Lift Off IT works directly with charities. The pressures are specific: tight budgets, high staff turnover, compliance requirements identical to commercial organisations, but without the internal resource to manage them. We build IT support around those realities rather than applying a business template to a very different kind of client.
A charity with eighteen staff, a mix of employees and volunteers, and a trustee board that scrutinises every line of spend is not a small business. The contracts written for commercial clients, the assumptions made about IT budget, and the support structures designed for office-based nine-to-five teams do not fit.
We offer fixed monthly costs that are predictable and justifiable to a trustee board. Support that covers volunteers without charging per-seat fees that make the model unworkable. And honest conversations about what you actually need rather than what a standard package includes.
If your charity handles personal data, and virtually all do, Cyber Essentials is worth taking seriously, not as a legal obligation but as a practical one. More grant bodies now require it as a condition of award, and more statutory partners expect it before contracts are signed. The five controls it covers protect against the vast majority of attacks that actually compromise charity systems. The process is more straightforward than most organisations expect. We walk you through what is involved, assess your current position, and fix gaps before the formal application so certification lands the first time.
In most cases, it works out cheaper than the alternative. Small charities without a managed provider tend to handle IT one of two ways: someone internal absorbs it alongside their actual job, or the organisation pays emergency rates when things break. Both approaches cost more over time, and neither includes the proactive monitoring that prevents most problems in the first place. We offer support packages sized for small organisations. You are not paying for capacity you will never use. Start with a conversation about what you actually need.
A single point of contact for everything. Proactive monitoring that catches problems before your team notices, with no surprise emergency charges at the end of the month.
Everything depends on the internet connection being reliable. We source and manage business-grade broadband for charities, including leased lines for organisations that need guaranteed performance.
Cloud-based phone systems that work from any location. Considerably cheaper to run than traditional phone lines and far easier to manage for organisations with staff spread across multiple sites.
Donor records, beneficiary data, financial systems. Losing any of them is a serious operational event. Automated backup with tested recovery processes, not a backup that has been running unmonitored for three years without anyone verifying it works.
A growing number of grant programmes and public sector contracts require it as a condition of award. We handle the assessment, close any gaps we find, and get you to certification without it becoming a project that sits on someone’s to-do list for months.
Microsoft 365 is available to registered charities at little or no cost through the Microsoft for Nonprofits programme. Google Workspace for Nonprofits offers the same proposition. We manage the migration so your team is productive from day one on a properly configured platform.
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