Better Impact

Software to manage volunteers

Better Impact have provided software to nonprofit organizations and government agencies to help them manage their volunteers since 2001. Their clients come from all corners of the world like Australia, Bermuda, Canada, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Singapore, South America and USA. All varying in size from 50 to 150,000 volunteers.

Providing enterprise level solutions

Much like how companies use HR software to manage their staffing information, nonprofits can use purpose-built software to manage the efforts of their volunteers. One of the challenges that Better Impact face frequently is to try and provide Enterprise level solutions to organizations with little money – and an even smaller portion of that going into technology. “Things like application forms, volunteer profiles, skills matching, scheduling, hours tracking, reporting and much more are handled through our flagship software Volunteer Impact. Pingdom help us get the job done,” says Dan Plaskon.

With a big launch comes big challenges

Faced with the launch of a major new release there were several problems ahead to tackle. This led Better Impact to investigate whether Pingdom could solve the requirements they had:

Multiple checkpoints in their own service requiring monitoring (status pages, login pages, other supporting “sub-sites” – such as documentation, support, etc.) Checks from multiple geographical locations. Good granularity for checks interval (<20 minutes). Possibility to monitor third party vendors such as DNS, CDN, email etc. Flexible alert handling A mobile application

“Frankly I was sold upon your service after signing up for a free account and trying it out for a few days,” says Dan. Since the entire process to get started was ‘slick and intuitive’ Better Impact found the service incredibly easy to get up and running. “I believe we purchased a paid account within a few days of our free trial,” Dan continues. The pricing model and the ability to purchase services on a very granular basis (eg. Individual checks) were huge advantages to Dan and his team.

Collecting on SLA violations

Among the “big wins” for Better Impact have been to get alerted about issues very quickly, and being able to act upon them sooner. There is also the upside of being able to hold third party vendors accountable with data from the Pingdom reports, “I have used the root cause analysis on multiple occasions to troubleshoot issues with 3rd party vendors and collect on SLA violations when they occurred,” says Plaskon. “A big plus in my mind, for $6/year/check, I add multiple checks per vendor, to make it easier to provide proof of SLA violations and collect on them.”

Better Impact have also provided data from their Real User Monitoring they have in place to potential customers concerned about the average page load times in various regions of the world.

“I would say that the price-point and the flexibility of the service make Pingdom an excellent choice, especially for a smaller company looking for a single external monitoring vendor who can provide 99% of the features of other services for 25% of the cost.” concludes Dan Plaskon.