We're not a generic "tech for good" team.

Luke trained as a youth worker, and spent the first part of his career working directly with young people, before following the well-trodden path of many a charity Chief Executive, and finding himself at the reins of (and responsible for the budget of!) a children’s mentoring charity. The charity was headquartered in Glasgow and he led it from Manchester, so he learned to run an organisation under both Scottish and English charity regulations at the same time. Over eight years he grew its income from £45,000 to £350,000, most of it from grants.

That growth meant applying to hundreds of grantmakers, each with its own forms, criteria and reporting. He knows firsthand how much of a small charity’s time goes into filling them in, and how little of what makes their work effective can be conveyed in character counts and uneditable PDF text boxes. In 2023, the trustees made the difficult decision to close the charity because a sustainable funding model couldn’t be found. Luke had the painful role of leading the controlled closure.

Since moving into a freelance support capacity he has worked with a wide range of VCSE organisations as coach, mentor and fundraiser. He quickly discovered that the difficulty of keeping a small charity afloat was not something his team had failed at, but that actually the same problems were endemic across the sector.

He started testing ideas with one of the charities he was supporting, in a scrappy, hands-on way: Trello boards to track impact, simple pipelines to keep on top of grant applications. They made a real difference, and they convinced Luke that the right product could solve problems he’d watched small charities wrestle with for his whole career.

Building it meant bringing both sides of the picture together. Luke came from fundraising; his co-founder, Beckie Denny, came from funding and impact evaluation. The language that connects the two is impact, and Raiser is built around it. With no engineering background, Luke built most of the platform himself, testing it with charities as he went. He still leads development on the charity side of the app.

Beckie has spent her career solving the problem funders can’t quite name: why, even with genuine intent to fund good work, so much money ends up going to the wrong places. Her answer has always been the same — the sector lacks a shared language for impact, and without it, the best evidence rarely reaches the people making funding decisions.

As an impact evaluation specialist, she has built frameworks that work at national scale. Her evaluation system for the 1851 Trust was adopted by the UK Department for Transport as the national standard for their STEM programme. She founded The Charity Spark in 2019 — profitable from day one, with an international client portfolio that includes the Church of England and the Royal Horticultural Society — and was nominated for Social Entrepreneur of the Year at the Great British Entrepreneur Awards in both 2024 and 2025.

Before all of that, she had a career that bears no resemblance to a standard career trajectory: contributing writer on the Channel 4 series Skins, a commissioned film broadcast nationally as part of Channel 4’s 25th anniversary celebrations, officer training in the Royal Naval Reserve, and a Lead Projects Officer role at a Westminster policy think tank in her early twenties. She moves fast, operates at the level of the room she intends to lead, and has a track record of building things that get adopted beyond the organisation that commissioned them.

Beckie’s impact measurement tools — built independently in early 2025 — became the foundation of Raiser’s Impact Story™ and the Open Impact Standard. She formally joined the cap table in December 2025 when her IP merged into Raiser.

She is completing a theology degree for ordination, averaging first-class honours throughout.