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The only way to deliver the large scale, low cost, UK wide functional support charities tell us they want is by a technology solution.
It's the most useful website I have come across since joining the charity sector - there's such a wealth of information here I've only scratched the surface of!
AI offers us a huge strategic opportunity to build on that, but it brings real risks too, charities are as yet ill-prepared for AI and what they want is locally delivered functional support and not an AI only solution.
We've spent 2 years building the data set and 6 months on research and listening - we have a solution.
Charity Excellence will be re-imagined from a hugely popular and trusted platform to a low-cost, UK wide, social franchise that taps into and promotes the huge collective expertise of the sector and is accessible to and meets the needs of everyone.
Our aim is to help charities to survive, stabilise and then thrive.
Help us to make that possible by donating to our Charity Excellence 2.0 Crowd Funder, thank you.
| Our thanks to our own insurance brokers Access Insurance, for their generous donation and kind words about our work.
"We are proud to help small charities on a daily basis at Access and recognise the huge amount of value Ian at Charity Excellence has provided to the thousands of small charities across the UK. We hope Charity Excellence 2.0 will put even more useful tools into the hands of small charities and infrastructure organisations." They are part of the Benefact Group, a unique financial services group who give all available profits to good causes - recently celebrating giving £250 million and being the third largest corporate donor over the last decade. |
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Currently running in deficit supported by reserves. They will be exhausted in maximum 2 years. If not successful in accessing additional funds by then will be forced to close.
The UK charity sector is still in crisis. Since 2020, income hasn’t recovered, costs are rising, and demand has grown hugely. A further downturn may well arrive in Autumn 2026 and, if it does, the data tells us it'll probably be the longest crisis yet.
All of the literature we've reviewed shows that small charities are vital. Not just because they are 95% of the UK’s 0.5 million non-profits, but also because they are engaged with and trusted by their communities, often the most vulnerable and hardest to reach, and with few staff or overheads, they also offer huge value for money. But they are under enormous pressure, and also more likely to run deficits and less likely to receive government funding than larger charities.
We all know about the closure of the Small Charities Coalition and the FSI, leaving Charity Excellence as the only national small charity focussed organisation that provides the broad based functional support people want. But did you know that there are 600+ small infrastructure bodies - their numbers have been slowly dwindling as the bulk of funding goes to the national, often London based, infrastructure bodies.
We are encountering increasing overhead costs and using up our reserves. We will close if this is not rectified!
Thank you to Patient First Research for their generous donation to our crowdfunder. They offer charities and non-profit organisations a straightforward, ethical way to receive additional funding through member participation in healthcare market research.
I rated national infrastructure support as I did, not because it's not important but because it currently doesn't seem to be there! By far the most valuable support we receive or see is thanks to the wonderful networks like SIDCN and the amazing CEF resources!
Charities don’t just need help—they can’t find it:
They want simple to access, practical, functional support - local infrastructure support and specialist networks. We asked charities to rate 8 options to deliver that and there was strong demand across all them, so these were all built into the new system. You also told us how desperate the funding situation is. There will be a focus on deploying both existing and new capabilities to support income generation both for infrastructure bodies and the charities they they support.
Moreover, AI is a huge sector opportunity but, it's the large charities who are best placed to benefit, and charities have told us they don't want AI only solutions, because that excludes many of them. Many charities still need human support, and most lack the capacity to adopt AI safely without help.
We’re fed up of endless online volunteer sites with no local bureau or ‘recruitment agency’ for matching and attracting volunteers.
This is where Charity Excellence comes in.
Thank you to Iain at Charity Excellence for always having the small charities back!
With 50k registered users, Charity Excellence is by far the largest UK charity community; our website resource hub has 0.75 million active users pa, and our AI provides 40k support sessions pa. We have huge reach (the weekly newsletter alone is sent to 100k+) and very high trust (62% rate us 10/10 for trustworthiness). Since 2022, we've been building charity AI, delivering AI training and creating guidance; 44% of our learners rate our courses 10/10. But we're very low cost - our FY25/26 income budget is £83k.
We punch far, far above our weight. Read about the impact we have in delivering support directly to front line charities.
There isn’t enough sector funding and there isn’t going to be, and the crisis is now so deep that only a bold, easily and rapidly scalable, low-cost solution will deliver the impact needed. Our systems already tap into and actively promote the huge collective expertise of the sector and, over the last 2 years, we've been designing and building the data set to deliver that bold solution. In light of the even greater urgency now that work must now be accelerated.
We’re going to re-imagine Charity Excellence by giving its capabilities plus additional new ones to those best placed to use them – the 100s and 100s of local charity infrastructure bodies and specialist networks UK wide.
We're we're not building a new network but making an existing hidden one visible, the bulk of the data set build is complete, and we're deploying our existing hugely popular capabilities to those best placed to exploit them. All that remains to be done is to complete the data set, design the deployment, build deployable AI agents and train those who will use them. This significantly minimises build costs and will keep running costs very low.
We're tapping into the huge collective expertise of the sector by making it accessible for everyone, then supercharging it by deploying our existing and new capabilities to everyone who wants them.
Do it once, do it well and give it to everyone.
Fabulous resource, very easy to use and understand
Join our movement for change by completing this short survey about what capabilities you want us to create that'd most help you.
The sector remains in crisis and is too weak to cope with a new potential crisis in the Autumn and AI might well create a 2 tier sector, if we don't act. And it's already changing how people find information—smaller charities are becoming even less visible, while bigger organisations will increasingly dominate search results.
This project responds to the urgent unmet need.
This creates a powerful self-reinforcing loop:
Better support → Reduced workload → Stronger networks → More income → Greater influence → Even better support
Enabling infrastructure bodies to deliver even better support to more charities is the starting point in our righteous cycle to reverse the decline.
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The biggest challenge in making that happen? We have most of the data and our existing systems, the planning is done, and the technology already exists but we have very little funding. We need funding up front for the build and, within 2 years, to triple our annual income to step change our abilities and deliver long term sustainability. That's £250k pa by 2029. We are an enabler, building a network of collaboration, not an empire. We have launched a crowd funder to begin moving forward to deploying the new system.
We're exploiting both the existing network and our existing data, so we now just need to operationalise this by joining all the dots using technology - progress depends on funding for specialist coding support.
Subject to funding, we'll go further:
The key to delivering transformational change at very low cost is to use AI agents to fully exploit existing sector resources - our unique data sets, current services, and the UK wide network of infrastructure bodies. The AI agents will be simple to use, focused on user needs and low cost both to build and run, and will integrate these 3 resources, making them both available and accessible to everyone, whilst being managed locally by humans.
The cost of building the dataset and deploying the initial AI agents is relatively low, with estimated development costs of approximately £20,000 for the dataset and initial launch with a further £60,000 for the whole programme. Cash running costs will be around £1,000 per month depending on usage. Cost is driven by usage.
If you'd like to know more, you can download the Charity Excellence 2 Programme Delivery Plan.
To ensure our plans deliver what charities genuinely want, we spent 6 months carrying out a sector wide literature review and a range of surveys and reports of our own.
Charity Excellence.
Literature Review Part 1 - Small Charities
Literature Review Part 2 - Small Infrastructure Charities
