The National Compassion Fund is a project of the National Center for Victims of Crime. All work on this project was done when Sam was a full time employee of the National Center for Victims of Crime. Logo design for this project was done in house by other members of the National Center for Victims of Crime team.

The Project

The National Compassion was designed to collect donations for the victims of mass casualty crimes. Unlike other donation platforms that spring up in the aftermath of mass casualty crimes, the National Compassion Fund donates 100% of the funds raised directly to the victims. The service was designed to be easily deployed in the event of any mass casualty incident, so that the legwork to set up a donation platform wouldn’t have to be done repeatedly.

The crucial task of the National Compassion Fund was that it would be easily deployed in the event of a mass casualty incident, and that it be able to handle a large amount of traffic on short notice while not breaking the bank by maintaining massive server infrastructure when not needed. The design needed to be simple and straightforward, not complicated and gimmicky. All it needed was donation pages, pages for the incidents, and a few static pages. The heavy lift here was the server architecture.

What We Did

Sam created the visual identity beyond the logo, and set up the server to the specifications required by the project. In order to meet the needs of the Compassion Fund (a cheap server that could be rapidly expanded to serve a large amount of traffic in a short time) we turned to a cloud based virtual private server. This allowed us to pay for a small amount of server resources, but spin up additional servers in a matter of minutes in the event of a mass casualty crime that would require activation of the fund, saving money for the National Center and allowing longer operation of the project, while not compromising its technological fitness in the even of a full scale activation.