Citizensheep. "Michael Grimes lives in Birmingham (UK). This is his blog about anything that he fancies."

Someone complained to me recently that he couldn’t give his product away. His company had developed a tool that it was offering to charities for free, but no-one was taking advantage of it.

He was quite indignant, implying that charities should be grateful for anything they’re given. My reply was that maybe they didn’t need his product. Charities are not magpies looking for shiny things for the sake of it (or, at least, they shouldn’t be, but more on that later).

Of course we love to get things for free or at a reduced cost, but don’t expect us to snap something up gratefully just because it’s there.

We have a job to do, which is to meet our charitable objectives. That means making the best use of resources against a clear strategy. If your product doesn’t seem to help toward those goals, then please don’t take it badly if we don’t want to use it or don’t have the time to hear you tell us about it.

I could walk around town offering people free beefburgers. But if someone is vegetarian, has a wheat allergy or just doesn’t like beefburgers, they won’t accept them. Should I complain about that?

Take that a step further: I take my beefburgers into a roomful of people and wonder why nobody’s accepting them, then discover I’m in a vegetarian convention. At worst it would be seen as antagonistic and rude; but even at best it’s insulting and highly inappropriate, and clear that I haven’t done my research.

Which begs the question: why is this product being offered free to charities when there’s clearly no demand for it? Why should a company feel that it has to be generous to charities?

Maybe because charities expect it. We are always crying out for support, asking for money and free services.

But sometimes I wonder if we’re guilty of undermining our charitable aims by not appreciating value and not planning efficiently.

Often I hear people in the voluntary sector say they need this or that; a website, for example. Why do they need it? Because they do. How does it fit with their strategy? It doesn’t: the funder requires one. They need a website but they can’t afford to spend on a designer, so they find a free designer and tell them how to design. Why? Because they haven’t planned properly, they don’t value the expertise and they think they understand the design process better than the designer.

If we plan properly we have realistic, strategic goals and the budget to deliver them. Any output (such as a website) is determined by those goals and planned as a direct response to them. In turn, that process determines the quality of the people employed to deliver it.

If at that point we don’t have enough money, something has gone wrong in the planning. And if we can’t get the budget in the first place then perhaps we shouldn’t be attempting the work.

I think people tend not to appreciate the value of things: expertise and experience as well as products and services. And those of us in the voluntary sector are as guilty as anyone.

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