Mission

The free Charity Excellence online toolkit enables any charity to increase its impact and financial resilience. The COVID19 funder database (launched 20 April) holds data on 550+ emergency funders for charities, and is searchable using a wide range of criteria, with click through to funders’ websites to apply. To access it, charities register on the Charity Excellence Framework website. This takes 2 mins and everything is free. This also allows use of the ‘health check’ assessment and access to the huge resource base, including the 4 charity COVID19 toolkits. It works for even the smallest charity, no expertise is needed, and even for those who choose to complete the full assessment, this takes less than half a day. The average in-system feedback rating is 9/10. The data is aggregated into the Charity Excellence Sector Data Store, creating Big Data for the sector. So far, It has about 0.4m scored assessments on it, analysable in-depth.

Category

Education and Skills

Additional Information

I work on my own and, whilst I’ve done a lot of marketing, I’m not a professional and much of what I’m doing is self-taught. Watch You Tube video, do it, mess it up, get better at it. I know that I’m not as good as a pro, but some of the results have been extremely good - 1100+ people registered in the 2 weeks before the launch and 387 yesterday 920 April). The average assessment questionnaire feedback rating on the platform itself is 9/10. I fund and do everything myself, so it’s all social media. I have 18k LinkedIn connections and belong to about 50 groups, and have some traction on FB and Twitter. Long term, I just need to finalise my charity registration and I’ll get Google Ads. I gave a very good launch plan for that. My newsletter is up to 5k, open 40%, click 10%. However, most of it’s homemade – newsletter layout, Mail Chimp set-up, SEO. I’ve also e mailed network groups, such as community foundations, CVS and the funders on the database – all via contact addresses, best I could do. In PR terms, I’ve been in Charity Digital News and UK Fundraising, but everything else has been a fail. I've tried all the usual sector suspects, Third Sector, Guardian, blah. I had very strong interest in terms of financial support (pre-COVID) and that’s likely to be even stronger now, so it’s not about the money; never was anyway. My (hugely ambitious) aim is to change the sector, but I need vastly more people on-board to do that. What I’ve done is proving to be very popular with front line charities, so it’s a case of making as many people as possible aware of it.