Project management for charities with a small paid team

A small charity runs on a handful of paid people and a much larger group who give an afternoon a week. The staff juggle funders and the day-to-day service, and the volunteers are organised through a WhatsApp group that someone’s nephew set up in 2021.

In Klusko the staff team gets one app for the work and the conversation about it. Each event or grant gets a project. Anything that needs doing is a task with an owner and a date, and the channel next to it is where you talk it through. When the volunteer coordinator is off sick, the list of who’s been asked to do what isn’t in her head or her phone.

Invite a volunteer as a Guest on a single project, the fun run or the Saturday food bank, and that’s the only project they’ll see. They won’t see the budget, or the private channel where staff discuss a difficult referral. Public channels are different: guests can read them, so anything sensitive goes in a private one. That makes it safe to give the marshal lead their own tasks on the event board rather than relaying everything by text.

It won’t suit every volunteer. Some of your best people won’t want another app, and that’s fine; keep them on the phone tree. Guests work best for the dozen regulars who already run a bit of the show.

Funders forget a lot of things, but not a late monitoring report. Make each grant a project, or a task in a Funding project, with custom fields for the funder and the report due date. A saved view sorted by that date is your funding calendar, and the Calendar view shows the month’s deadlines at a glance.

Monitoring figures are easier if someone collects them as they go, so a monthly recurring task called ‘Lunch club attendance for the Lottery report’ means nobody is sitting there in March trying to rebuild twelve months of numbers from a pile of damp sign-in sheets. Look at how recurring work is set up for the detail.

Trustee meetings produce actions, and actions from minutes have a habit of reappearing, unchanged, at the next meeting. Put each one on a Board actions project as a task with one owner and a due date. The chair can be a Guest on that project and see progress without seeing your other projects.

Attach the board papers to the meeting’s task and everybody’s working from the same version. If you’re preparing for your annual return to the Charity Commission, make it a task on the same board with a date well before the deadline, and assign it to whoever actually does it.

The Free plan covers up to 10 people and 5 projects, with full chat history, which is enough for plenty of small charities. Guests need the Team plan, £5 per person a month billed yearly. There’s no separate charity price. During early access every plan is free, and we’ll give 30 days’ notice before charging anything; see pricing.

Klusko isn’t a donor database. It doesn’t handle Gift Aid or rotas, and it has no integrations. Some funders ask for a Gantt chart in a bid, and you’ll need to draw that elsewhere; we don’t have one, and we don’t miss it. For fundraising events, our page on event planning goes further.