So, you’re in a marketing or fundraising role in a charity, you’re constantly planning campaigns to engage the most people. You know when your audience peaks and how to plan for it.

But you’re also responsible for the moments you can’t plan for. Sudden crises, urgent appeals, or those intense Christmas and tax year-end filing deadlines.

When traffic on your website surges, it becomes a whole new beast. The very last thing anyone wants is slow load times, images not working, or the absolute worst - lost potential donations. This is where peak fundraising capacity really matters.

Here are the four most important reasons Umbraco is trusted by charities to perform when it matters most.

It scales instantly when demand spikes

This is the big one. Umbraco (especially when hosted in Umbraco Cloud) can automatically scale its capacity the moment traffic surges.

What this means for you is when thousands of supporters arrive at once, the site doesn’t just die immediately, it is specifically designed to scale quickly and reliably during traffic surges, then scales back afterwards. No panic, no manual intervention, no lost donations.

Donation pages stay fast, even under pressure

Another great thing about Umbraco (can you tell we love it?) is that it makes excellent use of caching. Umbraco can serve pre-rendered versions of pages without rebuilding them for every visitor, dramatically reducing load on the system during traffic spikes.

This frees up your most important pages, I’m thinking your donate page for example, to load quickly even during peak traffic. Potential supporters aren’t left frustrated by the donation process and therefore don’t abandon their user journey.

Fundraising integrations don’t bring the site down

Some charity websites rely heavily on CRMs, payment providers, and marketing tools. Umbraco is designed to connect to these systems without tightly binding everything together.

You are left thanking you chose Umbraco, as if a payment provider slows down or an external system has a wobble, your entire site doesn’t fall over at the first hurdle. The risk is contained, not catastrophic.

Reliability during high-profile moments

Legacy platforms often struggle when success becomes a stress test. Umbraco is built for high-traffic, high-stakes scenarios, including crisis appeals and media-driven spikes.

You can promote campaigns boldly, knowing your platform can cope with the attention you’re trying to generate.

In short, Umbraco isn’t just a CMS. It’s a safeguard for your fundraising success. When supporters show up in force, your website was born ready.