Supporting the British Heart Foundation to beat heartbreak forever

A platform to support life-saving research

The charity knew it needed a better technology infrastructure to support these ambitious goals. Its website has become increasingly important for delivering on the promise of its mission for 2030, with its online retail business, fundraising campaigns, and acting as a source of information for all stakeholders. Working with Rackspace Technology, the British Heart Foundation migrated to Microsoft Azure, giving it a platform that is both reliable and scalable.

As much as 80 per cent of the charity’s income comes from voluntary contributions, of which just over 60 per cent is legacies. The rest comes from a variety of fundraising sources, including community activities, events, major gifts, and mass participation events. Increasingly, these fundraising efforts rely on the British Heart Foundation’s website to promote and provide information, as well as acting as a donations channel itself.

“The website was fit for purpose around six to eight years ago,” explained Amit Patel, head of enterprise architecture at the British Heart Foundation. “But more recently it has struggled to scale up as needed. We’ve seen massive growth in digital donations and sign-ups. For instance, our London to Brighton Bike Ride is a major annual event, and all of its information and fundraising is processed through the website. We see a major peak in online traffic during this time, and we’ve had issues in the past with the website slowing down, grinding to a halt, or even crashing, which hampers the user experience and can hinder people from supporting us.”

The charity realized that in order to grow and meet its targets, it needed a platform that had the reliability and scalability to support it. After establishing exactly what it needed, the British Heart Foundation appointed Rackspace Technology as a strategic partner through a procurement exercise and Microsoft Azure was selected as the cloud platform for its reliability and Platform as a Service offering.

“We’ve been working with Microsoft directly over the past two years but didn’t have the capability to migrate to and run Azure in-house. Rackspace Technology provided expertise and experience with Azure, as well as collaboratively working as an extension of our team to make sure everything was exactly how we wanted it to be,” said Amit.

“We chose Azure because we could design a scalable, reliable base, and were interested in its Platform as a Service offering.”

Looking to the future

The migration was always about providing a future-proofed platform to support the British Heart Foundation and its 2030 strategy. Now it is in place, the website is opening up new possibilities the internal IT team couldn’t have previously considered. “Having this new, expandable platform, which can access all the tools Azure supports, is helping us think of new ways of helping patients via digital technologies. At the same time, it’s unlocking innovative approaches to fundraising and revenue generation,” said Mary.

And while the new site is reliable and scalable, the charity knows it is just the first step in order to keep in line with technological advances. “People are going to be going more digital and we need to be with them. We’re looking at Platform as a Service with Rackspace Technology, which will help us be more agile, more scalable, more stable. It’s ongoing, and it’s the way we can best use technology to reach our targets,” said Amit.