Case Study: Walks for Recovery
Building a scalable peer-to-peer fundraising platform for a multi-location nonprofit event.
Overview
Teen Challenge of Southern California needed a custom peer-to-peer fundraising platform to support an
organization-wide event held across multiple locations. The solution needed to support long-term use,
annual changes, and evolving feature requirements.
- Enabled people outside of the organization to fundraise for the event
- Delivered exact functionality required instead of relying on clunky commercial solutions
- Provided a unified system for running the same event across multiple locations
Project Snapshot
Client: Teen Challenge of Southern California
Industry: Non-Profit
Project Type: Web Development
Engagement Duration:
Initial project – 3 months
Annual changes – 12 years
Services Provided:
WordPress plugin for peer-to-peer fundraising
The Challenge
The initial project required support for three event types: a walk, a bike ride, and a motorcycle ride.
The walk events all took place on the same date across eight locations throughout Southern California.
The primary goal was to create a peer-to-peer fundraising site that operated like a shopping cart,
providing a simple and consistent experience for donors and participants while supporting centralized
reporting.
Objectives
- Provide each participant with a landing page they could share to fundraise with a simple message and photo
- Track donations by center and by donor
- Use a secure payment system with the organization’s existing merchant account
Solution
- Gathered and refined initial requirements
- Built the system using WordPress as the primary CMS and Magento as the shopping cart
- Matched existing logos and themes
- Implemented from designer-provided mockups
- Selected and customized a WordPress theme
- Developed a simple WordPress plugin to display transaction information and fundraising totals
Project Evolution
WordPress plugin to support the required functionality.
without adding WordPress overhead.
maintainability.
Additional Capabilities Added Over Time
- Teams
- Virtual Walks
- Strava Integration
- Leaderboards
- Family Registration
- Shirt size collection for walkers
- Internal administration tools
Results
The site has been used annually for peer-to-peer fundraising. Over time, new features have been added
and workflows adjusted to meet changing requirements—allowing the organization to continue running
events effectively and consistently without replacing the system each year.