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LLS and MuleSoft Set the Pace with High Performance Fundraising Platform
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
The 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 The 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.
The 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.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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