These are difficult times in the charity sector. With the rising cost of living and unemployment, fewer people decide – or can – donate your money and/or your time to support charities. But these factors also mean that more people are struggling and need help.
As charities face falling revenues and increased calls for help, technology is playing an increasing role in improving efficiency, whether through better engagement with supporters, streamlining the donation process or collecting data to support advocacy work.
Here, five charities reveal how they are modernizing their technology infrastructure and what features they would like to see in the market.
RSPCA
Technology plays a key role in helping the RSPCA achieve its educational goal of helping people understand how to love animals. The charity's website is vital to this because although it has several branches that can offer education, they cannot interact with or reach everyone.
“It's a barrier,” says Lee Reid, project manager for prevention and education at the RSPCA. “Instead, we try to empower everyone who can teach to teach on our behalf. Many educators love animals, but they don't necessarily know what to teach young people or how to teach them.”
When Reid joined the RSPCA in May 2022, his first task was to review the existing website of over 500 web pages to consolidate it. He realized that instead of going through 500 pages and spending a lot of money updating existing PDFs, it would be better to refocus the site to focus on editable, dynamic content and a way to understand how people use resources.
The charity has teamed up with Liferay and Webtown develop a new version of your educational website based on these goals. It now offers customized training packages for time-poor teachers, as well as downloadable activities for families that can be quickly and easily accessed directly from the site. Since its launch, participation in the digital learning platform has increased by 38%.
One area where the website update makes a real difference is the RSPCA's partnership with the Duke of Edinburgh's Award. Scheme members can now access a range of practical activities, save them to a dashboard and show evidence of that work being carried out.
Investing the time and resources required to update technology also pays off in terms of user engagement. If the RSPCA were to continue with its old website, Reid said it would employ around 100,000 people between 2023 and 2030. When the new site launched in October 2023, the goal was to attract 150,000 pages; in its current form, the charity is projected to employ around 300,000 people, almost double its engagement rate.
Although the charity is benefiting from investment in its website, it would like to see more work being done in the area of virtual reality (VR).
“If [young people] I really like the idea of seeing animals in real life, and we've done that with videos, but the next step will be something based in virtual reality,” says Reed. “We've seen some of it incorporated into some people's work, but I don't think that's what it should be right now. It's also very difficult to achieve success with headphones such as sending them out to schools or families and getting them back. Affordability is the main barrier.”
Irish Deaf Society
Irish Deaf SocietyIDS) is the only provider in Ireland that offers a range of courses for deaf students in their first language, Irish Sign Language (ISL). The charity provides accredited ISL courses for those who are deaf, hard of hearing or hard of hearing.
Online and blended learning programs have removed the geographical barriers that until recently faced the deaf community across Ireland. In the early days of the Covid pandemic, IDS quickly transitioned from traditional classroom teaching to online teaching via Zoom.
The charity then wanted to move to a student management system that could improve the quality of education by making it more modern, engaging and continuous. Visual learning materials such as videos in ISL are also extremely important and therefore digital storage space is crucial.
IDS now uses D2L Bright spacewhich offers a range of content design features and, more importantly, the storage capacity required for charitable activities. Users can now access learning opportunities both synchronously and asynchronously, providing flexibility 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
“D2L Brightspace also offers the benefit of centralizing much of the IDS program administration, which was previously quite siled, so it has simplified much of the work for teachers and support staff,” says Paul Grundy, digital education specialist at IDS.
Since spring 2022, when IDS began delivering courses through Brightspace, 1,732 students have taken advantage of online courses delivered through the system. Grundy adds that the number of students is constantly increasing from semester to semester, and each semester either a new subject or a new course level is added to the platform.
Yorkshire Wildlife Trust
As Yorkshire Wildlife Trust's turnover grew from £4 million to £12 million, its old financial system struggled to keep up with the growth.
In an organization with approximately 45,000 members, 111 reserves and 200 employees, technology is critical to daily operations. This includes those conducting field surveys using geographic information systems or using drones for monitoring, or those placing purchase orders or approving expenses.
“We realized there was a lot of friction within our organization,” says Darren Tiffney, director of finance and central services at Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. “We wanted to increase efficiency, bring our team closer to the center of the organization, closer to good data and good processes, and see if we could automate something that could make their lives easier.”
YWT is at the start of a major digital transformation project, which has so far included moving from a legacy on-premises financial system to a cloud-based accounting platform, Iplicit; installation of a special CRM system for charitable organizations called AccessthankQ CRM; and in the HR and payroll area, the company introduced People First from MHR about a year ago.
The Trust's next two big projects are a SharePoint migration and a project management system that will bring together some KPI and activity data.
“We've hit targets like CRM systems, health and safety systems, financial systems, HR systems,” Tiffney says. “Project management, greater access to data files—those kinds of things are a little more complex. And then there's the bigger picture of how to bring them all together. That's the kind of work we're moving toward now.”
Age UK
Age UK is exploring the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to provide information and advice on any topic that may arise as people get older. This ranges from social benefits and social assistance to support for local authorities and health issues.
However, based on AI testing that helps answer some of these questions, the technology doesn't yet seem accurate enough to directly introduce a version of it to the general public.
“In our testing it was only able to get the answer right nine times out of ten,” says Alasdair Stewart, director of national services at Age UK. “When we're dealing with social benefits that are potentially thousands of pounds a year for an older person, or social care fees (potentially tens of thousands of pounds), it's just not precise enough yet to put it in that kind of space.”
Instead, the charity is focusing on the ability to use human-powered artificial intelligence to empower and support advisers. Age UK is exploring Twilio's Agent Copilot tool as a way to provide call transcripts and summary data after a call has taken place.
Stewart says: “At the moment, our team of staff spent a few minutes after a call writing down what the call was about, what help we provided, what the next steps were that we advised, and what options or support we provided, so that if that client called back, another consultant could take it.”
It's quicker if the caller can work from the notes on the resume they're given, he adds, editing it as needed rather than having to write everything from scratch. They can then transfer these records into Age UK's CRM and move on to the next call.
Although the charity does not believe that AI is accurate or advanced enough to be used directly in front of service users, it is already seeing value in how AI can speed up the processes, tasks and activities that teams of staff must undertake to deliver services, and make them more efficient and effective. Ultimately this means Age UK can help more people and improve their intelligence levels.
“If we have detailed transcripts of our calls, we can much better understand the 600,000 conversations we have every year with older people, with friends and families of older people, and use that information from those calls to inform and influence the work we do with government,” Stewart adds.
This work includes encouraging the UK government not to cut winter fuel charges (a decision it has since reversed); and keep the triple lock for pensions. AI has an important role to play in this advocacy work as it gives Age UK greater insight into the challenges and needs of its user base, which can then be applied to support older people across the country.
Children with cancer in the UK
As part of its digital transformation programme, Children with Cancer UK is modernizing its core systems to create more resilient, secure and data-driven processes. This includes implementation Salesforce Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud to personalize communications and streamline fundraising processes, which in turn improves donor acquisition and retention and ultimately generates more revenue.
“As part of Marketing Cloud, we have made significant progress in transforming the support journey,” says Fadil Dugolly, Head of IT at Children with Cancer UK. “For example, our London Marathon rides are fully built and automated, allowing us to deliver timely, personalized experiences at scale.”
The system has resulted in a reduction in manual administration of registration fees and payments, allowing teams to focus on building meaningful relationships with runners and fans. This has had a direct financial benefit: although Children with Cancer UK had fewer runners at the London Marathon this year, it managed to raise 5% more money than last year.
While there are many concrete examples of the benefits of technology investment for the charity sector, Dugolli believes the charity sector is struggling to articulate a clear vision of what technology can truly deliver.
“It’s often seen as a cost rather than a strategic factor,” he adds. “This is something they need to articulate very early in the process: technology is an investment, but in today’s age it is also a tool to have a 360-degree digital view of your supporters.”
As these five charities show, investing in modern technology systems can help increase donations, improve relationships with supporters and free up staff to focus on important tasks.
