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Still rocking ten years later

Finance | John Tate | 24 Aug 2009

Charity Finance’s longest-standing columnist sharpens his brash stick ready for a second decade of debunking.

1999. Cast your mind back. There was the total eclipse of the sun in the UK. Charles Shultz, the creator of the comic strip Peanuts retired. The Euro came into existence. Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones become the first to circumnavigate the Earth in a hot air balloon. And – I wrote my first column for Charity Finance.

100 columns, c. 75,000 words and two Charity Finance editors later, much has changed. On the personal front my youngest child has gone from being eight to 18 and is just about to go off to university. I now have an allotment as well as a wife and am ageing gracefully (or not as the case may be).

Back in 1999 technology was my main focus of attention for my monthly column.  Google has only just been launched and had 11 employees. The word ‘blog’ had just come into existence. Less than a fifth  of UK households had access to the internet.  Charities were focused on understanding  and getting their technology to work and so this was in the main what I wrote about.

Step forward ten years and these products have matured and are generally more reliable. The internet has opened up countless new ways of working. CRM systems (Customer Relationship Management), for example, allow one view of all information on  a contact. Mobile devices and web ‘front ends’ mean information can be captured  at source and automatically fed through  the different databases and systems  in operation. This saves administration costs  and can hugely improve the service to  a ‘customer’. I have seen charities adapt to this change and deliver hugely more ‘bangs for their bucks’. However I have seen many struggle with the scale of change required  and make a semi or complete hash of these projects. So my more recent columns have focused on change management and  how charities can best drive change through their organisations.

The web has also opened the door to masses of data and individuals expect more information and transparency from charities. Blogs/tweeting/social networking etc allow charities and individuals to express their opinions more openly and to be heard. This is turning the world upside down. The traditional command and control structure is under huge pressure to disclose more and to genuinely demonstrate accountability to their beneficiaries.Well-run charities embrace this. Those who are not are on the run and are finding it increasing difficult to hide. My column has followed this trend, watching progress of sites like Intelligent Giving and tracking the fiasco of the government-funded hubs. More recently I have opened up the debate on whether charity chief executive expenses should be disclosed and have watched the professional response by some umbrella body heads and squirming by others on how to tackle this subject.

How have you the reader reacted to this? I have had many comments on what I have written. These are a few of my favourites:

From a well known charity commissioner  I received: “I enjoy your regular columns –  but what is CRM? Tut tut, unless I have missed it goes unexplained in your article.”From a finance director responding to my column about my allotment: “I was interested to read about your plot and the presence of your two edifices. From now on you shall be known as two sheds Johnnie.”

From an umbrella body head responding to a web piece I wrote: “An obscure and uncharitably snide blog by an accountant called John Tate.”

And most recently from a finance director/ turned consultant in the sector: ‘Please be as brash and bold as you can be in your writings. People need to hear it!!!!”In ten years I will be 60. If the editors of Charity Finance put up with me and  I continue to get feedback like this I will write on!

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