Operations Director & Lead Developer — Organisation

Operations Director & Lead Developer — Wonderful Organisation Summary & background

Wonderful is a not-for-profit organisation that ran the Wonderful fundraising platform, with 100% of all donations going to the charities of the fundraiser's choice. The bottom line and fees for the platform are paid by corporate sponsorship and like-minded philanthropists.

Working with the chairman on this project, I was the sole lead developer on the fundraising platform, building from scratch on bare-tin in a managed data centre. Over a period of 6 months, I developed the Wonderful fundraising platform using Vanilla PHP, Elastic Search, Maria

DB and Redis
, whilst integrating with a number of third-party services for verification, fulfilment and communications, including Kickbox.io for email validation and Twilio for SMS telephone validation.

Upon the successful launch of the platform I was promoted to Operations Director to oversee the day-to-day operations and running of the platform. Wonderful's policy is that 100% of the donations made by users go to the charity, no deductions at all, allowing the £2.3M of donations made to date to arrive at the charity unimpeded.

As the platform gained traction, and with corporate sponsors coming on board, I took a more managerial role — reviewing policy and procedure for enquiries, complaints, charity communications and other related tasks. Using our upstream payment provider tools, my day-to-day tasks also involved payment vetting of over £10,000 of donations per day
, fraud review and dispute resolution, working closely with fundraisers, charities and issuing banks.

Given the continuing and ever-growing donation turnover, and the introduction of GDPR, a decision was made to also have me as the responsible Data Protection Officer, monitoring compliance of all donations' data transferral, charity data acquisition and associated marketing communications from the platform.

As an FCA Small Payments Institute, we also had a reporting responsibility.

This role was a secondment from my position at Nexbridge .