What Nonprofits Should Look for in a SaaS Provider

High-visibility disasters, such as the tsunami and Gulf Coast hurricanes, are not the time to discover the subpar architecture of your SaaS vendor. For example, when the quantity of online donations and Web activity threatened to overwhelm the online systems of the leading recipient of charitable donations during Hurricane Katrina, the organization needed to distribute traffic to other Web sites that were accepting contributions on its behalf. Nonprofits need to partner with providers whose systems are designed to withstand high volume and who have a proven track record of processing millions of Web site visitors and financial transactions at peak loads.