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Two thirds of charities report increase in demand for services

The past three years have seen a surge in demand for the service of charities – but also a significant drop in income – according to a new report.

TWO THIRDS OF Irish charities have experienced an increase in demand for their services over the past three years, according to a new research report published today.

However, despite the apparent increase in need, the report shows that almost 60 per cent of charities have seen a reduction in their income over the same period. A third (34 per cent) reported both a drop in income and an increase in service users.

In response to the increase in demand coupled reduced income, many charities are attempting to secure efficiencies by collaborating and reducing the scale of their activities – but almost one fifth say they have been forced to cut services.

The largest savings been made on staff, with 36 per cent of nonprofits having introduced pay freezes and a quarter having reduced pay.

“Charities are responding to deep cuts in statutory funding, a decline in public donations and an increasing demand for their services by cutting costs, but many organisations are now stretched to the limit, and it is very likely that we will see a further cuts in areas such as disability services, social housing and youth services,” Deirdre Garvey of Chief Executive of The Wheel.

Other key findings

The study found that just one third of charities believe it’s possible to develop a new approach to earning income to make up for fall-offs in traditional funding.

Organisations also pointed out that while the number of volunteers has increased over the last three years, the recruiting, training and supervising volunteers still present major challenges.

The report also found that:

  • Almost 30 per cent of Irish nonprofits do not fundraise from members of the public
  • The sector’s workforce is three-quarters female and growing
  • Twenty per cent of nonprofits are still unaware of the Charities Act 2009, and of those that are aware, only 60 per cent are prepared for the requirements

The study, A Portrait of Ireland’s Nonprofit Sector, included 506 charities and was conducted by RSM McClure Watters in association with the Northern Irish Council of Voluntary Action (NICVA) and Whitebarn Consulting.

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3 Comments
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    Mute Eamon Harbison
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    Aug 11th 2011, 10:37 PM

    Seems to me that Amazon has no one to blame but itself if its data center lost power…. They should have had ample UPS to bridge the utility power loss and the time their N+1 generators kick in. Also, they should have diesel tanks onsite to store at least 72hours worth to run the center on full load, and a local supplier on contract to re-fill the tanks after 24 hours. If Amazon do not have any these redundancy measures in place, I would be very surprised… If they do and they still had power loss that affected their customers services, then they need to look internally for where to point the finger of blame!

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    Mute Christopher Duffin
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    Aug 12th 2011, 9:47 AM

    Not to mention their own software hampering restoration of the downed instances and a complete lack of help from their support in trying to restore things. This has been a joke from the beginning.

    I also cannot understand why they only had power from one sub station supplying the DC. Any data centre I’ve been involved with has had power coming from at least 2 sub stations to avoid these issues.

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    Mute John Jacob
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    Aug 11th 2011, 11:15 PM

    who gives a crap really ?!?!

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    Mute Darren O'Brien
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    Aug 12th 2011, 2:42 AM

    I give a crap. Our company had a good chunk of our infrastructure down
    for 2 days because of this. Im an Irish system administrator working in Spain and this was embarrassing to say the least. We chose Amazon for its reliability and really cutting edge cloud services. The fact that its in Ireland was a bonus and made me proud that one of the best cloud facilities in Europe, if not the world, is in my home country. But we’re going to think hard about continuing with Amazon as I’m sure many others will. It’s a pity but when your company’s existence depends on servers staying on, and even minutes of downtime cost thousands in revenue and incalculable loss of reputation, you’ve got to go where you’ll be sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen.

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    Mute Damian Keane
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    Aug 12th 2011, 12:30 AM

    People who think that Ireland could make some sorely needed money by being a reliable cloud computing bridgehead for Europe.

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    Mute fitszpatrick
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    Aug 12th 2011, 3:47 AM

    Loss of power is a serious issue. Hundreds of thousands of children on the brink of death by starvation with no back up systems. This is going to have a detrimental effect on their profitability.

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    Mute Jane Bresnan
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    Aug 12th 2011, 8:04 AM

    Maybe there was a lack of surge protection? 48 hours is a long time for a data center to be down. There must have been equipment damage. All data centers will have bought at least two independant feeds from the esb as well, were the esb supplying both from the same substation?

    It is very embarrassing for this to happen. Ireland has been trying to market itself as an ideal data center location because of the lack of extreme weather conditions, distance from earthquake zones and political stability. Top class electrical infrastructure is part of that marketing speil.

    We do not want to lose the investment and employment brought by these corporates.

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