Yesterday I came across an article stating that the Michael Jackson memorial service cost the city of Los Angeles, which is already $530 million in debt, a hefty $1.4 million. The city planned to pay for the service with donations collected through Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s website, but so far they’ve only managed to raise about $17,000, leaving them pretty deep in the hole. Why so few donations? Is it because people don’t love and adore the late King of Pop as much as the city thought? Is it due to the recession and high unemployment rates? Are people just greedy a-holes?

Actually, the fact of the matter is that the city only raised a fraction of the amount they wanted because the high volume of traffic sent to the site caused it to crash and go down for long stretches. No site = no donations. No donations = more debt. More debt = more Ramen dinners for Los Angeles, and that’s no good for anyone (think of the sodium levels!).

Here’s an excerpt from a statement released by the office of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (PDF):

“After collecting more than $17,000 from hundreds of donors in support of the Michael Jackson Memorial Tuesday morning, the City’s Information Technology Agency could not handle the high volume of traffic or adequately respond to the frequent and prolonged server crashes. Consequently, the City was unable to receive contributions for several hours Tuesday afternoon. The server also failed for at least 12 consecutive hours Tuesday evening, from 8:00 PM (PST) through 8:00 AM (PST) the next day, and periodically throughout Wednesday morning.”

What the crap, 12 consecutive hours of downtime? That is just ridiculous. Los Angeles really screwed the pooch on this one.

What They Did Wrong

First of all, they seemed to half-ass stick the “Donate!” info on the mayor’s website. I’m pretty sure that his site wasn’t built to withstand a giant influx of traffic (and why should it–it’s not like mayoral websites make the front page of Digg every two days). Ordinarily, the occasional fluke piece of content that goes hot on a major social news site and causes the site to crash is kind of an unexpected surprise. However, if you’re collecting donations for an event celebrating the life of arguably the biggest musician/artist in pop culture history, you’re going to get some major traffic to your site. To completely overlook that is a huge misstep bordering on “are you kidding me” ignorant.

From a marketing perspective, it’s a bad idea to put the Michael Jackson donation on the mayor’s website because it’s sharing the stage with other content. The website urges people to donate to cover memorial expenses in the first panel of a rotating five panel slide show, with the other slides talking about creating more jobs, being coal free by 2020, expanding transit, and making Los Angeles safer. I couldn’t even click back to the first slide to get back to the Michael Jackson information–the slide show was totally borked and wouldn’t let me skip or click on anything.

What They Should Have Done

If the goal was to raise money, someone should have created a separate website devoted entirely to raising money to pay for the Michael Jackson Memorial (like michaeljacksonmemorial.org). Something fairly decent could have been constructed in the time it took to plan the event. The site should avoid bandwidth heavy features like high-resolution images, videos, and data-intensive quizzes and slide shows. Keep it simple and tasteful with a clear call to action.

For promotion, the mayor’s website could have had a banner or badge on his website that said “Help Los Angeles–Donate to the Michael Jackson Memorial” and linked over to the official donation website. Donors could have received a thank you message upon contributing and been offered a little embeddable badge/widget that said something like “I donated to the Michael Jackson Memorial and You Can Too” or “Donate to the Michael Jackson Memorial” and linked over to the website. The site could have also offered links to Twitter with the pre-formulated tweet of “I just donated to the Michael Jackson Memorial. You can too: [link].”

Server Considerations

Whether they decided to create a separate site or have donation info on an existing site, the biggest problem was that the server was woefully ill equipped to handle such an influx of traffic. Below are some tips, courtesy of Greg, our Director of Internet Marketing and Keepin’ It Real (I may have added that last part), to keep in mind when launching some link bait or expecting a traffic increase.

1. Host images on Amazon S3 if they’re image-heavy. Image-heavy pages can crush a processor. Host them on Amazon, which costs around $0.20 per gig transferred, so it is super cheap and really reliable.
2. If using WordPress, use WP-Cache or WP-Super-Cache add-ons. This eliminates unnecessary database calls for each page load.
3. Use some sort of cluster computing to ensure redundancy. Many hosting companies say they can handle the “Digg effect,” but having multiple servers to fall back on is a good idea.
4. Check with your hosting company. See if they can handle 50-150 KB page loads in under 2 minutes.

NVI also has some good tips on how to help your server withstand a load spike.

Closing Thoughts

Hopefully the people who organized the memorial donations learned a valuable lesson and are able to plan a better strategy moving forward. Their mistakes are pretty common when it comes to building a website and getting it to adequately deal with huge traffic spurts, but it’s such a large-scale, attention gathering oops that other businesses, charities and site owners can take note and learn from the city’s mistakes. That way, when Abe Vigoda dies the city will be ready with a memorial website that can withstand the elements.

Preemptive RIP, Abe Vigoda