Software is “eating the world”. In the cloud even infrastructure can now be coded.

Your application is now your key business differentiator. Just look at the dominance of Uber or Airbnb.

As of fairly recently, Amazon.com kicked off a new software deployment on average every 11.6 seconds.

In one hour over 1000 new deployments were sent into the production environment.

They have load balancers on their side of the website just to deal with the volume of code changes coming from their developers.

That’s remarkable.

And I say “fairly recently.” That stat is from 2011.

Almost half of senior decision-makers in UK charities do not have an IT strategy that will support their future business needs.

Four in ten say they are unhappy with the priority IT gets in their organisation and that their trustees do not understand the importance of IT [1].

In a digital-first world, these statistics should be very concerning for charities that are looking to keep up with how their donors are using technology.

There are several reasons for this.

We’re in the middle of a software revolution.

Imagine what the business world looked like ten years ago. Could you have envisaged a taxi company rising to become the largest in the world, without at any point owning any taxis?

Uber achieved this in only six years.

Similarly, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba offers nearly a billion products. It doesn’t hold any stock.

Airbnb is the world’s largest accommodation provider. Not a single hotel room to its name.

“What we mean by a charity today will completely disappear by 2020” – Lucy Green, founder and director at Larato.

Falling cash donations, the rising popularity of debit transactions and the increased pressure on the third sector due to declining public services point firmly towards a future of change for charitable organisations.

Claranet’s Connecting your charity to the future conference, explored the two faces of this imminent transformation: