Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals® raises funds and awareness for 170 member hospitals that provide 32 million treatments each year to kids across the U.S. and Canada. Donations stay local to fund critical treatments and healthcare services, pediatric medical equipment and charitable care. Since 1983, Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals has raised more than $5 billion, most of it $1 at a time through the charity’s Miracle Balloon icon. Its various fundraising partners and programs support the nonprofit’s mission to save and improve the lives of as many children as possible.

Like many nonprofit organization structures, the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals’ development team is lean and run on few resources. They rely on tools like Raygun to free up valuable development time so they can focus on adding value to their web properties rather than spend time debugging.

As the Director of Software Development, Scott Lance is proud to lead his team of five. His goals are to keep their online presence strong and trustworthy, so they can raise more money and increase the awareness of their cause.

Raygun gives us more concise error reporting, more insights into errors and the ability to get more information about our requests. It’s just a fantastic product.

Scott Lance - Director of Software Development

Reducing the noise of too many notifications

Scott is running a lean team, and an influx of error notifications with their prior crash reporting solution meant that they were receiving 50,000 emails about a single error. Something needed to change — there was no time to waste by searching through emails looking for the source of the error.

Scott found Raygun to be a great solution. The error grouping features in Raygun’s dashboard would save hours every week alone. After a quick introduction to the team, Scott implemented Raygun into all 30 of Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals’ applications.

Fast implementation and ease of use for the whole team

Scott recalls: “I was surprised at how easy it was and fast to set up. It literally took me 45 minutes to get (Raygun) up and running and get errors through the system.”

Because Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals relies on donations — many through the website itself — Scott quickly needs to know if there are errors affecting end users. If someone can’t make a donation or bounces due to poor page load times, Scott doesn’t have the luxury of time to spend sorting through emails or log files. Raygun helped him solve this problem.

With Raygun, clicking through our applications is so easy. Compared with having to do an Outlook search to figure out where the errors are, I can just go in, pick an application, see which errors are there, resolve what needs to be fixed, and see what other issues we are having

Fast debugging and prioritization of errors at a glance

Being able to take a quick glance at errors is vital to many teams using Raygun - especially when assets like a public API start to throw exceptions. When this happens to Scott, he can quickly open Raygun’s dashboard and get the answer he needs in less than 10 minutes.

Before Raygun, it was taking over half an hour to sort through the requests, then figure out what was wrong. He says: “The amount of output that was recorded from that request was immensely helpful.”

Raygun’s detailed software diagnostics provide the information needed right down to the line of code, saving time digging through log files to find errors. He continues:

“Take the ‘at a glance’ information that I get by going into an error. I can see there are exactly 691 exceptions of a particular error, I can see these are the browsers it was in, these are the servers it was happening on, the stack traces, the headers, the environment. It’s amazing how much faster it is for us to debug problems in our applications.”

Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals continues to inspire giving to local children’s hospitals with their highly effective fundraising strategies. Raygun provides a fast, efficient and sophisticated method of debugging so Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals can continue to provide great user experience while fundraising to save and improve kids’ lives.