About the project
Pronto is a giving platform that allows for hands off merchant onboarding so it can be a truly scalable Saas application. Pronto needed many features in order to be on par with other similar products in the clients space. Some of these included high responsiveness and performance, complete white label giving experience, acceptance of ACH and credit cards, subscription model billing for merchants, text 2 give, vigorous PDF reports based on transaction data, and analytics of user behavior available to the merchant at anytime through the dashboard.
This project took approximately 1 year to get to an MVP and 2 years to launch to the public. We had many design phases over the course of 2 years and iterated on new features based on user feedback. Apart from developing the entire application at the software level I was also able to provide consulting for the client and help them to launch the business successfully.
Pronto now has many larger sized merchants on the platform who process hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.
Features
Giving Reports
In order to easy the accounting process for the merchant and organization Pronto has a feature to export giving reports from any period weekly. These reports consolidated all information from the backend payment processor and matched it up with deposits from the actual bank statement to ensure the merchant is only getting reports from transactions that went through.
To all for these reports to look beautiful and high quality upon printing I created an engine on the backend for generating PDFs with custom content.
I integrated with two different payment platforms (CardConnect, Stripe) in order to create a user experience that was seamless.
Campaigns
To allow for organizations to segment targeted donation efforts Pronto needed a campaign feature. This allowed the merchant to upload a youtube video, a description, and a goal for the campaign. In this way donors could see how close they were to reaching a goal which not only increased the perceived impact of the donor but only incentivized them to share their donation url.
To supplement this feature I also built a gallery of sorts which allowed any donor to see other related campaigns on the platform and increase overall giving volume on the platform.
Recurring Donations
As a standard for any high scale donation platform we needed to support recurring payments.
After research of existing services that could make this happen it was decided that there were no viable options given our budget, and custom transaction pipeline. It made more sense to build this service internally from scratch.
I built the architecture on top of an existing daily cron job service. Once a user created a recurring donation the payment was not processed but instead added to a list of transactions to process when the correct time came.
This allowed me to easily search through the transactions that needed to be processed on the specific day based on the frequency given by the user initially.
If the user ever decided to stop that payment then the entry was simply deleted from the transactions list.
Because everything was encrypted by tokens which processed the payment, the user could easily swap out the card or payment method they wanted for a recurring donation. They could also pause and play upcoming payments.
Project results
The end product for Pronto was a fully fledged and competitive donation platform. This platform covers every aspect of considerably nice user experience, from ease of use to fast and performant.
