Where your week is leaking hours, how to get them back, and exactly what to do first — using tools you already pay for wherever possible.
"We know exactly what needs doing better. We just never get a clear week to do it."
— Trust director, discovery callWe spent an hour inside how The Lantern Trust actually runs — a three-person team supporting 140 young carers across the county, with a CRM, an accounts package, a donation platform and an email tool that don't talk to each other. The service is in great shape. The admin around it is quietly taxing the team: five quick wins would hand back half a day to a full day every week, take the pain out of funder reporting, and put supporter relationships on a system instead of in three people's heads.
A note on the numbers: these are deliberately conservative ranges, built from what the team told us about frequency and duration. We'd rather you beat them than doubt them.
Before the fixes, the mirror. Two things stood out: how much is already right, and how much time goes into work a system should be doing.
The referral relationship with local schools is genuinely strong, the CRM was a good choice and the team use it daily, and the trustees are engaged. The team's instinct to phone and thank funders personally is exactly right — the evidence behind personal stewardship is overwhelming.
"The donation platform pays out in lumps, and matching those lumps back to actual donors at year end took us most of a fortnight." The CRM and the accounts package hold different versions of income, restricted funds are tracked in a side spreadsheet, and the independent examiner had questions.
Every funder wants outcomes in a different format. The data exists — session counts, school engagement, wellbeing scores — but each report means manually recounting a spreadsheet. "Quarter ends are just lost weeks."
New donors get a thank-you if someone remembers. There's no welcome journey, no tiers, and the email list hasn't been segmented since it was set up. Meanwhile volunteer DBS renewals and training are chased one email at a time.
Everything we found, plotted. Top-right is the good stuff: big impact, easy to do. Tap any dot to jump to the detail.
What we checked and didn't find: safeguarding record-keeping (already well handled through the schools' frameworks — a good result, not a gap), HR processes (right-sized for a team of three), and website replatforming (not worth the disruption yet). We tell you what's fine as plainly as what isn't.
Every fix comes two ways: a guide to do it yourselves, and what it looks like if Thread builds it with you at a fixed price. No obligation either way — the plan works whichever routes you pick.
The CRM and the accounts package disagree about income. Donation-platform payouts arrive as lump sums that someone unpicks by hand, restricted funds live in a side spreadsheet, and year-end reconciliation ate most of a fortnight
plus examiner queries.
Your CRM has a built-in integration with your accounts package — this is configuration, not new software. We align one coding structure across both systems, switch the integration on so gifts flow through coded, set up a payout-reconciliation routine for the donation platform, and mark restricted/unrestricted at the point each gift is entered. "How much of our reserves are restricted?" becomes a report, not an archaeology project.
We design the coding structure with your treasurer, configure both systems, set up the payout routine and hand over a one-page monthly checklist (automated reconciliation setup — £750 fixed fee, 48–72 hour turnaround). Optional phase two: a board reporting template & dashboard so trustee papers draft themselves (£350 fixed fee, 3-day turnaround).
New donors get thanked if someone remembers. No welcome journey, no donor tiers, an unsegmented email list — and the personal calls the team already makes (rightly) depend on whoever's least busy that week.
Three moves. Tiers in the CRM — first-gift, repeat, regular giver, major — with thresholds you choose. A stewardship dashboard: a live "people to thank this week" list, with calls and cards logged as tasks. And an automatic three-email welcome journey for new supporters, with higher-tier donors flagged for the personal touch instead. Donation forms move onto purpose-built pages that run on your own Stripe account, so giving is seamless and every gift lands in the CRM tagged and ready to steward.
Stewardship is Thread's home ground. We build the welcome journey properly (automated email welcome journey — £500 fixed fee, 48-hour turnaround) and the donor stewardship sequence with tiers and dashboard (£350 fixed fee, 48–72 hour turnaround), drawing on what measurably works in individual giving. You approve every word before anything sends.
The outcomes data exists — sessions delivered, school engagement, wellbeing scores — but every funder wants it cut differently, so every quarter end means manual recounting. Quarter ends are just lost weeks.
Same spreadsheet, upgraded: a summary tab that calculates totals and percentages automatically, and a funder-view tab where you pick a funder's categories from a dropdown and the numbers recut themselves. Feedback and session forms feed the workbook directly instead of being re-typed. Your headline stats — "89% of young carers say Lantern gives them a break they get nowhere else" — are always one glance away, for reports and fundraising alike.
We rebuild the workbook, wire up the forms, and pre-load your current funders' formats so the next quarterly report is minutes, not days (reporting dashboard built from your sources — £750 fixed fee, 3–5 day turnaround).
DBS renewals and safeguarding training for staff and volunteers are chased one email at a time, from a spreadsheet, by whoever notices. The chasing is the leak — not the compliance itself — and the risk of something slipping grows with every new volunteer.
A compliance register with expiry dates per person, plus an automated workflow that sends escalating reminders (60, 30, 7 days, then a copy to the coordinator), records completions, and shows a live red/amber/green dashboard with a one-click summary for trustees. Humans only handle genuine exceptions. Built in the Microsoft 365 tools you already pay for.
We build the register, the escalating reminder flow and the trustee dashboard in your own Microsoft 365 (system integration / automation — £500 fixed fee, 48–72 hour turnaround), and hand it over working, with the first cycle monitored.
Not a leak — an opportunity, and a fair worry. The team asked the right question: where does the data go?
On business plans, your data isn't used to train the models and stays yours. The risk isn't the tool; it's using it without agreed boundaries.
A two-month Claude pilot at charity pricing (roughly £18/month for three people) pointed at the unglamorous work: recutting funder stats, first drafts of grant reports in each funder's format, policy tidying, spreadsheet formulas on demand. Alongside it, a one-page AI policy naming what you'll happily use AI for, what you never will (nothing identifying a young carer goes anywhere near it — that's line one), and what's still being decided. The board sees it, everyone relaxes, and you innovate inside clear lines.
The AI policy draft is included in your audit. Beyond that, a hands-on session getting the whole team working with Claude on your real tasks — scoped and quoted at the review call.
Free inside your Microsoft 365. One board per event, one for the board cycle (papers, meetings, action points tracked instead of lost in minutes), and ready-made task lists for volunteers. Rule of thumb: supporters live in the CRM; everything else that needs doing lives in Planner.
A two-minute form any staff member can use to log a young carer's story idea, with consent tracked from the start — so when a grant application or appeal needs a story, it's there, cleared, and current. Consent rules for young people make this one worth designing carefully; we'd sequence it after the quick wins.
At this size, CRM forms plus the compliance register cover it. The trigger to revisit: volunteer numbers doubling, or shift scheduling becoming a weekly headache. Until then, skip the software — we'd rather you spent the money on young carers.
| When | What | Route |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Agree the income code list on paper · adopt the AI policy draft | DIY |
| Weeks 2–4 | Quick win 1: coding structure, CRM↔accounts integration, payout reconciliation — run one month in parallel | DIY or with Thread |
| Weeks 3–4 | Quick win 5: Claude pilot starts · policy to the board | DIY |
| Weeks 5–7 | Quick win 2: tiers + dashboard + welcome journey live | DIY or with Thread |
| Weeks 6–8 | Quick win 3: reporting workbook + forms rewired | DIY or with Thread |
| Weeks 8–10 | Quick win 4: compliance register + reminder flow live | DIY or with Thread |
| Weeks 10–12 | 90-day check-in with Thread: what actually saved time? | with Thread |
A report like this one — specific to your charity, in your team's own words, with every recommendation carrying a do-it-yourself guide, a fixed-price build option, and a data-ethics rating. Then a 30-minute review call, and a 90-day check-in to see what actually saved you time.
The Thread Audit is £2,500 — and the first five are half price at £1,250. Commission any recommendation and your audit fee is credited in full against the implementation work and monthly fees. If your audit doesn't uncover major potential time savings, we refund it. Book your audit call →
Implementation, if you want it, runs through Thread Executive — fixed prices published upfront, most work delivered in 24–72 hours, one revision round included.