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
It's hard to exaggerate the effect this experience has had on me. I really do look at the world differently now.
It's the season of giving, and we would like to give a huge thank you to the family of Stephen Hampson who have donated to Yellow Submarine in his memory 💛
Here are some words from one of his relatives.
"Stephen loved music, social events, going out for food and drink (especially sausage rolls and fishcakes) and staying up late. Stephen had Down's Syndrome and learning difficulties and lived life to the full right up to his early death in January 2018.
He lived in North Wales with his mum and dad and loved coming to visit his sister and brother-in-law in Oxford, and they always made sure to pop into Yellow Submarine for a drink while he was here.
He would have loved the thought of a donation in his
name to help support you in your work with young people like him!"
We were all incredibly moved by this generous donation, and we are endlessly grateful.
Thank you 💛
