Charities have struggled more than most organisations during the Covid-19 crisis. Pro Bono Economics estimates that the funding gap will be £10 billion over the next 6 months and some large charities have already announced significant redundancies. In a recent DSC survey, over half of charities reported that they expected to be insolvent within 6 months.
In response to the virus, the Charity Excellence Framework (CEF) platform was upgraded in April to include COVID 19 preparedness assessments and the COVID19 Funder Database created. Updated weekly, the funding information has been used by tens of thousands of charities and is the only comprehensive source of emergency funding for UK non-profits. Since the crisis began, more than 6000 have joined the CEF community.
With the crisis now deepening, a major upgrade has been launched to provide charities with everything they need, in one place, to respond and emerge from the crisis stronger and more effective. The system has been substantially upgraded, new functionality added, and the charity COVID19 Response Toolbox created.
The CEF aggregates the data from its 1000s of users, to create Big Data for the charity sector, including tracking how well the sector has responded to the crisis. This has been used to identify those areas where charities have most opportunity to respond, to prevent a cost cutting race to the bottom.
The Response Toolbox’s 6 toolkits target these areas, to enable charities to create effective recovery plans and use the very limited funding they have far more effectively.
The system itself, its huge resource base, and the COVID19 Funder Database and Toolbox, now provide charities with everything they need to respond to the crisis, in one place. It works for any UK based non-profit, including micro-charities, requires no expertise to use and everything is free. It takes only half a day to complete the system health check of every area of activity.