Red Nose Day 2017: how to donate digitally

You can also make your Comic Relief donations using Apple Pay

Gone are the days of just using landlines to make phones donations to the biannual Comic Relief fundraiser. This year, for Red Nose Day 2017, there's a plethora of options including websites, apps, Red Nose Giving Pages and now Apple Pay.

Apple has made it possible to donate to the charity directly through Siri. Simply tell Siri: “I want to donate to Comic Relief,” “Make a donation to Red Nose Day”, “Where can I give some money to Comic Relief” or, if you're feeling particularly generous, “I want to give all my money to Comic Relief.”

Siri will respond with the web address of the online payments platform, or you can click Donate now to be taken directly to the fundraising page on Safari. If you used a recognised finger to activate Siri, the Safari screen will open automatically. If you used your voice, or a finger that hasn't been programmed in, you'll need to enter your passcode.

Once on the donation page, select the amount you'd like to donate, choose whether you want to Gift Aid your donation (only available to UK taxpayers) and then select a payment method. Red Nose Day 2017 has partnered with PayPal, Braintree, Stripe, Worldpay, MasterCard, Visa, Maestro and American Express. Additionally, if you have Apple Pay enabled on your device, you can pay by clicking Donate with Pay and using your fingerprint or passcode to approve the payment.

Alternatively, you can donate by going to the Red Nose Day 2017 website, call 03457 910 910 and donate using your credit or debit card, at a bank using a Red Nose Day 2017 giro slips available behind the counter at most bank branches, at Post Offices, by paying money in to “FreePay Account 5550”. More details can be found here.

What is Red Nose Day?

Red Nose Day is a UK-wide fundraising event organised by Comic Relief every two years. On Red Nose Day 2017, people are encouraged to put on a Red Nose, wear red and take part in funny events to raise money. On Red Nose Day, which this year takes place today, Friday March 24, celebrities and stand-up comedians take part in a night of comedy and films on BBC One.

"Red Nose Day unites the entire nation in trying to make a difference to the lives of thousands of people across Africa and the UK who are facing terrible injustice or living in desperate poverty," said the charity.

Where does Comic Relief money go?

For Red Nose Day 2017, Comic Relief is focusing on five issues including support for immunisation programs, mental health, young people in Africa, helping domestic violence victims, and fighting malaria. You can learn more about the individual projects and issues here.

Other digital initiatives for this year's Comic Relief include the Swear Jar app. Available on ioses and androids, the free app uses Google's voice recognition technology to listen to how often you swear. You can choose how much you’d like to donate and how long you want the app to listen for (up to 10 minutes). For every swear, a donation of 20p will be made from your pot. Once your time is up you can see how you fared against other swearers on the app's ‘Wall of Shame’.

Red Nose Day 2017 has also made it easy to set up an online fundraising page. The Red Nose Day Giving Page can be shared with friends and family, or online, to collect sponsorship. All the money is stored and shared with Comic Relief securely. Comic Relief will guide you through the process on its Red Nose Giving Page hub.

How are the donations managed?

Ahead of tonight's event, WIRED spoke to Pivotal, chosen by Comic Relief to provide the technology behind the donation platform. The company said it is expecting surges of up to 300 donations per second at key moments during the televised charity drive.

To make sure this high demand doesn't cause instability, the company is running the Cloud Foundry donations application across as many separate providers and physical regions as possible; and then using DNS "round-robin" to load balancing traffic across the different regions.

This year there are four Cloud Foundry installations; two hosted by Pivotal on the Google Cloud Platform and two hosted by Armakuni on AWS, and each installation has been load tested up to the full 300 donations per second; and has a separate operator monitoring it.

In the event of an issue being detected; there is a procedure for removing it from the DNS round-robin list; and redirecting traffic to one of the other installations.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK