Charity Digital Strategy

On Friday I’m looking forward to spending some time at the Institute of Fundraising’s Technology Conference listening to a whole bunch of speakers from charities and within the sector talk about their current IT concerns and opportunities.

One of the thing we’re asked most about at the moment is that of “Cloud computing”.  What’s it all about? Why should I care?  In my session during the afternoon I’ll share some of the lessons we’ve learned working in the sector and show how cloud computing is something that charities need to sit up and listen out for.

In the desktop era, our organisations owned and managed our own hardware and software in our own premises, in the server era, we outsourced some of that – the hardware and network side mainly, to data centres and managed hosting firms, but in the cloud computing era, we’re outsourcing the management of everything connected with computing – hardware, software, reliability, backup, the whole shooting match, to suppliers of specialist software and platforms.

It’s an exciting opportunity, one that brings with it new features and capabilities, but also new risks and concerns.  I hope that you’re able to join me on Friday to find out more…

Conference information

A couple of weeks back, amazon web services went down.  If you’re in the web business, you probably heard about it, you may even be in the rare group of people who read Amazon’s press release which described what went wrong, but if you noticed foursquare or one of a bunch of other high profile sites going a bit slowly for a few days, you probably saw the problem first hand.

Amazon’s web “cloud” computing service is famously very reliable, it has data spread across multiple data centres organised into multiple regions, but even with all these safeguards in place, there was still a means by which a number of failures could bring down a substantial proportion of their service.

If your organisation is looking to the cloud to save money, be more flexible or use new tools, you’ll be understandably anxious about what happens when things go wrong.  It’s useful to take a pragmatic approach in this scenario.  IT people love to design systems with multiple backups built in and automatic handlers for failures, and they’ll love to try and work out exactly how reliable and automatic the end solution actually is, but at the end of the day there’s only one way to be sure and whilst your IT people might not be very comfortable with it, it’s worth a try.

I first read about this a while ago in some IT publication or other whose details now escape me.  I read the story that a new Chief Information Officer, on starting work with a new team in a day long workshop, was briefed by technician after technician about how all the servers in the business were reliable and backed up and would resolve problems automatically when they occurred.  He kept asking one question: how sure are you that this will work when things go wrong.  Of course the technicians were very confident that things would work and kept telling him so.  When the technicians returned after lunch, they found in the middle of the conference room table a block of wood with a fire axe imbedded in it.  The new CIO said to the technicians “Some time later today, I’m going to put that axe through one of the servers in this building, how confident are you that things will keep on working”.  We can anticipate that there might have been some further double checking happening after that.

Of course I’m not advocating that you destroy your equipment or risk life and limb, but it is very easy to simulate failures in computer equipment: you pull the plug out.  When we commissioned a major new system recently, we deliberately worked to build in the very highest level of automatic backup and failure management with the expectation that if any device in the setup failed, the rest of the system would seamlessly pick up the slack.  After all the specifications, sign-offs, commissioning and testing, everyone was very confident.  When I asked to go and pull some plugs out, however, I was met with some resistance, and a certain amount of double checking.  In the in end it was a very worthwhile exercise because I know exactly what happens when there’s a hardware failure in this key system – not all that much – the other devices sort the problem out and then get a human to come and replace the broken bit.

Of course Amazon’s problem was much more complex than this, but when it comes to your IT, how confident are you that you could pull plugs out?  If you can get the IT team to the point where they’re happy to do this on a live system, you’ve come much further than most towards a really reliable IT provision.

Gift Aid gets less valuable tomorrow.  A couple of years ago, when the basic rate of income tax was reduced, someone at the treasury worked out that there also needed to be a reduction in the Gift Aid that charities were reclaiming.  This is because Gift Aid is supposed to represent the basic rate income tax paid on the money that’s donated.

Charities were up in arms about the loss of income – which will be considerable.  So the government extended a transitional relief, which ends tomorrow, meaning that charities could still claim at 28p in the pound for donations until 5th April 2011.  Now that particular battle is over, there’s a glaring opportunity: all of your donors are aware of “the cuts” and many will know something about gift aid changing.  Why not ask them to make up the difference?

Dear Donor,

Tomorrow the Government’s Gift Aid scheme changes.  The £10 you gave us last month was worth £12.80, but the donation you give us next month will only be worth 12.50.  In these tight financial times, our cause needs your support more than ever.  Please make up the difference by clicking here and increasing your direct debit by 30p per month.

Yours etc

Of course the real opportunity here is in a larger increase from donors.  If you’re worried that donors will be cancelling their entire direct debit because you’ve reminded them, then remember that if they’re hard up (as many people are) then they are going to do this anyway (and perhaps time to re-persuade them to support?).  If this excercise would be too expensive for the income gained, then time to think again about how to do your online direct debits – and remember that when you talk to donors online, it’s much easier to drive up your gift aid revenue by going back to donors for a declaration.

There aren’t many opportunities to talk about how government policy affects charity in such a tangible way, so whilst the actual battle here is over, there’s still plenty of support – and additional donations to go and get.  After all, if that 30p wasn’t worth it, we wouldn’t have made all that fuss in the first place, would we.

I almost fell of my bike today, but I didn’t because technology is irrelevant.

Continue Reading

On Tuesday the BBC kicked up a fuss by posting a news story that many in the Charity Sector interpreted as an announcement that all website cookies would become illegal on 25th May.  That set the blogs all-a-twitter and I’m sure caused some senior level head-scratching.

Yesterday a contradictory story was posted quoting “experts” who put the story straight.  Apart from wondering why the BBC didn’t ask these experts in the first place, this got me thinking.  In this example, there were quite a few “experts” (this blog included) who realised immediately that the original story had got the wrong end of the stick, but as is often the case, the authority of the BBC (which, let’s face it, is usually a pretty good bet) carried a lot of weight and will have lead to an awful lot of time being wasted on a non-issue at many digital charities.

In our projects I am continually reminded of the value of engaging the right experts as early as possible.  That’s why whenever we set up a major programme of work, it’s vital to engage consulting experts, project management experts, design experts and technology experts from day one.  Digital stuff is complicated and, as the BBC demonstrated this week, it’s very easy for the well informed non-expert to get things very wrong.

We’ve found in practice that the value of the slight nudge an expert can give at the beginning of a project isn’t truly apparent until much later when it’s realised that the project has avoided the need for a huge (and expensive) course correction.  Anyone who’s spent the last 48 hours trying to come up with a workable way to implement “opt in” cookies would certainly have valued an early intervention like this!

So here’s the challenge.  You’ve taken a break from something to read this blog.  Whatever it is, perhaps it’s something important and complex – who do you know who’s an expert?  Perhaps they are a member of your team or someone at an agency you work with: ring them up, or better still – go and see them.  Take muffins.   Ask them about your project.  They’re an expert so if they can’t add anything they’ll know right away.  You might just be surprised at how valuable the result turns out to be.