”

IDENTIFYING FRIDAY5’s NEEDS

Our collaboration with Friday5 began in 2013, when Friday5 founder Mike Berman found himself needing a team to help maintain Friday5.org, implement features requested by Friday5’s partners, and prepare for growth.

When Friday5’s lead developer left the company, Mike began looking for someone new. After a month of searching for a new team, he reached out to Ben Stewart at ShareMagnet, another Los Angeles startup that Exaltation of Larks has worked with and has a 1st-degree connection. “From day one, we’ve felt that we’ve been in great hands with Larks,” Mike says. “They quickly and accurately assessed our needs, and we’ve been more than impressed with their work.”

OUR SOLUTION

Friday5’s site hadn’t been updated for several months by the time Exaltation of Larks came on board. We performed our standard site audit and included a security review.

The results of our site audit identified several technical issues that needed to be addressed, from server maintenance and security issues to general bug fixes and ways to streamline and optimize the payment process. We also performed a business assessment and documented the platform and its systems and helped Friday5 plan for its next phase.

Recognizing the need to ensure that Friday5 had as seamless a transition to our services as possible, we worked with Friday5’s former lead developer over the course of several meetings to perform site discovery and produce all related documentation.

Managed Hosting
The payment gateway Friday5 uses, Network for Good, requires its customers’ servers to have a fixed IP address. This eliminates the option of using some grid and cloud hosting platforms. While the hosting costs at the time were higher than necessary, we advised against migrating to a new server environment. The transition cost of migrating to a new server or webhost were greater than the immediate short-term benefits.

Fortunately, their webhost changed its pricing options in April, 2014, and is now much more affordable. By using our server administration tools and our familiarity with the Friday5.org website and systems, we were able to build a completely new server infrastructure and fully migrate the Drupal site to it in less than 30 minutes.

As part of our managed hosting services, we provide Friday5 with rock solid backup and disaster recovery services. Systems we’ve implemented create backups of the database and codebase and these are regularly saved to a number of locations, including Amazon S3. Together with the documentation we’ve compiled for Friday5, we help ensure Friday5’s business continuity.

Network for Good
Network for Good is a specialty payment gateway set up to provide services to nonprofits. Exaltation of Larks maintains the Network for Good integration module that connect Drupal sites with Network for Good’s API, and has shared this module with the larger Drupal developer community. “We contributed this module during the code sprint at a Drupal Coworking Friday,” Christefano said. “These events combine mini code sprints and free coworking days and are a great way for us to mentor other Drupal developers.”

Data-Driven Development
When joining the project, we immediately documented Friday5’s systems and features that existed at that moment in time. This gave us a clear starting point for developing the product’s roadmap.

Our project planning for the next phase of feature development uses a data-driven approach. The features we’ve developed so far include better reporting tools to measure key indicators and enable business decisions on critical issues and opportunities. We’re expanding this to allow for more clarity in the day to day management of the organization, as well as insight for future planning.

Support and Maintenance
Exaltation of Larks performs ongoing maintenance and support for Friday5. These services give Friday5 the comprehensive coverage they need, from basic maintenance to emergency support. For example, the Friday5 website had an issue when the company was in the middle of an important business meeting. Friday5 used our emergency support system and the issue was resolved within the hour.

PROJECT OUTCOME

Exaltation of Larks has given Friday5 solid footing in the area it most needed it: technical leadership and support. We continue to act as a technical resource for Friday5, advising Mike and his team on the company’s infrastructure for growth. “With Larks,” Mike said, “we have instant access to great programmers, and we only pay for what we need. As we grow, we’ll need more development time and expertise — Larks has us completely covered.”

We are proud to see Friday5 succeeding in the market and see Friday5 as an important addition to the Los Angeles startup landscape — and also the national nonprofit landscape. Friday5 has proven to be a pioneer in crowd-funded charity giving. Indeed, about 6 months after Friday5 launched, Google effectively validated Friday5’s business model by introducing One Today, in which users donate $1 per cause per day using a system very similar to Friday5’s — including Network for Good integration.