The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations is the membership organisation for Scotland's charities, voluntary organisations and social enterprises. Charity registered in Scotland SC003558. Registered office Mansfield Traquair Centre, 15 Mansfield Place, Edinburgh EH3 6BB.
Altruism
Many of the tools we use in our daily work would cost a vast amount of money if we were a commercial organisation. Thanks to good-will towards non-profit organisations we are able to use wonderful tools at discounted rates or completely for free.
In addition to open source software and libraries, we are able to achieve a lot without having to deal with large invoices - we hope this list will help other charities discover new tools and do more with less.
Most of these organisations will need proof of your charitable status - it should be enough to link to your profile with OSCR (in Scotland) or the Charity Commission (in rUK).
Team collaboration
Slack
This is a fast and functional team messaging platform that allows group and private messaging - we use it with different "channels" for different projects.
Slack offers non-profit organisations a standard account for free. As it is a per-user pricing model, this saves us over £1,000 annually!
Trello
Trello is an amazing free-form task management system that I could write a whole blog post about (I might add that to my Trello TODO list!)
Trello offers a 30% discount on their Business per-user pricing model which offers greater flexibility, administrative controls, and features such as integrations with other services. You'll need to contact their billing department directly to request a discount code.
GitHub
We use GitHub to store our code repositories. They a discount to non-profit organisations matching the price of the bronze account which allows for private code repositories - we use this for IP development and internal documentation, as well as the public repositories for open-source projects. Learn more...
Salesforce
Salesforce is used to store organisational data in the cloud. Learn more...
Synovations are a Community Interest Company that help non-profit organisations use cloud technology such as Salesforce.
Content creation
Microsoft Office 365
The big name in office software, with great pricing for non-profit organisations. Learn more...
Adobe Creative Suite
Adobe software packages such as Photoshop are available on a subscription pricing model with discounts available for non-profits. Learn more...
Canva
Canva helps create beautiful stories and infographics - and is available at discount for non-profits. Learn more...
Social media & communications
Facebook can help charities to fundraise and build communities. Learn more...
YouTube
YouTube provide specific functions to help charities in their fundraising. Learn more...
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor is an email marketing system that provides charities a 15% discount on campaign mailings. Learn more...
MailChimp
MailChimp is an alternative to Campaign Monitor and provides the same discounted rate of 15%. Learn more...
Anything else?
Do you know of any other tools that should be on this list? Please let us know!
