Bay area non-profits raised more than $1.7 million this year for "Give Day Tampa Bay." But organizers believe that amount could have been higher.

  • Technical glitch hampered donation efforts for several hours
  • Company managing fundraising platform called the problem a hardware issue

A technical problem with the online fundraising platform may have kept some donors away. For several hours, people were not able to give online.

"There's no way to quantify who you lost when they tried to give and couldn't," said Wilma Norton of Community Foundation of Tampa Bay, the organizers of "Give Day Tampa Bay.
 
"A day like this would not be possible without technology," Norton said. "It's an online giving event, but when technology fails it's sort of double ironic, double frustrating."
 
Kimbia, the company that managed the fundraising platform, apologized online and blamed the problem on a hardware issue. They issued the following statement on their website:
 
"The past 10 hours have been some of the most painful of our lives. The root cause of the issue now appears to be a hardware issue on one of our hosted database nodes."
 
The day was not a total loss. Area non-profit Arc Tampa Bay Foundation, for example, raised more than $12,000 for its programs.

But Arc Tampa Bay's executive director Madison Hauenstein said every dollar counts.
 
"It's unfortunate that that happened to people and unfortunate that we lost out on potential dollars to the organization, but hopefully they'll still give through our website," said Hauenstein.
 
In total, despite the technical glitch, Bay area nonprofits were able to raise about the same amount as they did in 2015.