Information Governance & Data Protection Workshop for Charities – 17 October 2023

How do you keep your charity up to date with ever changing data protection law, GDPR standards, Subject Access Requests and data breaches? This is just one of the questions we answered in our Information Governance and Data Protection workshop for nonprofit organisations, in partnership with Charity IT Leaders. Andrew Coyle, our Director of Information…

Webinar: Teams Voice – Consolidate your telephony and save money – 26 September 2023

The Covid-19 pandemic completely changed how we use telephones. Most charities are now reducing their ‘landline’ phone numbers to save cost, and are consolidating them into Microsoft Teams. As traditional copper phone lines in the UK are being switched off forever in 2025, now is the ideal time to consolidate your telephony, reduce your spend,…

Getting ready for AI at your charity

Welcome to the Smartdesc July newsletter. In this edition, we cover how you can utilise Microsoft’s new productivity tool Copilot at your charity, including: A blog introducing Microsoft Copilot, its capabilities and some important considerations Further resources from Microsoft and the National Cyber Security Centre Our Charity Technology Leaders Report 2023 Resources In this blog,…

AI for charities – what is Microsoft Copilot and what can it do?

Since its arrival in November last year, ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. This powerful new chatbot with seemingly endless possibilities took 3 months to reach 100 million users; Facebook took 4 years to reach the same milestone! Microsoft is leveraging some of this technology to introduce AI into Microsoft 365 this year –…

Quarterly Charity Technology Roundtable – Achieving a Happy Hybrid Workforce – 6 July 2023

Our second quarterly roundtable took place on Thursday 6 July, in partnership with CFG and the Microsoft Tech for Social Impact team. Each quarter we explore a different topic relating to tech and IT at large charities, in a relaxed, jargon-free environment where open discussion is encouraged and confidentiality assured. At our July roundtable, we…

Technology insights for charity leaders

Welcome to the Smartdesc June newsletter. In this edition, we share our Charity Technology Leaders report released earlier this month, including: Our Charity Technology Leaders Report 2023 A webinar and blog on our insights from the report A video case study on our Modern Workplace Project with national charity Mind, featuring testimonials from key Mind…

Charity Technology Leaders Report 2023 – key trends and insights

Earlier this year, Smartdesc conducted a survey of Charity Technology Leaders to ask what their strategic technology priorities are for the year ahead. We received responses from senior stakeholders from a range of large UK charities, with an average organisation income size of £30m.  We shared our findings in our Charity Technology Leaders Report 2023,…

Charity Technology Leaders Report 2023

We are delighted to publish the Charity Technology Leaders Report 2023. Earlier this year, Smartdesc engaged with senior leaders involved in technology across a wide range of charities in the UK, to find out their priorities for IT in 2023/24. The report shares these findings and what they mean for charity IT leaders across the…