New Era Colorado and some of the other 931 organizations participating in Colorado Gives Day were getting a donation every couple of minutes until a network problem during the crush of online giving took down the website Tuesday morning.
To make good for the hours of thwarted donation attempts, Colorado Gives Day has been extended until noon today.
“What it looks like happened was that there was some sort of networking issue on the servers,” said Charles “Chic” Naumer, co-owner of CiviCore, the event’s technology-support team. “It’s like there was a dam and a reservoir formed behind the dam.”
In its second year, the 24-hour online giving fest was designed to spike philanthropic donations for area nonprofits.
But by midmorning Tuesday, the site began experiencing cycles of crashing and rebooting.
“It’s a big deal, I think,” said Steve Fenberg, executive director of New Era Colorado. “It’s frustrating for us, but we don’t rely on it to be our major fundraising effort of the year. For some organizations, it’s pretty bad.”
After not hearing from the event organizers for hours, many of the participating organizations scrambled to shepherd donor calls and take donations directly.
At 2 p.m., the event’s organizer, Community First Foundation, sent a news release announcing that the deadline for donations would be extended. Now it is up to Denver-based CiviCore to carry the event forward, said Community First Foundation spokeswoman Caitlin Jenney.
CiviCore tested for months at three or four times the expected levels. Naumer said they had the capacity to deal with the traffic.
“Unfortunately, it’s one of those things that is totally out of our control. It’s very, very frustrating,” Naumer said. “It happens to the biggest and best websites.”
By late afternoon, the website’s traffic had regained a smooth flow.
“We’re getting about $50,000 every five minutes,” Naumer said.
Colorado Gives Day’s inaugural event in 2010 raised $8.4 million for area nonprofits and organizations.
At 6 p.m. Tuesday, contribution totals were at $7.8 million, on track to surpass last year’s total.
Kristen Leigh Painter: 303-954-1638 or kpainter@denverpost.com
