CauseSquare Drives Social Giving for Non-Profits and Personal Causes with NuoDB
Elastic SQL database delivers scalability without compromise required for platform as it expands to crowd funding.
Cambridge, MA – March 28, 2017 – NuoDB, the elastic SQL database company for hybrid cloud applications, today announced that CauseSquare, an online fundraising platform for charities, nonprofits, and personal causes, has implemented NuoDB’s elastic SQL database to power their popular social giving platform. By leveraging NuoDB’s innate cloud-ready architecture, CauseSquare has built a successful platform that can continue to scale, particularly as the company introduces a new crowdfunding component to compete with sites like GoFundMe.
With 1.6 million registered nonprofits in North America and a record $373 billion in charitable donations made from individuals, corporations, estates, and foundations in 2015, the appetite for charitable giving has never been greater. Meanwhile, the Massolution Crowdfunding Industry Report estimates that the North American crowdfunding market raised $9.46 billion in 2015 alone. CauseSquare was established to help nonprofit organizations and personal causes capitalize on the generosity of the population, specifically improving millennial donor conversion and retention rates. Centered on delivering a convenient mobile app experience, founder and CTO Walid Darwish recognized that traditional databases weren’t capable of providing the elasticity or scalability needed for the platform to be successful.
“As a SaaS company, our cost-to-profit ratio is based on how many users we have. Obviously, acquiring more subscribers generates more revenue, but it also increases costs and complexity because we have to manage the associated data. Without a database that can scale and handle the volumes of data associated with a marketplace model, we knew we would be limiting our profit in the short-term and hindering the future growth of the business,” said Darwish.
After ruling out NoSQL options given higher costs and specialized knowledge required, Darwish and his team sought out SQL databases with a distributed architecture. CauseSquare selected NuoDB for its cloud-centric design, which could not only elastically scale along with the growth of the platform, but also support multi-tenancy as CauseSquare increased its customer base. In addition, NuoDB’s SQL foundation offered the familiarity CauseSquare developers were seeking as they migrated the existing application from MySQL.
“Given its focus on cloud applications, NuoDB provides us with the perfect combination of traditional relational databases and NoSQL databases. We not only get a database that can maintain exceptionally high availability, we also can easily and cost-effectively add capacity when we need it without compromising on transactional consistency or data durability,” noted Darwish.
“Traditional relational databases can consume upwards of 60 percent of application budgets, which is why so many young applications are built on top of open source databases. But the limitations to scale and needless application complexity of these products can be just as restrictive,” said Jeff Boehm, chief marketing officer at NuoDB. “By building on NuoDB’s elastic SQL database from the start, CauseSquare has been able to maintain a low total cost of ownership that aligns with their application needs without sacrificing any future growth or further compromising the platform experience.”
To learn more about CauseSquare and how they’re using NuoDB, read our case study at www.nuodb.com/causesquare-cs.
For more on how NuoDB can help support the development of new cloud applications download our free Community Edition.
About NuoDB
NuoDB’s elastic SQL database for hybrid cloud applications helps customers get applications to market faster and reduce their total cost of ownership. Software vendors and ecommerce companies rely on NuoDB to obtain the combination of scale-out simplicity, elasticity, and continuous availability that cloud applications require, with the transactional consistency and durability that databases of record demand.
As a result, customers can capitalize on modern technologies such as cloud computing and containerization to ensure their applications are ready for today’s evolving expectations, as well as any future requirements.
NuoDB is headquartered in Cambridge, MA, USA, with offices in Dublin and Belfast. For more information, visit nuodb.com.