We talk a lot about transparency. It seemed only fair to turn that same honesty on ourselves.
We talk a lot about transparency: about charities’ data, about how funding decisions get made, about what’s actually happening with your information. It seemed only fair to turn that same honesty on ourselves.
This page lists the tools and services Raiser runs on: the software, the companies behind it, where things are physically located, and, where it’s relevant, what that means for your data and ours. Some of it we’re proud of. Some of it is good enough for now, and we know it. We’d rather tell you both.
This page is the detailed companion to our How We Build page. For the legal version of how we handle your data, see our Privacy Policy.
show where each company is headquartered — not where your data is stored, that’s a different question, and we cover it below. marks open-source software that no company owns.
The everyday tools behind Raiser: email, docs, chat, money.
Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar)
Our email and day-to-day documents and scheduling.
Reliable, widely understood, works well for a small remote team.
Google is a US company. Like most US tech giants, it can be required to share data with US authorities under US law (more on this below).
Notion
Where we organise projects, write internal docs, and manage the database that powers our blog. We also use Notion AI for some of this, which draws on a blend of different AI models behind the scenes.
Flexible, good for a small team, and the AI features genuinely save us time.
Also a US company, with the same caveat as above.
Discord
Team chat: quick messages, voice calls, day-to-day coordination.
Free, easy, good for small teams and communities.
US-based, same caveat as above. Not designed with data minimisation as a priority.
Xero
Our accounting software: invoices, expenses, bookkeeping.
Headquartered in New Zealand, not the US. Well-regarded for small businesses.
New Zealand is part of an intelligence-sharing arrangement with the US and UK (the “Five Eyes”), so it isn’t a clean break from the issue, but it’s a meaningfully different starting point from a US-headquartered company.
The platform itself: the address you type in, where it physically lives, and what it’s built with. This covers Raiser as a whole, not just this marketing site.
34SP
Registers raiser.uk (the address itself) and manages our DNS. DNS is the internet’s address book: when you type raiser.uk into a browser, DNS is what looks up “where is that, actually?” and points you at the right computer. Every website needs this.
Independently owned, based in Manchester, and we’ve worked with them for a decade on other projects. We moved here from GoDaddy, a large US company.
Nothing major. This is close to our ideal setup.
Brightbox
Runs the actual computer that Raiser lives on, day to day.
UK-owned and operated, with data centres in Manchester. As far as we can tell, Raiser physically lives in Manchester, the same city we’re based in.
Nothing major.
Ruby on Rails
The open-source software framework Raiser is built with: the code that makes everything actually work.
Free and open source, over twenty years old, used by huge sites like Shopify and GitHub. No company owns it or could change the rules on us.
Not really a downside for you. This is just what Raiser is built with.
GitHub (Microsoft)
Stores the history of every change ever made to Raiser’s code: a detailed record of how it’s been built.
Industry standard, excellent tools, free for the way we use it.
Owned by Microsoft, a US company. Your data as a Raiser user isn’t stored here — this is about our code, not your information — but it’s part of the full picture.
Analytics & cookies
How (and whether) we track visits to this site.
We only do this with your consent, and the data itself is processed on EU servers.
The analytics tool we use is made by a US company, even though the data stays in the EU. Full detail on our Privacy Policy — we didn’t want to repeat it all here.
There’s a US law called the CLOUD Act. In plain terms, it says US companies can be legally required to hand over data to US authorities, even if that data is stored outside the US — say, on a server in Europe. Where the data sits physically isn’t the deciding factor: who owns and controls the company is.
Raiser exists to help UK charities, and we think the people who support them deserve to know that the tools handling their information aren’t quietly subject to a different country’s laws with no say in the matter. Moving our domain to 34SP, an independent UK registrar, was a small, practical step in that direction. It doesn’t fix everything (see below), but it’s one less link in the chain that runs through the US, and we think that’s worth doing even when it’s a small thing.
We’re not going to pretend everything above is perfect. Several of the tools we use day to day — Google Workspace, Notion, Discord, GitHub — are run by large US companies, for the simple reason that they’re the best tools available for a small team right now, and rebuilding everything from scratch isn’t realistic, or even necessarily a good use of the time and money charities are trusting us with.
What we’ve tried to do is be deliberate about the parts that directly affect your data as a visitor (the domain, the DNS, where Raiser is hosted) and be upfront about the rest. As better, independent, UK or EU-based alternatives become realistic for the things we use internally, we’ll consider them. This page will be updated as things change, not quietly rewritten.
