Free tools, boring by design, operable by whoever holds the role in two years.
A registered Verein — around 40 active volunteers, one part-time paid coordinator, funded by a mix of small grants, membership fees and donations. Nobody there has a technology budget, and the coordinator is doing the work of three people on 20 hours a week. This engagement was partly unpaid and I would do it again.
The acute break is grant applications. Each funder wants the same information in a different structure — organisational description, project plan, budget, impact evidence, previous funding — and each application takes two full days that come out of the delivery work, which is the whole point of the organisation. Behind that: rota coordination across 40 volunteers, membership admin, donor thank-yous and the annual report.
- Maintaining the reusable core: mission, history, structure, staffing, finances, past projects, impact figures
- Reshaping that core into each funder’s required structure and word limits
- Tracking deadlines, reporting obligations and outcomes across applications
- Volunteer rota: availability, shifts, reminders, gaps
- Membership: joins, fees, lapses, Beitragseinzug
- Donor thank-yous and Spendenquittungen
- Collecting activity data continuously so impact reporting is not archaeology
- What the organisation is for
- Which funder to approach and what to promise them
- Every claim about impact
- Volunteer relationships
- The core document
- Every reusable fact about the organisation, written once, kept current, with sources for every number. The single highest-value thing built, and it is essentially a well-organised text file.
- The application shaper
- A funder’s questions and word limits in; a draft built from the core out. Two days becomes about three hours, and every claim traces to something in the core, so nothing is invented under deadline pressure — which is exactly when organisations invent things.
- The obligations diary
- Application deadlines, reporting deadlines, and what was promised to whom. Missed reporting is how small organisations lose funders quietly.
- The rota
- Availability in, shifts out, reminders sent, gaps visible early. This was the coordinator’s largest weekly time sink and it is pure scheduling.
- The activity log
- Thirty seconds after each session: what happened, how many people, anything notable. A year later the impact report writes itself from real records instead of from a panicked reconstruction in January.
No impact claim is ever generated, and no funder communication is auto-sent.
Every number in a grant application comes from the activity log or the accounts. If the log does not support it, the application says so. Overstating impact to a funder is fraud, it happens by accident under deadline pressure, and a fluent drafting tool makes it easier to do accidentally — so the shaper is built to refuse. Where evidence is missing it writes "we do not yet measure this" and leaves it for a human.
Nothing is written about a beneficiary. Where the organisation works with vulnerable people, no personal data enters any external tool at all. Aggregate counts only. And everything must run on free or near-free tools and be operable by whoever holds the role in two years — anything requiring a subscription or a specialist will be abandoned.
Hours per grant application. Applications submitted per year — which roughly doubled, and that is the entire economic point. Reporting deadlines met. Coordinator hours spent on admin versus delivery. Whether the activity log is still being filled in after six months.
When an organisation wants a website, a CRM and a donor platform. That is a different project with an ongoing cost they cannot carry, and it will be abandoned within a year. A well-kept spreadsheet and a documented process outlive most systems built for organisations like this.
Thirty seconds after each session. Nothing financial that recurs.
A grant application took two full days and those days came out of the work the Verein actually exists to do. Everything reusable about us now lives in one place and gets reshaped into whatever structure a funder demands, so it takes about three hours. We doubled the number of applications we submit, which is the entire economic point. He built it so that if the evidence is not in our activity log the application says we do not measure it, rather than letting me improvise a number at midnight before a deadline.
Tell me what your week looks like.
I'll tell you honestly which parts you can hand over — and which you can't.