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With the change of charity online accounts for the Charity Commission register, we were one of many charities unable to access our new account. At the Charity Lawyers' Conference in Nov 23, the Commission's chair promised that charities would not be penalised for the Commission's failings but, presumably, that didn't include our charity.
We have tried repeatedly but they keep sending us the same standard registration e mail that isn't working. We finally had no choice but to give up and have published our report on our own website because that's the best we can do.
Who We Are. With the closure of the SCC and FSI, we are the last of the small UK charities that provide broad based support for everyone. However, each of our sub systems is optimised for small and marginalised groups. Specifically, the BAME, LGBTQI+ and disability communities, food banks, and homelessness and women’s groups. Those who too often get pushed to the back of the queue.
What We Do. We’re a free one-stop-shop that enables any UK nonprofit to assess its priorities and find the funding, resources, help and data it needs, using cutting edge technology, including our own extensive AI services.
Using our Charity Sector Big Data store to create forecasting models and develop crisis support, we were in the forefront of the fightback against Covid in 20202 and now in the Cost-of-living (CoL) crisis. We were the only organisation to launch a comprehensive support programme for our front-line charities, in response to the CoL crisis.
Our Impact. Our charities support more than 10 million beneficiaries. All credit for that is due to them, not us, but supporting beneficiaries is what the sector exists to do, so that number is a key target for us.
With 40,000 members, growing at 2000+ a month, we’re the largest and fastest growing UK charity community; nearly half of our in-system feedback ratings are 10/10.
We now also support 1000s of individuals each month, including children, by using AI to connect them to funding, food, welfare support and people who will protect them. These numbers have continued to grow through the year and are expected to continue tod o so.
Our Future Plans. In 2024, we plan to augment our existing charity sector Big Data set by deploying multiple CEF systems to share ownership and create a single, consistent UK charity sector data set.
In 2025, we will migrate our remaining non-AI systems to a single AI concierge service. In doing so, we will create a single fully accessible gateway to the sector for everyone.
Finance & Resources. Our cash spend in the last financial year was £15k. We are provided with extensive pro bono and CSR support, by Biomni and Liquid Palladium, and with the Founder now paid a very modest gross salary of £24k pa, our completely free services represent huge value for money.
Thanks to donations from Redbrain and the GSR Foundation, and funding from our commercial partner Access UK, we did not close and enter the coming year with the funding we need to significantly develop our services to better support our frontline charities in responding to the huge challenges they face.
Governance. We’re a registered charity governed by a board of 4 independent trustees who collectively bring significant senior charity and commercial sector expertise. It is run and, until very recently was fully funded, by its founder, who is not a trustee.
Outlined below is our annual review and plans for the future, in more detail.
Analysis of our active members in 2021, identified that they supported more than 6 million beneficiaries. All credit for that is due to them, not us, but ultimately beneficiary impact is the only metric that matters, so we track it. We do not have the capacity to run the exercise again yet but in light of our huge growth acceleration since then, we are confident it is in excess of 10 million now.
Impact Measurement.
Cost of Living Crisis. We created our Cost-of-Living Crisis predictive model in Aug 22 and deployed the upgraded Funding Finder and new Help and Data Finder directories in Sep/Oct, as well as a range of toolkits as part of our #SurviveAndThrive programme to support charities. We were the only charity to launch a comprehensive crisis support programme. It went down very well, with significant positive anecdotal feedback and registrations surged. Our predictive model for the path of the crisis proved to be extremely accurate.
AI. We began building the AI bunnies in early Dec 22, a couple of weeks after ChatGPT launched. They launched on Christmas Day, and this was followed by a series of upgrades, including bid writing and a ChatGPT prompt creator. The range of support they are able to provide also expanded from navigating the CEF to welfare and funding for individuals, running charities, public information and all things AI. They can now answer about 20,000 questions. Through the year, we also build an extensive suite of AI insight briefings, toolkits, ChatGPT guides and training, which was extremely well received. The best was 300+ who booked tickets for the bid bunny webinar but webinars of 80 have been fairly normal with some webinars having to be run again and again due to demand.
Charity Sector Data Store. The system’s Charity Date Store grew throughout the year. By year end 2023, the system’s lifetime scored questionnaires total was 18,677 and the estimated data points 0.485m. From Aug 22 onwards, we produced monthly crisis updates which proved to be extremely accurate predictions of the path of the crisis into late 2023. We also carried out surveys to augment the system data. For example, our £1bn Government Funding Cut report in Sep 23, plus 2 new annual benchmarking surveys. The first, Staff & Volunteers and the 2nd Trustees.
The key financial events this year were that we ran out of funding and by Jan 23 were within a couple of weeks of having to close. Only the payment of a large, long outstanding invoice saved us and, subsequently, we were approached by Redbrain, then the GSR Foundation, both of whom made generous donations, saving Charity Excellence and transforming our financial position.
Every funding application we have ever submitted over the last 7 years has been rejected, primarily we think because we are an infrastructure charity and also that we use advanced tech. What we do is boring, and they don’t understand it anyway. Consequently, we are huge grateful to the AI and tech companies who support us, without whom we would have shut down by now.
This support, combined with the Founder whom we are now able to pay £24k gross pa, enables us to deliver our entire programme at exceptionally low cost.
UK Wide Charity Data Network - 100 CEF Owners. It is now widely recognised that the use of sector level data is very poor, with a commensurate negative impact on decision making at all levels. We are currently building a far more powerful master dashboard and, once we can fit in the developer time, we'll complete the audit of the core coding. The aim is to complete this work and begin deployment in 2024.
This will enable us to exploit the master data set far more effectively and also to give CEF master systems to almost anyone, including large charities, grant makers and groups of charities. We do not have the capacity, specialist expertise or influence to fully exploit the system's data, so we'll give it to those who do with lead partners for each charity sub sector, but we can also create data sets geographically and in other ways too.
Part of that, will be to connect charity regulator APIs and economic libraries to our own data in the cloud. This will enable us to use AI to create predictive analytics that will be far more powerful than our very effective cost of living crisis predictive model. Taking charity sector data for decision making to the cutting edge of technology.
Catalysing Widespread AI Adoption. We spent much of last year building AI systems, toolkits, insight briefings and training to enable us to act as a catalyst for widespread adoption of AI by charities. We will continue to roll this out in 2024 by providing access to our own AI services, allowing others to deliver those eservices and potentially spinning off or co-creating with others.
Access To Everything For Everyone - AI Concierge Service. We already tap into and promote the huge collective expertise of the charity sector, both for charities themselves and, increasingly, individuals. However, we are limited by our capacity and many of our users struggle with any kind of tech. In response, in 2025, we will bring other providers into the system, begin using AI to grow our reach even further and migrate our remaining systems to AI to create our AI concierge service. This will be far more accessible and will create a single gateway to the sector for absolutely anyone who wants to use charity services.
At year end we had 4 independent trustees who collectively bring significant senior expertise from both the charity and commercial sectors and from across various professional disciplines. They are (in alphabetical order):
During the year, Dries de Coster stood down for family reasons. The Board and Founder wish to record their gratitude to him for the outstanding support he provided whilst a trustee.
