Most charities need to manage lots of data, of various sorts. There’s keeping up with their contacts, donors, members, event participants, inventory… the list goes on. There’s various sorts of specialised products available for different tasks, such as finance packages, fundraising databases, event planning software, inventory control systems, and so on. These products are very powerful, even suited to large and complex charities (or other organisations), but they are arguably beyond the means of smaller charities, especially volunteer-led organisations. It has certainly been my experience that such charities don’t see value-for-money in such systems at the price of the industry leaders.

For this reason, we at Value-Aware are planning to develop a modular hosted web application for charity management, and maybe some other functionality. We plan to have core functionality including contact management and essential functionality like authentication and access control. On top of this, we plan a range of modular add-ons, including finance, membership management, fundraising… well, I’m sure we’ll think of plenty more. We could also include features that are aimed at charity users as well as those running the charity, such as messaging, microblogging or forums for users.

I think the real advantage of this to clients is that it will be aimed at small to medium users, with a high-value subscription based charging model. We don’t have the details worked out yet, of course, but I would hope to offer a simple setup for under £10 per month, any customisation needed paid upfront and not costing too much. The trick now will be getting it ready for market and marketing it well enough and quickly enough for it to work for us.