Hosting at scale
11,083 visitors in a single day, no downtime.
Lemonade Stand Day · Stollery Children’s Hospital
A city-wide fundraiser — hundreds of kids, one website, and a whole city arriving at once. Event day brought a five-fold surge against the daily average with donations flowing through it the entire time.
Custom build
Hosting at scale
Fundraising
The engagement
- ClientSimply Supper · Lemonade Stand Day
- IndustryNon-profit, fundraising, e-commerce
- What we didCustom build, memberships, payments, integrations, SEO, hosting
- LaunchedJune 2020
The challenge
Lemonade Stand Day gives kids a day running a real business, raising money for the Stollery. After six years the team was running it on spreadsheets and paper — hand-drawn maps of every stand, manual reconciliation, and no automation anywhere.
It worked, but it capped how big the event could get. Then the pandemic arrived and the whole thing had to work for people who couldn’t set up a physical stand at all.
James is probably sick of me, but I truly can’t thank him enough for making my vision come to life, making my life easier, like 5000% easier, and creating our one-stop shop for Lemonade Stand Day.
Monita Chapman, Owner — Simply Supper Ltd.
What we did
- A site of its own. Lemonade Stand Day moved off a static page on the Simply Supper site and became its own thing.
- Registration that isn’t paperwork. One form, collecting what the event actually needs.
- A dashboard per stand. Participants manage their own page, update details, post photos and watch their total climb in real time.
- Donations, with the fee covered. Online payment with the option for the donor to absorb the transaction fee.
- Hosting built for one enormous day. The monitoring and the boring weekly maintenance exist for the second Saturday in June.
The result
11,083
Visitors on event day
5×
Normal daily traffic
$2.2M
Processed since launch
Traffic: GA4 · Uptime: monitoring log · Transactions: payment records
The first year raised $168,000 — at the time a record online donation total for the Stollery, and it happened at the height of the pandemic. Reconciliation went from two people over several weeks to one person in three days.
Six years on the site has processed over $2.2 million for the Stollery: 26,519 transactions from more than 18,700 customers. At its busiest it takes a donation every ten seconds.
Is this your situation?
One day a year when everything arrives at once, and it has to hold — if that is your event, this is the work.