Real-Time Donor Matching & Payment Processing Pipeline

A high-growth nonprofit needed to match donors to campaigns in real time, process payments securely, and keep their CRM and internal tools in sync—without manual handoffs or overnight batch jobs.

Challenge

• Donations arrived via multiple channels (web, events, APIs).
• Matching rules depended on campaign state, donor history, and external CRM data.
• Payment processing had to be idempotent and auditable.
• CRM and internal dashboards needed near-real-time updates for fundraisers.

Architecture approach

• Single entry point: All donation events (webhooks, API, form submissions) landed in a single ingestion layer that validated payloads and published to an internal event bus (Pub/Sub).
• Matching service: A dedicated service consumed events, pulled campaign and donor context from Firestore and CRM APIs, applied matching rules, and wrote results back. Implemented as Cloud Functions triggered by Pub/Sub for scale and retries.
• Payment pipeline: Stripe webhooks were processed with idempotency keys and signature verification. Successful charges triggered the same event flow so matching and CRM sync shared one pipeline.
• CRM sync: Outbound sync to the CRM was done via a queue with retries and dead-letter. No double-writes; order of operations was strict (payment confirm → match → CRM update).

Outcomes

• Donors saw accurate matching and receipts in real time.
• Fundraising team had up-to-date dashboards without manual refresh.
• Failures were isolated (e.g. CRM down didn’t block payments) and observable.

This kind of real-time data pipeline and automation engineering is what we build for revenue-critical systems. Request an architecture review to discuss your pipeline.