Mulesoft Case Studies LLS and MuleSoft Set the Pace with High Performance Fundraising Platform

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	LLS and MuleSoft Set the Pace with High Performance Fundraising Platform Mulesoft

LLS and MuleSoft Set the Pace with High Performance Fundraising Platform

Mulesoft

Technology Category	Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Applicable Industries	Life Sciences
Applicable Functions	Sales & Marketing Business Operation
Use Cases	Process Control & Optimization Predictive Quality Analytics
Services	Software Design & Engineering Services System Integration
Challenge	The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) had been using a third-party outsourced application for its Team in Training (TNT) fundraising program. However, as the number of fundraisers increased, the application began to experience frequent outages and performance issues, leading to failed or duplicate donations. The weak integration between the outsourced application and LLS’s internal systems resulted in duplicative functionality and higher maintenance costs. Additionally, the 7% transaction fee and the delayed transfer of funds significantly increased LLS’s fundraising costs. LLS needed to regain control of the infrastructure end-to-end, developing a set of rich user applications and integrating them with the existing back-end systems. The new system needed to be highly reliable, with no messages lost, robust exception strategies, and an active/passive failover architecture to achieve full redundancy. Read More
About Customer	The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) is the world's largest voluntary health organization dedicated to funding blood cancer research, education, and patient services. The mission of LLS is to cure leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin's disease, and myeloma, and improve the quality of life of patients and their families. Since its founding in 1949, LLS has invested more than $600 million for research specifically targeting blood cancers. LLS has been a pioneer of event-oriented fundraising, leveraging the passion of individual fundraisers. Its flagship program, Team in Training (TNT), has grown to become the world's largest endurance sports training program, raising more than $850 million since its founding in 1988. The TNT program allows amateur endurance athletes to help raise funds for LLS. In exchange, the program provides personalized fitness training and sponsored trips to endurance events around the globe, including marathons, triathlons, and century (100-mile) bike rides. Read More
Solution	LLS built a series of front-end applications using Adobe Flex, allowing individual participants to register themselves and manage their own fundraising, and providing TNT chapters with tools for administration. The team brought together Mule ESB Enterprise and ActiveMQ at the core, creating a backbone to integrate the front-end applications with a core set of reusable services called Mission360, as well as a legacy VB-based campaign management system called Society Central. Mule's out-of-the-box connectors allow the applications to access the file system and SMTP services for sending email. To ensure reliability, LLS leveraged Mule's built-in component and connector exception strategies. In the case of a component failure, the component exception strategy is configured to retry the message until it succeeds. The messages are also persisted in ActiveMQ via Mule's JMS endpoint to ensure that no messages are lost, even if the ESB shuts down for any reason. If ActiveMQ fails, the connector exception strategy is configured to persist messages in the file system until ActiveMQ comes back online. In addition, all messages are logged for auditing purposes. Read More Log in to view content
Contents

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration

Applicable Industries

Life Sciences

Applicable Functions

Sales & Marketing

Business Operation

Use Cases

Process Control & Optimization

Predictive Quality Analytics

Services

Software Design & Engineering Services

System Integration

Challenge

The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) had been using a third-party outsourced application for its Team in Training (TNT) fundraising program. However, as the number of fundraisers increased, the application began to experience frequent outages and performance issues, leading to failed or duplicate donations. The weak integration between the outsourced application and LLS’s internal systems resulted in duplicative functionality and higher maintenance costs. Additionally, the 7% transaction fee and the delayed transfer of funds significantly increased LLS’s fundraising costs. LLS needed to regain control of the infrastructure end-to-end, developing a set of rich user applications and integrating them with the existing back-end systems. The new system needed to be highly reliable, with no messages lost, robust exception strategies, and an active/passive failover architecture to achieve full redundancy.

About Customer

The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) is the world's largest voluntary health organization dedicated to funding blood cancer research, education, and patient services. The mission of LLS is to cure leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin's disease, and myeloma, and improve the quality of life of patients and their families. Since its founding in 1949, LLS has invested more than $600 million for research specifically targeting blood cancers. LLS has been a pioneer of event-oriented fundraising, leveraging the passion of individual fundraisers. Its flagship program, Team in Training (TNT), has grown to become the world's largest endurance sports training program, raising more than $850 million since its founding in 1988. The TNT program allows amateur endurance athletes to help raise funds for LLS. In exchange, the program provides personalized fitness training and sponsored trips to endurance events around the globe, including marathons, triathlons, and century (100-mile) bike rides.

Solution

LLS built a series of front-end applications using Adobe Flex, allowing individual participants to register themselves and manage their own fundraising, and providing TNT chapters with tools for administration. The team brought together Mule ESB Enterprise and ActiveMQ at the core, creating a backbone to integrate the front-end applications with a core set of reusable services called Mission360, as well as a legacy VB-based campaign management system called Society Central. Mule's out-of-the-box connectors allow the applications to access the file system and SMTP services for sending email. To ensure reliability, LLS leveraged Mule's built-in component and connector exception strategies. In the case of a component failure, the component exception strategy is configured to retry the message until it succeeds. The messages are also persisted in ActiveMQ via Mule's JMS endpoint to ensure that no messages are lost, even if the ESB shuts down for any reason. If ActiveMQ fails, the connector exception strategy is configured to persist messages in the file system until ActiveMQ comes back online. In addition, all messages are logged for auditing purposes.

Impact #1	Regained control of infrastructure, which reduces processing fees from 7% to 2% of donations
Impact #2	The infrastructure scales to over 24,000 transactions per hour and beyond
Impact #3	MuleSource consultants designed an architecture that leveraged Mule's built-in exception strategies to ensure reliability, with 100% up-time and zero message loss

Impact #1

Regained control of infrastructure, which reduces processing fees from 7% to 2% of donations

Impact #2

The infrastructure scales to over 24,000 transactions per hour and beyond

Impact #3

MuleSource consultants designed an architecture that leveraged Mule's built-in exception strategies to ensure reliability, with 100% up-time and zero message loss

Benefit #1	Reduced fundraising fees from 7% with the outsourced provider to a mere 2% currently for credit card processing fees
Benefit #2	The system is designed and tested to handle peak loads of over 24,000 messages per hour
Benefit #3	Helped to drive over $10 million in donations in the first 4 months alone

Benefit #1

Reduced fundraising fees from 7% with the outsourced provider to a mere 2% currently for credit card processing fees

Benefit #2

The system is designed and tested to handle peak loads of over 24,000 messages per hour

Benefit #3

Helped to drive over $10 million in donations in the first 4 months alone

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Overview

LLS and MuleSoft Set the Pace with High Performance Fundraising Platform

Operational Impact

Quantitative Benefit