Can Charities Use Digital to Be More Successful

11th April 2019

What is digital? In short, it is all about technology and in this case the lack of it. Lloyds Bank UK Business Digital Index revealed that more than 100,000 charities lack basic digital skills, which is over half the registered charities in the UK. They also reported that there was a four percent rise in the number of charities that rated their digital capabilities as low. Not having these digital skills and practices in place can be very damaging to charities and can stop them from growing and being successful.

 

Although a lot of charities are lagging behind, some are already using digital technology to transform how they deliver their services and these charities are often pushing ahead of those that don’t. In the Charity Digital Skills Report 2018, it was found that unsurprisingly, funding is the number one barrier to a charity’s success, however, digital progress and skills are the second.

 

Lara Burns the Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Age UK stated “While acknowledging how hard the funding choices facing charities are at the moment, it’s worth considering how smart investment in the right digital focus can pay off – not just financially but in many other ways too. So, if your charity is in this position, a great starting place would be to review your digital strategy and how it could support your organisation’s funding growth or help create efficiencies. If you can make those investments, it will be worth it in the long term.”

 

HR and Payroll is often a time-consuming task for charities, as charities commonly have a mixture of full time, part time and volunteers working for them and they all require different payroll and onboarding processes. As charities aren’t working for a profit, they usually can’t afford to have a dedicated payroll manager that is clued up on all the newest laws and legislation, and you often find people who are not qualified trying to take care of it. In the report, we also saw that charities rated themselves as fair to low with using managing and analysing data and 47% rate themselves as fair to low with cybersecurity. These stats are worrying when thinking about GDPR and breaches. All these issues mean that managing charity payroll and HR in-house is a significant issue for charities.

 

There are a lot of free tools available today, such as the NCVO’s KNOWHOW website that offers free advice and support for voluntary organisations and can help you to learn how you and your employees can improve your digital skills and how you can use these to succeed.

 

Some charities might need a bit more help when it comes to their HR and payroll. Using HR and payroll software to help manage these processes can free up time for those involved to focus on other important things and ensure that it is managed correctly and easily. Outsourcing payroll is also a great way to take away the stress of payroll and you can feel safe in knowing that it is being handled by trusted payroll professionals, freeing up more of your employees’ time to focus on other important things.

 

IRIS FMP is an NCVO trusted supplier to the charity sector and provide payroll and HR services to many charities across the UK.