IT for Charities & NFPs

A New Rant! April 30, 2012

It’s ages and ages since I felt the need to publicly rant on our blog about companies that give lousy support (though sadly it happens far more often than the blog testifies!) but after trying to help one charity since Saturday to get a really minor change made to a domain record to allow them to send and receive mail after a major office and ADSL move, I feel it is time.  Those of a tender disposition may wish to browse away now………

Without naming names or going into “techie details” that would probably bore most of you silly, the change required would have taken one of our techies less than 2 minutes to do.  Unfortunately the charity concerned had (many years ago, way before we started working with them) entrusted the domain management and renewal to another company.  Not only does this company charge them waaaaaayyyyy over standard market rates to process the yearly domain renewal, it charges them a stonking great extra fee every time a change is required to the domain records.  And to add insult to injury 50+ hours later the charity is still waiting for the change to be done (so still has no email) and the company is now blaming the delay on their partner company. (A  much larger and well-known one that is probably not best known either for its speed or technical competence but which they chose to partner with for reasons that I would hesitate to guess, though the best interests of their customers would perhaps not seem to be first on the list.)

Maybe we at Charity Solutions are be doing things wrong with our (apparently) naive “let’s do our utmost to provide a really good service and not rip charities off” way of doing things.  Maybe we should just follow that other company’s apparent business plan:

1. Boast about providing 24/7 support – but don’t worry about having anyone actually available to do any support out of hours if anyone needs it.  Though we have clearly misunderstood in the past,  24/7 support apparently means that customers can send emails and leave answer-phone messages at any time of the day or night, it doesn’t mean that we need to do anything to help them until after we’ve had at least a couple of coffees on a Monday morning.
2. Offer a domain management service whereby we keep control of customers domains and make them pay through the teeth (at a minimum of 10 times market pricing) every time they renew them
3. Make customers pay extra every time we need to actually do any work up and above renewing the domain, however minor the work is.  Clearly we at CS are under-charging – £50 for a 2 minute job is apparently the going rate!
4. Partner with totally c*** companies (names removed to keep the lawyers happy) and adopt an “apologise half-heartedly but not really give a flying f***” attitude when our customers suffer serious issues due to unnecessary delays in getting our “chosen” partners to actually do anything.

Given that the companies concerned have remained in business for a number of years (which means people are still apparently willing to use pay for such “service” levels) maybe we should set up a new company with a “mission plan” based on the above  –  it would give us far more money …………..not to mention all that extra free time if stop doing any of the boring “technical stuff” and just passed the actual work to someone else (who cares if they don’t do it as long as we get great commissions).

So if you would like the services of such a company, please contact us at www.we-left-our-ethics-outside-the-office-door-along-with-our-ferraris.rip.off and, between champagne lunches and expensive vacations, we will be more delighted to help!

PAT Testing February 15, 2012

We can’t say it was part of our long-term plans when we started, but we are now able to provide Portable Appliance Testing to both existing and new customers in the London and South East and Cornwall areas.

We have added this service after a number of our charity customers ran into problems with their current PAT Testing providers (from incomplete and incorrect testing to causing major IT issues by just hoiking plugs out of walls to test equipment without shutting it down first) and asked us if we could do it instead.

So some of our key technical staff are now also trained and qualified to do PAT Testing – whether on its own or along with other services like network healthchecks or general IT “fixing stuff” work.  To be honest, they are quiet enjoying their new work so far – electricity is a bit more predictable than Microsoft!

If you think this is something we might be able to help you with, just email us or give us a ring – 0118 932 8338.