According to Small Charities Data , the three main challenges faced by small charities include Workload, Funding and Demand for services. Unfortunately, this 3-legged stool of challenges will hinder the growth of even the most ambitious charity organisations (unless you solve the problems fast).
While data is one way to prove anything, speaking with Emmanuel Agunze, the Founder of The Makoko Dream Project (a charity that focuses on educating children living around slums) proved these facts completely. For this growing charity, it has been a huge challenge over the years managing their workload of operations.
How workload can become a problem
For many small charities founded and run by an individual, it’s mostly run as a side hustle. The founder’s dream to impact society is what keeps them going, regardless of their other commitments (life, work, business etc). And knowing they are not yet in the position to hire resources to run the organisation, most of the operational activities are often carried out by the founder (or volunteers, if they are lucky enough to rally any).
Can you see how easy it is to become burdened or over-burdened with operational activities?
It can be very tempting to give up, especially when you’ve not rallied enough help to support your charitable activities.
During our interview with Emmanuel Agunze, we discovered he had rallied volunteers previously to support some of their activities.
Some of these core operational activities include the following:
- Managing stakeholder relationships (including other volunteers, donors, beneficiaries, 3rd party partnerships etc).
- Keeping records (including financial records, expenses, budgets, donations etc)
- Running campaigns to boost donations
- Managing communication (to keep stakeholders informed continuously)
- Managing projects
When you explore these activities in detail, you can easily make that conclusion — it is a lot. It is exactly as running an organisation. A small charity is an organisation in itself, and all these areas (and possibly more) need a lot of attention to keep the charity in operation.
The question is, “How does a small charity get these done without becoming overloaded with the operational demands”?
A Solution for Charity Organisations
Emmanuel was very transparent during his interview about his journey as a charity founder. He mentioned two challenges — volunteer turnover and unavailability. Volunteers signed up, took on tasks but disengaged or couldn’t be committed long term. This left the charity founder no choice but to take up most of the activities himself. Unfortunately, he could only do so much. In some instances, he will find an external resource and pay them to get tasks done, but this wasn’t sustainable in the long term.
This was the trigger point for My Centre Office (a technology solution for growing and winning organisations) to step in and support The Makoko Dream charity, upon the understanding of their workload challenges. This is how My Centre Office launched a Complimentary PREMIUM package for charities looking to solve their workload problems, to get a chance to boost their operations and grow. The Makoko Dream charity became the first pilot success for this initiative and the feedback from the team has been very thankful and welcoming.
My Centre Office helps small charity organisations solve a number of problems. Being an all-in-one solution (that most organisations can use, whether profit-making or non-profit), the solution provides the following benefits to charity organisations.
- Managing stakeholders — a robust contact directory that allows for keeping complete records of stakeholders such as volunteers, donors, partners etc.
- Managing communication — communication tools including emails & SMS allow for planning and scheduling newsletters and reminders to stakeholders to keep them updated on the charity activities.
- Managing projects — gone are the days of managing activities and tasks using complex and unreliable spreadsheets. The tool allows for planning new charity projects and monitoring projects in flight.
Other benefits include recording finances, capturing records, signing up volunteers etc.
My Centre Office finds a lot of fulfilment seeing how charity organisations can benefit from this, giving these small charity organisations a chance to boost their operations, and grow rapidly.
Other charity organisations benefiting from My Centre Office include Generous Me (collecting used items for people and donating to the needy), Crescent Kids (supporting children with Sickle Cell), Victor Moore Foundation (providing educational support to children) etc.
We hope you join this movement, to support more charities.
As mentioned earlier, the first problem is the workload, then the funding, then the demand for their services.
There is a lot we can do to lend a hand to support the workload small charity organisations are facing and we are glad to see there’s a tool they can rely on to make the load lighter for these passionate and ambitious charity organisations.
And you can be a part of this too by sharing this with a charity of choice. Join us to help them. Let them know My Centre Office is extending their PREMIUM offering to small charity organisations for FREE.
Together we can support them!
