One of the biggest reasons I made the move to esynergy was to try to encourage broader collaboration and wider impact across the Not-for-profit sector. I took a lot of time to think about what we actually mean when we talk about building “a stronger civil society.”
It’s an easy phrase to agree with. Of course we want charities, government, communities, funders and businesses working better together. Of course, we want people to get the right support at the right time. And of course we want every pound donated to go further.
But I think there’s a fundamental piece of infrastructure missing.
We’ve built a civil society made up of thousands of organisations. We haven’t built the infrastructure that allows those organisations to operate like a connected system.
There are more than 170,000 charities registered in England and Wales, collectively reporting more than £107bn of income. At the same time, around 61% report annual income below £100,000. That’s an enormous amount of knowledge, data, capability and community reach spread across organisations that often simply don’t have the resources to build mature technology and data capabilities on their own.
Many of these organisations are working with the same people, in the same communities, on the same problems. But the information they hold often sits inside individual CRMs, spreadsheets and case management systems that don’t talk to each other.
I’ve heard time and time again that the appetite for collaboration is there.
So how do we create the infrastructure that enables it?
Why this matters
People don’t experience society through organisational boundaries.
A young person looking for work doesn’t care whether the organisation helping them is a charity, a local authority, a college or an employer. They just want help.
But today, they can end up telling their story multiple times, filling in multiple forms and navigating multiple systems because the organisations supporting them don’t have a connected view of their circumstances.
The same is true for people experiencing homelessness, families in poverty, older people, people living with disabilities, communities responding to emergencies, and countless other areas where charities and public services overlap.
We’ve designed many of our services around organisational boundaries rather than around the people we exist to serve.
That’s a problem.
But it’s also an opportunity.
Technology and data could be the connective tissue that lets civil society work as a network, rather than a collection of disconnected organisations.
I’m not talking about one giant database, or handing all charity data to a central body. I’m talking about interoperability: common standards, trusted data-sharing agreements, appropriate consent, APIs, good governance and technology that allows organisations to connect without throwing away the systems they already have.
The question shifts from “What does my organisation know?” to “What do we collectively know that could help this person?”
That feels like a pretty fundamental shift.
Where do we start?
We don’t need to connect 170,000 charities on day one.
We need to start with problems.
Pick an issue where multiple organisations are already working with the same communities. Bring them together. Agree what information genuinely needs to be shared, what shouldn’t be shared, and what good governance looks like. Build the smallest piece of shared infrastructure that makes it work.
Then measure whether it actually improves outcomes.
My view is that it absolutely will. But who knows? We might discover that the way we’ve worked historically isn’t as bad as we thought. Or perhaps we’ve chosen the wrong community or the wrong problem.
And that’s OK.
Because the point isn’t to prove that technology is the answer.
The point is to find out what actually works.
We should also stop assuming every charity needs to build everything itself. For smaller organisations especially, there’s a huge opportunity for shared technology capabilities across identity, data integration, analytics, cybersecurity, AI governance, fundraising and impact measurement.
We don’t expect every charity to build its own electricity grid.
So why do we expect every charity to solve the same technology problems independently?
This also means leaders need to broaden the conversation. Not just which CRM to buy, whether to move to the cloud, or how much automation can save.
The question should be:
What parts of our missions could we achieve together that none of us could achieve alone?
The technology isn’t the point
I’ve worked inside large charities and seen first-hand how hard it is to build a genuinely connected view of the people an organisation exists to serve.
I’ve also seen what happens when you get it right.
And the technology quickly becomes the least interesting part of it.
The database isn’t the outcome.
The AI isn’t the outcome.
The platform isn’t the outcome.
The person getting better support is the outcome.
That’s the “so what?” for me.
If better data and technology simply give us cheaper systems, faster processes and more automation, then we’ve missed the bigger opportunity.
But if they allow a young person to get the right support without telling their story five times, allow charities to identify where communities are being underserved, help funders understand where investment is having the greatest impact, or allow organisations to work together rather than around each other, then we’re talking about something much more important.
We’re talking about infrastructure for civil society.
So perhaps the opportunity isn’t to build better technology for charities.
It’s to build the digital and data infrastructure that allows charities to work better together, as civil society.
There are more than 170,000 charities. Millions of volunteers. Millions of supporters. Billions of pounds of income.
Imagine what we could achieve if all of that were connected not just by a common purpose, but by common infrastructure too.
That, for me, is the next chapter of the civil society conversation.
And technology and data teams have a much bigger part to play in writing it than we might think.
If you’re a charity leader, working in the sector and interested in pioneering this, I’d love to hear from you. Our Not-for-Profit practice exists to help organisations tackle exactly these kinds of problems.
Because I don’t think the answer is another technology project. I think it’s figuring out what we can achieve together that we simply can’t achieve alone.
¹ Charity Commission for England and Wales, register data and 2025–26 regulated income figures. ² Charity Commission for England and Wales, Annual Return analysis, financial years ending 2024.
