Unit costs have fallen by over 25% since operations started.

Today Charityshare runs an infrastructure supporting over 4,000 computers across the member organisations.

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We provide IT infrastructure services across all member charities.

Company Rationale and Objective

By pooling the provision of IT Infrastructure services from separate charities into a single shared service and management organisation, each shareholder/owner is able to benefit from a superior level of IT capability and economies of scale in terms of Service Quality, System Stability, Special Projects capability, Data Security and Integrity, and Value for Money.

Unique Cultural Values and Business Alignment

Charityshare operates comfortably within the “high trust” world of not- for-profits, as a collegiate and flexible partner rather than operating a strict rule/contract driven business relationship. This is because Charityshare was set up to act as the shared IT department of its participating charities. Together with its scale, it combines the rigour of an external services provider with the flexibility and responsiveness of an internal IT function. Everything that the Company does is about bringing benefits to its clients rather than building its own profit bottom line.

Industry Best Practice

By using a set of ITIL®- and PRINCE2®-aligned tools and processes Charityshare has created a nucleus of core competence that has led to an increasingly skilled team delivering quality in Service Level and Project Management and delivery.

Value for Money

Since its formation the overall cost of service has been reduced whilst the quality of service has improved. Under the current agreements, all Charityshare costs are re-charged to its shareholders on a not for profit basis – without margin or VAT.

National and Local Technical Support

All our staff is UK-based with the Service Desk being a single point of contact for all requests offering a 75%-80% first-time fix rate for incident calls and rapid escalation to 2nd- and 3rd-line support when required. A team of field-based engineers respond to issues which cannot be resolved remotely.

Infrastructure and Hosting

Charities’ applications and data are stored on servers housed in 2 purpose-built data centres, geographically separated and connected by a high-speed data link for synchronous replication of critical data. This configuration offers N+1 redundancy and on-site generator to power the centre in the event of a power grid failure. Use of virtualisation technologies allows for responsive scalability of the infrastructure. In recognition of the sensitivity of some of the data which we manage the infrastructure is secure by design and achieves complete separation of each charity’s information.

Purchasing

Charityshare’s purchasing team maintain a very good working relationship with our preferred suppliers allowing from prompt delivery; usually 4 working days from order placement. An efficient online ordering process ensures 99% of requests are dealt with within the SLA.