Giving Compass' Take:

• Cassie Robinson explains how "charity as a platform" could help charities reduce their costs and build common infrastructure to create a stronger social sector. 

• Is this a pursuit that your organization could undertake? 

• Learn how charity and philanthropy are different. 

Here, I introduce ‘Charity as a Platform’ — a concept that makes it easier for charities to reduce their operational costs and build a common infrastructure for the social sector — to help strengthen it and create opportunities for collaboration, sector-wide advocacy and enable far greater collective intelligence.

The challenge for charities? The social sector in general, and specifically in relation to this work — health charities — need to constantly rethink how they fundraise, how they respond to the changing context they are working within, and for the smaller charities in particular, simply how they survive.

Some specific sector level needs that came out of our initial interviews with a range of charities included:

As a sector, we need the credibility of health research to be distributed more fairly so that different scales of organisations can survive.

 

As a sector, we need to encourage collaboration across different scales of health research charities so that we can better shape the effectiveness of the sector as a whole.

 

And the additional challenge of an increasing perception from the general public that charities don’t use money wisely, leading to a general decline in trust towards them.

But inevitably a charities’ operational activities, which includes aspects of governance, risk management and functional costs like donation processing and impact reporting, will come at a cost.

And the public’s diminishing trust in charities has been linked to perceptions about how effective they believe charities are being with their operating model, and as a result the allocation of their finances.

The idea of ‘Charity as a Platform’ is to create a common infrastructure for the social sector, based on the same principles as Government as a Platform — a platform of common tools, components, and guidance.

The platform is made up of different components (small parts loosely joined like lego blocks). The components are the activities and services charities commonly need to undertake and provide. These shared technologies support charities to deliver these activities and services more efficiently and effectively and therefore reduce overall costs. Since doing this work Richard Pope has set up a new research project called Platform Land, which is something that the social sector should read and follow with interest.

Read the full article about charity as a platform by Cassie Robinson at Medium.