Case study · Stouh Beirut Association · NGO · Beirut
The night the website had to hold.
A telethon is one evening a year. Every donation the country is moved to give arrives through one website, at the same time. If it falls, the year falls with it. Stouh Beirut had lived that once. They came to us so it would never happen again.
Who they are
Thousands of families, one association.
Founded by journalist Dalia Dagher, who in 2013 became the first woman to host a televised fundraiser in the Middle East, Stouh Beirut fights poverty and life-threatening medical need in a country whose safety nets have collapsed. Medical cases, food, shelter, rebuilt homes after the port explosion, aid convoys to the South. The annual telethon is the engine that funds it.
Figures as published by Stouh Beirut Association.
The year before us
The site went down. On the night.
During a previous telethon, as the broadcast drove the whole country to the donation page at once, the website collapsed. The agency responsible didn’t answer the phone. By the association’s own count, around fifty thousand dollars of donations never made it through that day.
- The stakesNot lost revenue. Lost surgeries, rent, medicine for families already chosen and already waiting.
- The decisionStouh Beirut put the project out to tender. In the middle of the 2024 war and the crisis, they chose Good Timbers for the most sensitive night of their year.
The work
Built to take the surge.
Design, build, payments, traffic, pressure. Not a brochure site: a fundraising machine that has to work when everyone arrives at once.
Architecture for one night a year
Hosting, caching and a donation flow planned around the telethon peak rather than an average Tuesday. Rehearsed before the broadcast, not discovered during it.
Bank and wallet integration
Card payments through the bank, plus OMT and Whish money ready for people who don’t hold cards. Every rail tested end to end.
Cases, not a “donate” button
Every family is a page with a story, a target and a live progress bar. Donors choose who they help. That transparency is why they give again.
Live stream, in the site
The broadcast and the donation form on the same screen, so the moment someone is moved, the way to act is already open.
Ads and traffic, on the night
Campaigns timed to the broadcast, sending people to a page that could hold them. Media without the infrastructure is how the last one failed.
One languages, one shop, a donor dashboard
The website is ready for English, Arabic and French. A shop whose sales fund the cause. A dashboard where donors see what their money did.
Telethon night
It held.
From the opening of the broadcast to the last donation after midnight, the site stayed up, the payments went through, and the team could watch the total climb instead of watching a screen freeze.
Illustrative shape of the two nights, drawn from the story. Not a system log.
The real work
This is the site. It’s live.
Not a mockup. The telethon page as it runs today, taking donations. Scroll inside the frame, or open it live.
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Since then
The site takes donations every day now.
The telethon is one night, but the campaign never really ends, and neither does the website. It has taken thousands in donations since, for cases the country would otherwise not see. For us this one was never only business: when the site holds, someone’s surgery gets funded. Dalia Dagher tells us the team is happy, often, and it means more than any invoice.
“I was honestly apprehensive. This was the third time we were rebuilding Stouh Beirut’s website, after two difficult experiences. For a nonprofit, a website is a trusted platform through which people donate and vulnerable families receive support. Good Timbers understood that responsibility from day one. Their professionalism, attention to detail, follow-up and ability to navigate every challenge made this one of the best professional experiences I have had, especially in the circumstances we face in Lebanon.”
Dalia DagherFounder & President, Stouh Beirut Association
For organisations that can’t afford to fall
Donation websites built for the night that matters.
If you run a telethon, a campaign, a launch, anything where the whole audience arrives at once, we build for that moment first and the brochure second. Lebanon and the Gulf.
Talk to us about your siteDo you build donation websites for NGOs in Lebanon?
Yes. Stouh Beirut’s site is one: cases with live progress, card payments through the bank, OMT and Whish, a live stream, a shop and a donor dashboard, in English, Arabic and French.
How do you prepare a website for a telethon?
We plan hosting and caching around the peak rather than the average, test every payment rail end to end, rehearse the surge before the broadcast, and stay on the line during it.
Which payment methods can a Lebanese NGO accept online?
Card payments via a bank gateway, plus local wallets such as OMT and Whish, which matter in a country where many donors don’t hold cards. We integrate all of them.
Running something that can’t afford to fall?
We’ve stood in that room. Let’s make sure yours holds.
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