Below we share some of the ingredients of how we run our charity. We hope by making this “open source” it might be helpful to other organisations starting up. And/or benefit the way some existing charities currently operate. Copy, ignore or improve on these as appropriate…. good luck!
We are often asked how Yellow Submarine got to be the Charity that we are today so we have out together this leaflet to give you a brief story of our history.
We chose to use Virgin Money Giving to allow fundraisers to collect money on our behalf for their events (running marathons etc etc). The reason for this is they don’t charge an annual fee (although there is a set up charge) and their “commission rate” is much lower than that of JustGiving.
We use www.clearbooks.co.uk
A really excellent cloud-based accounting software that staff find really easy to use even with no accounting background.They have a charity offer which gives quite a big discount over regular rates.
We use www.payroo.com
It’s done a good job for us. One of the best features is all our employees can log-in to access their payslips online.
This starts off free if you have less than 10 employees in a year. After that they charge £3 per employee.
For charities there is a very helpful website that we use called TT exchange which gives very significant discounts on things like Microsoft Office and anti-virus software
We chose to build our site based on the wordpress platform, using The7 theme.
It works well for us as everyone can easily manage pages and changes.
Specific ‘plugins’ that we find useful include Event Espresso for our events listings pages, and Nextgen for our photo albums
We use a cloud-based software platform called Huddle.
This is a brilliant service and allows all staff to share files on a common server in ‘the cloud’. We can restrict access rights to certain documents to certain staff. All file changes are logged, and previous versions kept.
Huddle have a very good charity offer via TT exchange
M did not look forward to school holidays as she would be bored. But since joining Yellow Submarine she looks forward to each trip and has had a great summer.
