The Convoy Cup Foundation is a charitable organization founded in 2002, whose mandate is to perpetuate and honour the sacrifices of merchant marine, army, navy and air force veterans from WWII and more recent conflicts.

The Foundation was in need of a new website to help increase their recognition both locally and internationally, as well as to raise funds to help achieve their mandate. So, we helped them launch a fundraising campaign supported by an extensive web application that streamlined campaign management, website updates and monitoring.

The Convoy Cup website integrates over 10 third-party APIs, ranging from social media services like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr, to key infrastructure like Stripe, Disqus, Eventbrite and MailChimp. Tying all of this together is a backend that facilitates adding new profiles to the crowdfunding campaign, while providing robust reporting tools for accounting and campaign monitoring.

This project was built from the ground up using Lasso 9 and CouchDB. Lasso's performance and ease of use helped keep the codebase lean, while still performing complex actions that would have been impossible in other languages' standard libraries. For example, it took less than 200 lines of code - and no plugins - to process a donation, charge a credit card, write the data to the database, generate a PDF tax receipt (with a secure permalink) and email it to the donor!

Lasso 9's query expressions also enabled us to generate the markup to serve beautiful, staggered-column, drop-in photo galleries in just 5 lines of code. Its caching tags allowed us to serve image data from an insecure CDN via a server-side proxy script in just 10 lines. Perhaps the most relevant metric, however, relates to turnaround time: the Convoy Cup Foundation website was produced from scratch in under 6 weeks, by one Lasso developer and one front-end developer. Lasso truly lived up to its promise of security, speed and simplicity.

Prior to the launch of their website, the Convoy Cup Foundation had no social media presence on the web. Over the 6 weeks from the website launch up to the actual event, an increasing number of referrals to the website started coming from Twitter and Facebook engagements - to the point where this traffic was competing with actual search engine referrals.

The crowdfunding campaign helped the Foundation raise over $13,000 in its first year, with 11 participating profiles generating second and third-order referrals from across the web. The project has been very positively received by the Foundation board, the local military community, and the broader international audience on the internet. An ambitious responsive design, robust content management system, administrative automation and deep social media integrations have come together to produce a compelling experience for all audiences.

"It looks Amazing! You and your team have worked really hard and I cannot wait for the release day so everyone can see what they are missing and want to get more and more involved in the foundation and honouring our war veterans. GREAT JOB!!"


From the Foundation chairman:


"We had a wonderful Convoy Cup event this weekend. I … wanted to pass along that I had received many compliments from people over the weekend for the new Convoy Cup website. They felt is was done very well and it will be a great start for our future. I want to thank you so much for being so helpful."