Government outlines priorities for supporting charities 2

Governance | Vibeka Mair | 30 Aug 2012

The government has announced plans to improve the technological capability of the charity sector, and new initiatives to support volunteer infrastructure.

The plans are included in a new report outlining the progress the Office for Civil Society has made in cutting red tape and improving support for the civil society sector, and its priorities over the coming months.

The report, entitled, Making it easier to set up and run a charity, social enterprise or voluntary organisation: progress update, says a key government priority will be to help the civil society sector exploit technology and digital media.

Recently-lauched charity GoOn UK is carrying out research into the digital capability needs of charities and working toward a national action plan this autumn. The Charity Technology Trust will be among the partners that will help to deliver this.

Another government priority outlined in the report is support for volunteer infrastructure.

It outlines plans for Nesta to use funding from its £10m innovation in giving fund to support innovation in volunteer infrastructure. Nesta will be running the programme in partnership with Volunteering England.

The report says that government successes in cutting red tape for the sector include reducing the number of criminal records checks.

The government is seeking views on cutting red tape to the sector as part of its Red Tape Challenge which will be open until mid-September.

Directory: Charity Technology Trust (see CTT) | NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) | Volunteering England

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Barb
3 Sep 2012

It looks like a great plan - more IT (so no facilities needed) and more volunteers (so no staff needed). The only thing that these nice people seem to forget is that plenty of people are IT illiterate - thus no matter how wonderful your online tools will be they won't use it - hence are particularly vulnerable and it make them charities' users in the first place!
Don't even start me on startegic approaches and the rest of fun supposedly perfomred by trustees - we will move into quantum computing era before they will acknowledge such facilities as chat, blog or whatever these crazy kids do these days. Cloud computing... What next...
Upon reflexion, yeah, users may be actually easier to convince.

[Reply]

Alex McLachlan
Senior Consultant
IndigoBlue
30 Aug 2012

An interesting report! Lets hope that the Red Tape Challenge and other initiatives, such as easier statutory reporting and changes to VAT rules can make a real difference.

I picked up on a couple of IT issues highlighted in the report - access to IT expertise and sharing resources.

Access to IT expertise is the major IT issue highlighted - "there are still many charities that are either unable to fully exploit the potential of technology and digital media or see the opportunities it provides" and "many small and medium sized charities say they have nobody they trust to discuss IT needs with".

This certainly resonates with our experience - that charities have IT requirements (and IT knowledge requirements) significantly higher than SMEs of a similar size. They have demanding IT needs, for contact relationship management, sophisticated websites, document management, complex processes, etc. This is where expert IT services and advice are needed by charities.

The other significant IT issue identified in the report is about sharing IT resources - "collaborating, to make efficiency savings and become more effective by consolidating assets, merging back-office functions and sharing services". There is an alternative here however that isn't considered in the report - to use Cloud services effectively to share resources with other users.

[Reply]

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