Understanding the true scale of grant monitoring reports

Everyone knows monitoring reports for funders are a hassle. They take ages to complete and often are hard to understand and learn from. Because of this grantees don't like filling monitoring reports and funders don't like reading them.

This is a problem as they take up to 15.8 million hours of charities' time to complete.

This is a hidden cost imposed on grantees by funders - money and time that should be better spent. 

To work this out we combed through the websites and the publications from the country's biggest funders to work out what a typical grant monitoring report looks like. We then asked 10 people from various small to medium sized charities that together report to 6 different local authorities and over 50 different funders to estimate how long it would take to fill out this "average report". 

Financial breakdown

Outcomes

Evidence of own learning?

Attendance data

Description of project

Details of successes and challenges

Future plans

Case Study of individual/s

Organisational update

How monitoring was done

Progress made against aims

Funder's reputational risk survey

Feedback for funder

Continuation funding?

What surprised us when we first started talking to small charities about reporting was the amount of time it takes to know who their beneficiaries are. We thought that would be easy. 

But then it was explained to us. Imagine if a funder asked you for the number of total unique people that have used your service. Even if you take a register every day, you can't just add up the number of people on each register, as they probably aren't unique. So you have to start making a register from those registers, going through each one individually and adding a new name every time a new person arrives.

If you then try and break that down by demographic data (information that people often don't want to give you) and where they've come from - the time really starts to add up.

Frustratingly, it isn't just us who are surprised to hear this. When we speak to funders they are also surprised. This might be because grantees are often uncomfortable admitting to funders how long this all takes, because they think it's their fault. It isn't, it is hard and the tools that have been available to help with this are expensive.

Luckily, attendance information is one of the most commonly requested items on the monitoring reports. Unsurprisingly, this is the case for lots of the requirements:

In theory this is good news. If all funders want roughly the same thing, it must be easy for grantees to do their reporting - they only need to copy and paste information between forms. 

Funders all want roughly the same information, but they want it presented differently and at different times of the year. If one grant started in March, that grant reporting will be based on a March year end, even if all an organisation's other grants have a December year end. 

Some grants require answers to very specific questions related to them - such as a breakdown of beneficiaries by ward. This is great for making grants very locally focussed, but very hard to monitor!

To add to this, charities often have a lot more funders than you think - the number increases pretty much linearly with income.

In fact, if a charity has enough income to have at least 1 FTE member of staff, they probably will have between 5 and 10 different funders. That means between 5 and 10 different reports. Even if two funders were to have exactly the same reporting requirements, it would still take a couple of hours to copy and paste between reports. 

Even if two grants do require the same information, they will often ask for it in different ways. Grant report question writers love synonyms.

Ways reporting requirements are asked for

Some people will ask for differences, others will ask for progress towards outcomes. Some people define outcomes as targets others as changes noticed in a beneficiary.

This just adds an extra unnessesscary layer of confusion to something that is already confusing enough!

Different types of funders mean different requirements

Luckily, you can guess from funders what sort of information they are going to be interested in. 

Local authorities grant monitoring reports often ask for a very detailed breakdown of who your beneficiaries are no matter what the size of grant, as for 

. This is likely since Local Authorities have a much greater pressure to show the value of their grants than any other funders, particularly in the climate of austerity. Having said that, other Councils, e.g. 

, ask only for pictures, expenditure and some outcomes for larger grants. Common across almost all of the reporting requirements for Local Authorities is the need to use a form specific to that grant programme.

Charitable Foundations tend to be more varied in what they want. They are still interested in a breakdown of beneficiaries, but tend to be interested in outcomes and what organisations have learnt from their grants. 

The format of the monitoring reports themselves varies massively between foundations. Some, such as 

, are happy to receive their monitoring information in any format, so long as it containts the key criteria.

Foundations are also more likely to ask very specific questions related to that grant. 

 is a good example of this. They ask for "what our money can buy" as a requirement for every grant, which is a question we have not seen elsewhere.

What's worse - some funders don't even share their monitoring requirements.

But in many ways, these are the good guys - they actually publish their monitoring requirements. This lets potential grantees assess how much time monitoring and reporting will take for a particular grant.  

This is important as monitoring and reporting is a significant enough part of delivering a grant, that they should be taken into account when preparing the budget. If you don't know what that will be, you can't properly plan when bidding for funding, which is a real factor in choosing whether to apply for grants:

We've stopped applying for funding from [big national funder] because their reporting requirements are just way too onerous.

By not publishing monitoring requirements, funders are not giving potential grantees the whole story.

So monitoring reports clearly take a lot of time. In order to properly quantify quite how long, we decided to estimate how this affects the sector as a whole. To do this we had to estimate the number of grants handed out every year. This is where the 

 came in handy. First, we worked out the total income from grants by adding up income from government and foundations. We then removed grants for research and to schools, as they have different reporting requirements. This gave an income of ~£18bn a year from grants and contracts. Dividing this total by the average grant size (~£50,000), we were left with a total number of grants of approximately 391,280 per year. (If you want to see our working for this, it can be found 

Combining this with the average grant time of 40 hours, we find that charities spend 

every single year just filling out reports for funders. 

. Or approximately the same amount as the lottery gives to organisations that work in Health, Social Services, the Environment, Village Halls, Housing, Employment and Training, Umbrella Bodies, and Playgroups and Nurseries.

Clearly, this is just an estimate. In particular, local authority reporting requirements (the way many organisations are funded) are hard to find, and we have not altered the grant requirements depending on size of grant. We have also assumed that organisations are using the kind of improvised paper registers-spreadsheet combination that is very common across smaller charities.

As monitoring reports take so long to complete, they get in the way of learning

Monitoring has the possibility to make a real difference. If done properly, both funders and grantees can learn what is and isn't working, which can then be used to improve future work. 

This is due to the variety of questions asked and time taken to do:

Because each funder asks for different things, it is impossible for grantees to compare     between projects funded by different funders.

Because of the time they take, grantees seem to see monitoring reports as a tick box exercise for the funder and not an opportunity to review what they have achieved with their grant. 

, a lack of learning is a problem in the sector. 

One way to cut down the reporting time, and therefore encourage learning, has been a move to allow grantees to send in their reports from other funders.

This is great, it saves grantees loads of time. The problem is that funders then get monitoring reports in thousands of different formats. This makes it impossible for funders to learn from the reports they receive, which means they aren't learning from their grants. 

Funders not learning from grants is a real issue. They have the most input on the future of the sector and the sharing of best practice. After all, they spend the most amount of time thinking and discussing how to make the most of grants.

We think that there should be an easy to use and free way for small charities to record the things that grant reports most need - attendance and outcomes.

We think that a charity's own data should be easy for them to analyse and learn from.

We think charity's should be able to easily share their monitoring information so they can share their impact.

We think funders should be able to easily build aggregated reports from all of their charities so they can inform best practice and better understand the grants they give.

But rather than just talking about it, we have built something that does just that. If you would like to know more about it email us on hello@timetospare.com. We'd love to chat.

 application released under the terms of the 

Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license (CC-BY-SA)

Charities spend too many hours filling out monitoring reports for funders. This gets in the way of learning. We tried to quantify that effect and understand why.

Charities spend 15.8 million hours reporting to funders - that's too much

When businesses work together, we call it collusion. It’s usually illegal. But for charities, it’s “collaboration”. Apparently, not working together is “

Legally, the UK has a Government department dedicated to “

 that explicitly advises: “Working together can be more effective than setting up a new charity. For example, so there are not two charities competing for resources.”

In our view, charities are something of a special case; but not for the above reason from the Charity Commission.

Charities should be encouraged to collaborate, not because of a depressing argument based on scarcity of resources, but because the returns to collaboration are so much bigger than in other sectors.

As a child, every Christmas Eve, we would watch the Richard Attenborough version of Miracle on 34th Street. There’s a scene in it, where the definitely-not-Macy’s department store Santa Claus starts recommending customers go elsewhere to get a better deal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vWaJiU4OZw

Of course in real life, companies don’t generally do that.

But charities do — all the time! Because the incentives are completely different. When someone comes to a charity for a community activity, for support or for an event, it often costs the charity more to provide this service than they get paid for it (even if the individual pays some money, or if they have a contract/grant with a commissioner). So, if there is another organisation better placed to work with that individual, it’s usually better for the charity to refer them elsewhere.

For an unfortunately all-too-common example, take food banks. There are now 1000s of food banks across the UK, distributing probably over 5 million food parcels each year (though no one knows the true numbers). This costs a lot of money, from donations, from Government (yes, the Government pays for food banks), from companies and from the individuals who attend them (in the form of “pay a little, get a lot” contributions).

Food banks are clearly not a long term solution to poverty. But in many places, they have become the first port of call for people in crisis. This means they are often extremely well placed to refer people onto longer term support, whether that’s employment readiness programmes, welfare advice, housing support or cash first interventions from local Councils. In fact, we helped the 

 to build a tool to help with this exact process: 

How is this relevant to software platforms?

Because most charity systems are hand-me-downs from the corporate world, this private-sector aversion to “collusion” is baked-in to day-to-day operations. With rare exceptions (like 

), most tools are built for single, independent organisations. They might span multiple departments in the same enterprise, but your CRM, your Payments Provider or your HR platform are not going to let you connect to an entirely different company.

This means organisations end up hacking or stretching these existing tools to work in a more partnership-focused way.

When you take a from-corporate tool that’s accustomed to treating a single organisation as the fundamental dividing line between “in” and “out”, and apply it to the voluntary sector, you get to choose your own misfortune:

Across the hundreds of charities we’ve worked with, we’ve seen both these options:

In the first case, one organisation has exclusive access to all the information, and then must choose to manually and laboriously share details with their partners. For good examples of this, just go find out how any part of the NHS works with their local voluntary sector. You’ll see lots of email back and forth, lots of “I don’t think I can view this because I don’t have an NHS account”, but very little productive partnership.

Alternatively, and particularly at large, national, federated organisations, you might see the second approach. Hacking something together, probably based on Salesforce, the national organisation will maintain a system that is shared in its entirety with every local member. That often means that each local charity might have full access to every single individual’s information (and potentially even a full, sensitive case history) across the whole country. So if you drop in to a local organisation in Redcar — a nosey so-and-so from Tunbridge Wells might be able to see all your personal details.

Systems built for the community sector, free from the legal, technical and mental constraints of corporate-world, should account for the way the sector actually operates.

Instead of drawing a sharp dividing line between “in” or “out”, a community platform should have a gradual gradient between “public”, “shared” and “private”. A sliding scale, not a 

This isn’t a radical innovation. It’s very similar to the model you see on publishing platforms. Whether it’s 

, Facebook’s privacy settings, or the way that Notion sets up its 

, it’s something that has been tried and has worked elsewhere. The difference is that we’re doing this in 

. Directly into the platform that a charity uses to manage their internal programmes, to store information about their members, volunteers and activities, we’re giving them the option to selectively share more publicly with other charities.

This replicates exactly how the sector is currently structured. The charity sector is very much a “

”. Sometimes it feels like you can’t move for umbrella bodies. It’s not even an uncommon thing to see a “coordinating body of coordinating bodies”, like 

A collection of organisations as connected as the voluntary sector needs tools that are similarly networked. We’ve built Time to Spare from the ground up to be able to do this, and now we’re releasing its full functionality.

OK what does that mean, in like, real life?

In the voluntary sector, there’s much idle chat about “collaborating more”, and “working in partnership”, but from that woolliness we’ve pulled out some tangible, concrete “jobs to be done” that are extremely difficult with the current tools.

Unlike in private businesses, where sharing customers could amount to illegal anti-competitive behaviour, charities share their beneficiaries all the time. Whether that’s Citizens Advice referring someone to a food bank, a community centre recommending an adventure playground, or a job skills programme recommending an English tutor, this kind of signposting or referring is what leads to holistic, community care — no organisation can support an individual with complex needs entirely alone.

But actually making these referrals are difficult. A charity needs to work out where to send someone, get the individual’s permission, actually send their information, check the organisation can support them, follow up on the outcome of the referral and then report on the referral programme in aggregate. It’s a long, laborious and typically manual process, because you’re repeatedly sending information across organisational dividing lines.

, and we’ve been testing a version of this in Camden 

A lot of what charitable organisations do is outreach. To engage “hard to reach” populations, charities providing advocacy, advice, healthcare or other support, will often hold drop-in sessions “in the community”.

A single organisation can try to coordinate these sessions so that they are covering all the relevant local areas, communities and population groups. However, if there are multiple related organisations doing similar work (which there often are!), this gets tricky.

 shepherds, organisations need to have an awareness of where everyone else has been recently, and where they are planning to go next:

I know this metaphor is a stretch, but I really like this map.

This can work informally, but usually requires a lot of meetings, phone calls and emails. Having one simple shared calendar visible to all these organisations is a lot, lot easier.

Community organisations often share venues. A community centre might have a bunch of different rooms, halls and studios available for other charities and community groups to use. Right now, each of these groups has their own way of managing their bookings — mostly “please call Janet”, but sometimes they might use Eventbrite or other platforms.

Unfortunately, even though its the same community space, because these are separate organisations, as an individual there’s no easy way to look through all the activities that are happening, and book directly (if necessary).

It also makes it tricky for any evaluation of the “social value of a community space”. Often Local Councils, Housing Associations or corporates will let charities manage a venue in return for delivering “measurable” value to the community. By bringing all the activities together into a shared place, this becomes much easier to do.

Almost every area of the country has a directory of services provided by their VCS. Whether that’s part of a statutorily required 

 or something a communities team in a Local Council or a CVS puts together, it can be a massive undertaking:

Sometimes, there are multiple full-time staff who have the responsibility of keeping a huge list of constantly changing voluntary services up to date. Often, the voluntary organisations providing the service aren’t able to update their own details, and so everything is bottlenecked at those individuals.

Even if the system does allow organisations to create and update their own listings, it relies on them remembering to do so, when there’s no real strong incentive to.

Clearly, it would be much better for the directory to be based on information about activities that arises naturally as a side effect of organisations managing their own internal affairs (taking registers, activity bookings and managing venue space).

We don’t normally write long blog posts with maps and diagrams for every big feature we release (though maybe we should?). But this one has got us particularly excited as a company.

Up to now, we’ve had a lot of success working with charities internally — helping them keep information about their activities, members and outcomes all in one place. In fact, over 70% of organisations using Time to Spare are still using it regularly 12 months later.

We’ve also had success driving a feedback loop between charities and their funders. We work with a Local Authority, Housing Association or local charitable foundation, helping them collect data for impact reports and manage their grant programmes. This brings in charities they work with:

” structure that is becoming more common in lots of different industries.

However, unlike “market networks” for the private sector, our new partnership tools give us a much more exciting option. Similar to social networks, messaging platforms and file sharing tools, we’ll be in the situation where one charity joining Time to Spare will encourage many other charities to join their network or partnership. Essentially, viral growth, 

built on top of our existing high retention

It will mean we have more time and more money to spend on developing the platform itself. We’ll be handing over less money to Google or Facebook. But also, our growth will be clearly and directly dependent on how helpful our platform is to individual charities and community networks, so our incentives will be directly and clearly aligned with our most important customers.

I hope it's clear why this is interesting if you work for a charity, want to partner with us, or are looking to invest in Time to Spare, but even if none of those apply to you, this is pretty exciting.

Our ultimate aim is to build the “platform” for the community sector. Something that’s open to all, allows organisations to connect with each other (and with individuals), and comes complete with a set of shared tools, so no one has to constantly re-invent the wheel.

If you look elsewhere, this kind of “platform” has dramatically changed almost everything we do:

Amazon Web Services cut the cost of building an app to pennies.

Shopify has let 1.75 million businesses get started with selling stuff online.

The Government Digital Service took 2,000+ Government services online in less than a decade.

Platforms are the most powerful economic and innovation engines in technology: they create the possibility for products that never existed previously, and are the foundation for huge amounts of innovation.

By creating this “community impact platform”, we can bring a similar scale of innovation to the charity sector. This isn’t a radically new idea — it was first suggested by DotEveryone 

, but nothing tangible was actually built or created. But since then, we’ve been quietly busy.

And this is genuinely vital, because the sector is gargantuan. In the UK, charities earn 

. For context, that’s almost twice the size of the UK’s advertising market, 4 times more than the income of all the country’s restaurants and 67x the size of the fishing industry (sorry, that’s a Brexit joke).

And even more than just its income, the charity sector is delivering services that no one else will, providing valuable and life-changing support to people without many other options.

But there are many parts that are very, very broken.

Firstly, the grant-funding model is extremely inefficient. We’ve written about this before. 

 and managing grant processes for funders are all laborious and time-consuming processes. The unsolved underlying problem in all of these cases is the issue of asymmetric information: when it comes to a specific local geography, or a specific issue, the charity looking for funding knows far more than any funder, yet the funder is the one making the decision. A “community impact platform”, where each charity can share a full profile, history and evidence of the impact they are delivering, will bring much more 

 to this process, making it much more effective.

More of this kind of transparency would also help to remedy the inequality in charity funding. When you look at funding from grant foundations, and from Government, as a share of their income large organisations receive 

. This is despite the fact that 80% of charities are classed as “small” (i.e. having an income of less than £100,000/year):

There does also seem to be evidence of other inequalities in grant funding. Last year, Paul Hamlyn foundation found that grants to black or minoritised organisations tended to be 

. And across the sector as a whole, only 

 of England and Wales (over the age of 30). By shining a more evidence-based, and more objective light on the work done by all organisations, we expect this to start to change.

Finally, the structure of charity funding is currently designed so that no one involved can ever become an expert — neither funders nor charities. Becoming an expert requires 

None of these are present in grant funding arrangements. Slow application cycles of potentially many months, requirements for grants to fund “new projects” rather than core costs, and perpetually changing funder priorities, mean that charities and funders alike can’t invest long term in any successful strategies or ideas. If our community impact platform can help to replace this process with smaller, more frequent, and more predictable funding agreements, akin to payment by results contracts (but without the current legal overhead and risk), the sector can work towards much greater expertise.

We’re focused on fixing problems, but we’re also aware that successful platforms unlock new and exciting products, solutions and services that were never previously possible. We don’t know exactly what these will be — that’s kind of the point — but we have had some thoughts about which general directions they might come from.

Companies working together is illegal. Charities working together is the key to building strong communities. Systems and tools for charities should reflect that. That’s why we’re building a Community Impact Platform.

Going multiplayer. What does a collaborative platform mean for charities?

 on levelling up communities, particularly the sections on better data and measurement of the sector, is a sensible blueprint for improving social infrastructure across the country.

However, it’s one thing to project a sensible vision for the future, quite another thing to build it. At Time to Spare, we have been building exactly this kind of software infrastructure for the voluntary sector for the past 2 years. So we wanted to give our own interpretation on what needs to be done, and what needs to be solved before it can happen.

Keeping track of the money is the easy, and least valuable part. Charities have limited time and resources, if you’re going to require more reporting to add to the 

, focus it on what they’re doing, not what they’re spending.

Any community group delivering services should collect “bums on seats” data - who is benefiting, where do they come from and what are they doing. For big grants, this should be combined with a small number of consistently collected outcomes e.g. “started employment”, “achieved XYZ qualification” or something like 

 scores. Smaller grants or contracts shouldn’t require this data, otherwise 

the cost is often greater than the value of money received

Specifically, groups should collect postcodes so that outcomes and interactions can be mapped onto publicly available data. Where possible and sensible, local and central government agencies should ask to map the individual beneficiaries to their existing databases for their statutory services.

Each funder, from private foundations to Government, has to make a political decision about how much data to ask charities to provide in return for their money. Ask for more information and you can better measure your effectiveness, but the time it takes to collect actually reduces your impact. Will likes to call this “Schrodinger’s Impact”. Alternatively, you can refuse to collect any information, give charities more time to actually deliver services, but then you’ll never find out what worked and what didn’t, and you can never improve.

At its best, technology solves these kinds of tradeoffs. For example, in ancient times, it was almost impossible to transport large amounts of food to cities, because you’d need to feed the horses that pulled wagons so much that they’d 

. The very act of transporting food destroyed it. Ancient Rome solved this tradeoff by sailing most of its food all the way from Egypt, using wind power instead of hungry horse power. The same problem is so clearly solved by “modern” technology in the form of railways and freight transport that we don’t even think about it.

To solve the tradeoff between collecting information and destroying impact, we need better technology that’s built specifically for charities to use. The technology can’t just be a reporting tool. That will add more work to already time-poor charity staff and volunteers. The technology itself should save the organisation time in their day-to-day work. That’s more than possible. Most physical centres already have to collect fire safety registers - why don’t they double as reporting data? Most online work is managed by tickets/sign ups (or should be), why can’t you use that ticketing data directly for monitoring? With new Covid regulations, details need to be collected for track and trace, charities should add the option to use these for reporting too.

If the tool is embedded in daily operation, working as a combination of a CRM, a case management tool and a reporting platform, by default the data will be live-updating and accurate.

Don’t get hung up on the phrase “volunteer passport”

A “volunteer passport” is a meme that’s been around for a number of years, but it can be misleading. From our experience managing a pool of emergency volunteers in Camden and from elsewhere, by itself a simple identity document is not enough to match up supply and demand for volunteers.

Volunteers’ skills and interests are highly varied and often can’t be helpfully standardised. More than a standard form of identification and background checking, what’s needed is a set of “

”. These platforms should combine training materials, matching, expenses with vetting. In times of emergency, coordinating volunteers and working out exactly where they are needed (even within an organisation) is a larger bottleneck than finding willing volunteers. A “deep platform” should provide software for charities to help with this, for example directly matching befriending volunteers to beneficiaries or automatically creating adverts for activity-specific roles based on calendar/website details.

In corporate recruitment there is a simple business model for these emerging deep platforms. That doesn’t exist in the voluntary sector, but the platforms are no less needed. They should be funded directly by Local Authorities, managed by Volunteer Centres/CVSs, but built by dedicated independent software companies and bought on a SaaS basis so that the platforms keep improving.

If the NHS or Government need access to these platforms, it should be done on the voluntary sector’s terms. Only 

 have worked with the public sector. As the report points out, the remaining vast majority should not be treated as a “resource to be tapped” for free labour in Government departments. The 

, in terms of the community benefits, should be enough to justify this expenditure on platforms, especially if these platforms better demonstrate this value through better reporting and data collection.

“Big tech should be persuaded to provide, for free, the wiring of our social infrastructure. They could contribute expertise and resources to the challenges of data, referenced above; they could help with the digital innovations that are connecting volunteers and funders and charities,”

Asking big tech companies to build this technology isn’t going to work. For this to work across the country for charities with limited budgets, it does have to be free for them to use. However, the typical “free” products built by American tech companies rely on an advertising business model that would be highly inappropriate in this sector.

The other “free” products are CSR projects without real corporate backing. They won’t be given the time and mind-share of senior executives required to make a system that genuinely works for charities and collects the kind of data on the sector that’s needed. No doubt in a matter of years they will be abandoned.

Don’t ignore the business models that do exist

There is a business model for this kind of data project. Most funders pay for some kind of grant management system. Most local authorities pay for databases to track their statutory services. None of these systems are particularly well liked. There’s clearly space for some improvement and evidence that people are willing to pay on an ongoing basis for software tools to collect this data.

This kind of sustainable business model, free software for charities and paid-for insights for funders, would mean the technology could be continually developed in the UK without requiring favours from California. It could make sure the user experience for community groups continues to improve, and could develop more interesting and useful ways of analysing the data. It also doesn’t necessarily contradict the idea of developing open standards. Even proprietary technology can still “print out” in an open format. It would however mean that new ideas can be tested more quickly.

If this all sounds like wishful thinking, we’re already doing this in 4 London boroughs and we’re growing rapidly.

We really liked most of this report. Some of its phrases could have been lifted directly from our website. But if you're reading Danny, when you're looking for how best to implement it, our Time to Spare software has the crucial benefit of actually existing.

 on data@timetospare.com, or you know, just watch this space.

Danny Kruger’s report on levelling up communities is a sensible blueprint. We've got some implementation suggestions.

Danny Kruger’s 'Levelling up our communities' report is good. Here’s how we'd implement it.

Lamenting the state of charity digital skills has long been a popular past time for the sector. Fortunately, in the past couple of years, it seems we've found a theoretical cure-all in the form of "Big Tech" corporate social responsibility.

However, despite months of gesturing in the vague direction of California, nothing much seems to have happened. We've tried asking nicely, and we've tried politely suggesting, but to no avail. There's still no magic Google volunteer matching platform. Still no Facebook volunteer passport. And still no Amazon volunteer currency. People are still on the eCampaigning Forum mailing list asking for alternatives to Salesforce.

Part of the problem is that "Big Tech" is too broad a category. Being so non-specific obscures the fact that no individual company actually makes sense. It's a kind of governmental 

. You can only remove the perception filter by looking at each "Big Tech" company separately.

; but they are almost all the result of acquisitions. Apart from its flagship retail site, Amazon rarely builds its own customer-facing software from scratch. In software, Amazon's leading light is 

Amazon makes far more money from selling access to its platform than it does building end-to-end products from scratch.

Microsoft is clearly more famous for its software products than Amazon. There's probably been a copy of Microsoft Office and Windows in the majority of businesses, schools and households at some point.

With respect to software, however, they are similar to Amazon. Windows, Azure, Github and VS Code are all Microsoft-run tools built to help other developers. The "

" describes the idea that a platform should provide more value to other people than it captures itself. It's not altruistic, they just earn more from taking a small slice of a bigger pie.

Whoever does build these volunteer tools will probably use the Amazon or Microsoft platforms, but it won't be Amazon or Microsoft themselves.

Apple is primarily a hardware company (even if their software is a big differentiator). Their biggest products are phones, laptops and headphones. Apart from iTunes, they don't build stand-alone software. It seems extremely unlikely we're expecting Apple to build tools to encourage volunteering.

Google may well build some volunteer tools. They build all kinds of 

 stuff. But it seems mostly so that individual engineers have something to put on their performance reviews. As a result, Google abandoning projects has 

. Remember Google Wave? No, me neither. Relying on Google to build something 

 is a big gamble that we shouldn't be taking with something this critical.

Facebook are probably the best bet. Their core competency is collecting information on people. That could certainly come in handy for matching volunteers.

However, Facebook has hardly been at the forefront of new developments, and new things they have tried haven't really caught fire. They set up a 

Big Tech companies aren't going to build the digital tools we need to encourage volunteering. We need to look elsewhere.

Charities spend 15.8 million hours reporting to funders - that's too much

Going multiplayer. What does a collaborative platform mean for charities?

Danny Kruger’s 'Levelling up our communities' report is good. Here’s how we'd implement it.

"Big Tech" won't save the voluntary sector

46% of grants cost more than they're worth

Working with communities in a lockdown - theory and practice

Social Mobility in London - is it really that bad?

HAF - the Sticking Plaster of the Future?

Searching outside the Council streetlight.