Everfund is a platform that allows its clients to increase fundraising reach and help them fundraise more effectively no matter where their donors are. Everfund clients create donation links to share with donors via QR codes and short links for any of their non-profit's online or offline touchpoints.
To run all of its operations, including customer acquisition, retention, marketing, and donations through the Everfund platform, the team must integrate with multiple CMSs, CRMs, databases, and many more APIs and SaaS services. They had started the platform on open-source technology and were attracted to StepZen’s hosted service model and the speed they could gain at design/build time when connecting each new backend.
Multiple, disparate backend data sources and a growing business
Everfund is currently powered by a set of REST and GraphQL endpoints, including a postal code API, the Stripe Payments API, a couple of GraphQL CMSs, a custom Serverless GraphQL API built with RedwoodJS, and more. Chris and his team had already integrated several backends using open-source technology. However, as the business grows and as the diversity of backends increases to include SOAP, REST, old and new CRMs, and various third-party tools, they needed to solve for a couple of things - a common interface and a solution to avoid each new backend or client becoming a bespoke integration project.
We are a small agile startup with limited resources and development time so speed is of the essence."
With StepZen, Everfund consolidated its backend data sources, allowing the platform to scale and integrate each new API or backend in an easily configured and unified GraphQL endpoint. In addition, StepZen supports an authentication model that ensures Everfund clients can securely access their data and only their data. Everfund transitioned to StepZen’s fully managed service, meaning that StepZen handles the backend implementation, including deploying, scaling, and securing the backend server.
Running on StepZen was an easy decision. Now my team can focus on the business while StepZen keeps the service and all the connections up and running.”
Summary
We sat down with Christopher and co-founder and COO, Will De Ath, shortly after Everfund went live on StepZen to catch up on how things are going. They reiterated the importance of the gains in development speed for their small and agile startup. They also underscore how critical it is that the Everfund team can focus on the business and leave the building and managing of the infrastructure to StepZen.
Chris told us that he appreciated StepZen’s responsiveness to support their existing stack, the team’s focus on ensuring things are well-designed, and overall dedication to implementing best practices. On our side, not only is it fun to work with Chris and the team, but we at StepZen learn a lot. Having started to build the platform on OSS before migrating to StepZen, the Everfund team knows well the potholes in the road they’ve traveled and anticipates the hurdles on the road ahead. We appreciate their partnership and feedback because it helps us understand real pain points and prioritize the problems to be solved for Everfund and teams like it.