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Last Updated: 11/09/2021

As Giving Tuesday and year-end appeals approach, we wanted to share the steps we’ve taken to deliver a secure, stable, and reliable giving platform for all of our customers during one of the largest giving days of the year and through peak giving season.

Last year, we saw our most successful Giving Tuesday to date—in terms of online fundraising results for our customers and platform stability and security—demonstrating Classy’s ability to reliably scale and support our customers' online fundraising needs this Giving Tuesday and beyond.

• $37.9M raised vs. $19.4M in 2019
• 291,991 donations vs. 173,851 in 2019
• Supported 20-21k requests per minute last year (API and transactions) with no performance loss or latency, regardless of campaign volume or complexity. We saw no disruptions across the platform across thousands of active campaigns—including a national telethon.

Platform Preparation and Readiness

We maintain the highest level of platform reliability, readiness, and security throughout the year, but take additional preemptive measures leading up to Giving Tuesday so you can confidently fundraise on Classy during peak giving season.

• Classy recently completed its annual audit for PCI Level 1 Certification (as of October 2021), ensuring the highest accuracy and readiness possible for the giving season.
• In the months leading up to Giving Tuesday, Classy leads a well-architected audit of best practices, in partnership with AWS and Cloudflare, to ensure our platform and customers are set up for success.
• Classy maintains an all-day, live mission control room with a team of AWS Solutions Engineers for real-time monitoring on Giving Tuesday and any major giving day throughout the year, including December 31.
• Classy preemptively scales our infrastructure for Giving Tuesday—increasing infrastructure cost and adding additional servers to our cluster—to support our already best-in-class infrastructure security and highly available architecture with automatic scale protocols in place.
• Classy follows an incident response protocol audited by trusted third parties to ensure effective, timely action and communication.

Those measures are in addition to the highest level of platform reliability, readiness, and security we maintain throughout the year and transparently publish in real-time on our status page.

Built for Performance at Scale

Extensive load and performance testing, throughout the year and leading up to Giving Tuesday, has ensured our readiness to handle large spikes in platform traffic.

• Page load times prove to be consistently above industry standards with our median page load time at 2.4 seconds, compared to the industry average of 10 seconds.
• Last year, despite the largest Giving Tuesday on the Classy platform, our median page load times outperformed our already strong median average.
• Our testing and simulation confirms the Classy platform can handle peak traffic volume with ease—with no performance loss or latency—and is only limited by the amount of traffic payment processors can support, typically 100 transactions per second. We have always been well within the rate limiting threshold, even during the highest volume periods on the Classy platform.
• Classy Pay is built on the most reputable and innovative processors, delivering best in class reliability with 99.9% up-time, has never experienced an outage, and processes at 3x the speed despite double the volume of other payment processors.

Built for Security and Reliability from End-to-End

We build security into the foundation of all our products and services to ensure our platform is secure by design.

• 24x7x365 Security Scanning and Threat Monitoring: We maintain 24/7/365 monitoring with improved machine learning to detect performance anomalies throughout our application, which includes:
• Network Level Vulnerability Scanning
• Annual Penetration Testing
• On-call team of engineers who continuously monitor
• WAF and DDOS Protection: Automated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection and rate limiting protects against cyberattacks.
• Load Balancer Based Compute Isolations: Using AWS, we have designed our platform to operate using compute based load balancing in a multi-region, multi-availability zone environment across two different geographic locations to ensure high availability. All backups are taken nightly across applications, databases, and other systems, and are encrypted at rest.
• End-to-End Encryption with TLS v1.2 Protocol Requirement: All Classy external-facing services use HTTPS TLS version 1.2 or higher to ensure encryption in transit of all data, whether that connection is established from a customer’s local web browser or an API endpoint with which we integrate.
• AES 256-bit Encryption: All secrets are stored in AWS using AES 256-encryption and are highly restricted, logged, and monitored.
• Role-based Access Control and Secure Logging: Classy uses identity-based access management for all of our systems along with application IP-based access restrictions.

Team Preparation and Readiness

Our platform isn’t the only thing scaled and prepared to support you this Giving Tuesday—we are too! The entire Classy team is also ready and excited to ensure you have knowledgeable, friendly, and live support for your Giving Tuesday campaigns.

• Care team is available by email, chat, phone Monday – Friday, 6:30am – 5:30pm PST
• Care team is available 5:30am – 5:30pm PST on Giving Tuesday
• Care team staffed fully to support end of year giving season
• Customer Development Team Giving Tuesday and Year-End Appeal Office Hours

Please reach out to us if you need support leading up to or on Giving Tuesday. We look forward to mobilizing and empowering your mission on one of the largest global giving days of the year!