Pole Pedal Paddle: Cost Optimization Strategies Maximize Impact for Local Non-Profit

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Held in Bend, Oregon, the SELCO Pole Pedal Paddle (PPP) event is a popular annual multi-sport relay race benefiting Mt. Bachelor Sports Education Foundation (MSBEF). Over 2500 amateur and pro athletes compete solo or as a team in the race each year. The six legs of the race include Alpine skiing, Nordic skiing, biking, running, a canoe/kayak/SUP leg, and a sprint to the finish. Race Manager Molly Cogswell-Kelley asked Effectual for a custom solution to improve race registration, team management, and results reporting as well as to reduce PPP costs.

One of the main cost drivers was an expensive yearly subscription service with a third party provider. With two races (the adult PPP and the kid’s PPP), the event was paying for two subscriptions. In addition, even though their production only ran 4 ½ months each year, they were being charged for an entire year. The off-the-shelf service also lacked needed functionality for managing PPP’s different categories and unique team structures. In addition to growing costs, the organization had a new legal requirement for attaining parent signatures for child waivers.

Applying Well-Architected Framework best practices for cost optimization, our team worked on several strategies targeting the PPP production environment and development process to address business requirements and meet cost objectives.

First, it was clear that an annual subscription was a poor pricing model for the once a year event. We shifted to a more flexible, pay-as-you-go solution with AWS to ensure usage and costs match PPP’s short production timeline. Using AWS allowed PPP to run servers and pay for usage only when their environment was turned on. Given that our development team has nine months each year to develop new features and push out code, we also decided to use spot instances for the development and CI/CD environment, representing a 90% discount.

For the same amount PPP was paying each year to manage its waivers, we were able to build a custom application with far greater functionality and flexibility to accommodate ongoing development needs. Due to the nonprofit’s budget constraints, we focused on the adult PPP race as the first phase of the project. We were able to build on this framework two years later for the kids PPP.

To ensure full cost optimization, Effectual leveraged their existing knowledge with .Net membership provider, .Net user provider and the .Net MVC frameworks and libraries. This allowed Effectual to focus only on the custom business logic and leverage out of the box solutions for logins, account creation, registrations, and password creation. This also meant we did not have to re-engineer a security feature, which kept development costs lower. For enterprise reporting and integration, Effectual chose Microsoft SQL Server and IIS.

By consolidating expenses, utilizing spot instances, and integrating AWS services with existing Microsoft technologies, we deployed custom applications that have significantly reduced PPP’s costs and improved their overall user experience year after year.

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