Eight of the UK’s top funders, including the Big Lottery Fund, Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts and the Wolfson Foundation, gathered at the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation‘s London office on Tuesday to discuss strategies to increase British charities’ use of technology.
In spite of significant investment from state and grant funders to increase their capacity, charities continue to lag behind other sectors in their use of technology: the National Council for Voluntary Organisations calls ICT the sector’s biggest skills-gap, with a third of small and medium charities saying they had no-one they trusted to talk to about technology.
Good use of technology allows charities to maximize their resources, raise more money, communicate more powerfully and to wider audiences, operate and deliver services to end users more effectively, cheaply, 24/7 and ultimately to change more lives.
Dawn Austwick, chief executive of Esmée Fairbairn, opened the event saying: ‘Today is about how we, as funders, become more effective, help the organisations that we fund, and in turn, allow them to help excluded or hard-to-reach groups to both benefit from technology.’
Delegates at the roundtable included Peter Wanless, chief executive of the Big Lottery Fund, Robert Dufton of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Paul Ramsbottom of the Wolfson Foundation, Alan Bookbinder, director of the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts, Linda Kelly of Lloyds TSB Foundation for England and Wales, Marcus East and Judith McNeill, head of future media and grants director at Comic Relief, John Low of Charities Aid Foundation, Stephen Hammersley of Community Foundation Network, Felicity Luard of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, David Emerson of Association of Charitable Foundations and William Hoyle of Charity Technology Trust.
Martha said the event was to identify what role Race Online 2012 could play in supporting the modernisation of charities so that their end users could also benefit from being online. ‘There is a big opportunity right now for the UK to lead in how it uses technology to deliver real social change: but this will only happen with leadership from the funding community, for example by increasing the numbers of funders that are prepared to fund both capital and running costs for charities’ ICT.’
‘Technology,’ said one funder, ‘is too often seen as a necessary evil that allows the real activity to happen. We need to communicate more vividly the transformative effects technology has for hard-to-reach groups.’
The civil society sector faces funding cuts of up to £5.1billion. Entrenched social problems, however, have not declined, and 40% of charities anticipate a rise in demand for their services. This huge strategic challenge makes it urgent that civil society organisations respond to the changed communications environment. While some charities, like Race Online 2012 partners the National Federation of Women’s Institutes, Carers UK, Macmillan, Comic Relief and Beatbullying have seized this chance, many lag behind and pro-bono tools or resources, such as those offered by Charity Technology Trust, Lasa and IT4Communities are woefully underused.