CTT in the News - 2004

Peter Sweatman asks : Are you making the most of the internet? 

Charity Times - Online Insight Colunm- April 2004
Most non-profits have seen the value of having a website to promote their identity over the internet, but do we really make the most of the internet ? 

In a show of hands at a recent IT conference I discovered that most charities present felt that a web presence had led their thinking on “use of the internet” and that only few had felt the impact of the internet on their business processes or on how they work.

Technology firms and new media publications tell us that better use of the internet can deliver enhancements to:  management information, business processes, stakeholder eCommunications, telephony, remote working, volunteer management and order or payment aggregations. 

We hear that the internet delivers us powerful options which the management teams of ten years ago could only dream of :  Have my office PCs supported remotely, rent an HTML programming team in India, hold a net-meeting, share my core applications, get free P2P phone calls globally, unprecedented and cheap research, real time campaign monitoring and reduced costs of stakeholder relationships.

Yet, the newness of these options and the rumours of hidden costs cause us to tread with caution and our organizational capacity for change dictates the pace. 

After many false starts, I believe that finally the internet is delivering to charities some of the fundamental benefits heralded by the soothsayers of the technology boom.  From a portfolio of examples of internet success I highlight :

• A large charity increasing the speed it processes donations by a factor of 2.5x and additionally reducing processing cost;
  
• Email reducing the cost of supporter communications and care by factors of 3-5x and increasing their frequency;
  
• Provision of standardized documents and procedures together with new data gathering opportunities coordinated across nationally diverse organizations;
  
• Reduction in the cost of committed volunteer recruitment by a factor of 10x

The only high-profile disappointment seems to be the absolute amount of online giving which continues to be a disappointingly low proportion of overall gifts.  However, many of those charities who made the move early and have been promoting giving over the internet have seen takings double every year.  The value of the internet gift is not just the payment, however, but the opening of a door onto a lower cost relationship and greater economies of scale for all web based activities.

My optimism for charities and our future use of the internet is buoyed by a continued reduction in the unit price of technology.  Whether it be the buying of a new PC, the hosting of your server, a man-hour of an HTML coder’s time, a leased ADSL line or the percentage charged to process an online credit card – I see the cost moving down.  Our scope to work from home and yet be fully connected into the resources at the office, with centralized data, means that we can work more efficiently at no cost to our quality of life – and maybe improving it.

In sun, those at the cutting edge have cut and those at the bleeding edge have bled.  The internet pioneers’ legacy is a set of economically compelling uses of the internet which can now help improve our business-as-usual for the benefit of all.

Peter Sweatman, CEO