The organisations doing the most important work have the worst tools to do it with.
Impactful is our answer to one part of that. Charities and community groups cannot find volunteers, the people who want to help cannot find them, and the software in between has never been good enough to fix it.
Where this came from
Impactful is built by Enjoy Development, a UK software company. Before this, the same people built the systems behind national field campaigns for Coca-Cola, P&G, Ferrero, HP and Duracell: teams working in stores across the country, reporting on a launch while it was still running.
In 2020 our founder, Paul King, started looking at the social sector, and found charities and public bodies being asked to do more with less on software a decade behind what the commercial world takes for granted. Enjoy Development started in 2022 to build to that commercial standard for organisations that cannot afford to get it wrong.
Impactful is the first product we have built end to end for ourselves rather than for a client. Charity budgets are smaller. The standard should not be.
The research built the product
Before we wrote any of this, we spent six months on interviews and evidence review, asking why volunteering in the UK is falling. The answer was not that people had stopped caring. Flexible, informal and local came back over and over, and organisations being impossible to find came back with it.
That is why Connect is a way to be found rather than another system for managing the people you already have.
The full review is about youth volunteering, because that was the brief it was written for. It is free to download.