Too many "tech for good" companies see the sector as easy pickings: build something flashy, grow fast, and exit. We're building infrastructure for a sector that has been failed by short-term thinking for decades. That means building differently.
Here's how we think about it.
Raiser is built on Ruby on Rails — the same open-source framework that powers Shopify, GitHub, and Basecamp. It has been in production use for over twenty years. It has been stress-tested by some of the most demanding applications on the internet. It doesn’t need us to validate it.
We chose it deliberately, on the advice of DHH — its creator — because it is opinionated, productive, and designed to be maintained by small teams over long periods of time. That is exactly what the charity sector needs from its infrastructure.
We are committed to using open-source software wherever it does the job. We contribute back where our work creates shared value. We are not building on proprietary foundations that will hold the sector to ransom if Raiser ever changes.
“Build on boring technology. It’s boring because it works.”
Every funder has their own impact framework. Every charity describes their work in different words. The same programme might be called “youth intervention” by one organisation, “early prevention” by another, and “community support” by a third. There is no shared language — which means there is no shared data.
Raiser’s Open Impact Standard is our attempt to fix this at the infrastructure level. Charities describe their work in their own words; the Open Impact Standard maps that to a shared taxonomy of activities, outputs, and outcomes that any funder or tool can read.
We’re not building this in a proprietary format and locking it inside Raiser. We want it to become the sector’s shared standard — something any tool can implement, something that makes different systems interoperable rather than competing.
We are already working with Lamplight Database Systems — a platform with over 1,000 charity users — on a two-way data integration that would let their users bring their impact data directly into Raiser. We are in discussion with several other sector software providers who have approached us about interoperability.
We are building in the open, with the sector. Not for it.
Most SaaS companies host their data wherever it’s cheapest — typically US-based cloud infrastructure operated by one of three major providers. We think charities and funders deserve to know exactly where the data they trust us with is held, and by whom.
Our goal is to host Raiser’s infrastructure on UK-based servers — not as a legal technicality, but as a genuine values position. We are working towards moving from our current setup to a UK-based provider as we scale, with full transparency about where data is stored and processed.
We are also exploring the development of our own open-source AI infrastructure, hosted in Manchester — so that the models we use to power Raiser’s agents are not dependent on US hyperscalers, and so the energy and compute costs of running them can be managed with the same care we apply to everything else.
This isn’t finished work. It’s a direction, stated publicly, so you can hold us to it.
The charity sector is rightly sceptical of AI. There are tools that have flooded the sector with cheap, low-quality content. There are companies using “AI-powered” as a marketing term without caring about what it means in practice. We are not those companies.
Raiser uses AI to help charities articulate their impact and help funders find organisations worth backing. The AI doesn’t make decisions. It doesn’t submit applications on anyone’s behalf without their review. It doesn’t generate content that charities then paste in without reading.
It works alongside people — as a knowledgeable colleague who knows your charity’s story and helps you find the right words, not as a replacement for the person doing the work.
James Poulter — one of our non-executive directors and the author of AI at Work — leads our thinking on AI ethics and communications. We are developing a public position on AI energy use, bias, and responsible deployment in the charity sector, which we will publish at Raiserlution when it’s ready.
We don’t think you can build good tools for the charity sector without understanding what it feels like to work in one. That’s not a rule — it’s an instinct. The best contributions to Raiser have come from people who have something personal at stake in getting this right.
We’re a remote-first company. We work a four-day week by default. We believe good work happens in focused time, not in hours logged.
We’re not currently hiring for specific roles, but we’re always interested in people who have worked in, volunteered for, or fundraised for small charities — and who want to apply their skills to making the sector work better. If that’s you, get in touch.
We are building shared infrastructure for a sector that has been underserved for too long — not by moving fast and breaking things, but by making deliberate, values-driven decisions about what we build, how we build it, and who we build it with.
Open-source foundations. Open data standards. UK-based hosting. Honest AI. A team with skin in the game. A business model that aligns our incentives with the sector’s success.
None of this is accidental. All of it is intentional.
