A year sideways.

A year ago this week, I started at GoodCRM. I had spent fifteen years in and around the third sector, consulting, training, sitting on boards, raising funds, and I was 12 months into being a mother. The combination of those two things had reshaped me in ways I’m still working out.

I didn’t expect to end up in tech: I expected to keep doing what I’d always done, helping charities think about money, sustainability and strategy. But the technology side of that work had become impossible to ignore. Most of the organisations I cared about were trying to make decisions about people, programmes and pounds using systems that couldn’t tell them who their donors were, let alone their potenital donors. The conversations I was having about strategy kept running into a wall of bad data. So when GoodCRM came along, it felt less like a leap and more like a sideways step. Same sector, different lens.

A year in, I now think the sideways step is the most underrated career move in our field.

There’s a particular kind of clarity that comes from working on the technology layer of the sector you’ve spent your career trying to change. You see, in unforgiving detail, how decisions get made when the data is incomplete, contradictory, or trapped in a spreadsheet someone made in 2014. You see how often the answer to “do you have the capacity for this?” is shaped less by skill and more by whether the system in front of someone helps or hinders them.

You stop blaming people for being slow and start blaming the tools.

The ‘data ecology’ (aka the unglamorous question of how information flows through an organisation), who has access to it, and what it costs to maintain, is one of the most important things our sector has to get right in the next decade. We are talking endlessly about AI at the moment. But we barely talk about whether our charities have data clean enough for AI to do anything useful with. The two conversations are the same conversation, and we keep treating them as if they are not.

I came into this work expecting to get people to sign up for a CRMs. What I’ve actually been doing is helping organisations re-imagine their relationship with their own information. Which donors do you record, how, what do you infer, who has access, what gets discarded, what gets remembered? These are not technical questions. They are values questions wearing technical clothing.

The other thing I want to say, is that a year ago I wasn’t sure I would be able to do this kind of work at this stage of my life. New motherhood is its own full‑time blog (more coming on that soon…). But the flexibility I have had at GoodCRM, to start at unusual hours, to take an afternoon when an afternoon needs taking, to think in fragments and stitch them together later, is the only reason I am still in the conversation at all. I notice when I talk to peers in the sector how rare that flexibility still is, and how much talent the sector continues to lose because of it.

So: a year sideways. Not a leap, not an exit, but a useful change of angle. I came in thinking I would learn about technology. I have ended up learning more about the sector I thought I already knew.