Customer story: Sidmouth Independent Lifeboat

When a pager alert comes in from Solent Coastguard, Sidmouth Independent Lifeboat needs to be on the water within minutes. But keeping a volunteer-run rescue charity ready to respond at any moment is a relentless administrative challenge. Insurance renewals, medical certificates, DVLA checks, DBS clearances, lifeguard recruitment and a steady flow of donations from across the community: all of it falls to one person.

Naomi Cook is the only permanent paid employee at Sidmouth Independent Lifeboat. A former crew member and qualified helm, she came to the Company Secretary and Treasurer role in 2020, inheriting a filing cabinet full of paper records, a tangle of spreadsheets and a manual reconciliation process that added cost and risk at every turn.

Today, Donorfy sits at the centre of everything she does. Not just as a fundraising tool, but as the operational backbone of an organisation where accuracy can affect whether a volunteer is legally permitted to go to sea.

Sidmouth Independent Lifeboat is entirely self-funded. It receives no RNLI affiliation, no government grants and carries out very little active fundraising. Income comes in via legacies, postal donations, contactless giving machines, a QR code on the outside of the boathouse, direct debits, standing orders, an in-house shop and around 80 collection tins placed in businesses across Sidmouth. Two public events each year, the town carnival and Flag Day at the Regatta, are the only times the team actively goes out to collect.

All of that income was being managed across multiple spreadsheets. Reconciliation was handled by an external bookkeeper, which added time, cost and a constant back-and-forth of queries. Meanwhile, the operations team, made up of boat crew, tractor drivers, shore crew, mechanics and duty launch authorities, had their own administrative requirements: medical certificates, DVLA driving licence checks, DBS checks, annual declarations and membership renewals. All tracked separately. All prone to slipping through the gaps.

"I just needed to make a leap and just crack on with it."

Naomi had seen an advert for Donorfy, explored it, watched some training videos and had a conversation with the team. She liked the look and feel of it, could see how she could make it work and made the call.

Fundraising and financial management

The most immediate win was pulling all income streams into one place. Standing orders, single donations, legacies, Stripe and GoCardless payments: all of it now lands in Donorfy and reconciles directly with Xero, which replaced the previous Sage system. The bookkeeper involvement that used to add time and additional costs is gone.

For a charity with a strong base of regular supporters,visibility matters. Naomi can now see at a glance who has given before, who gives regularly and whether someone who donated last year has come back. On a spreadsheet, last year's donor was just a line further up a different tab. In Donorfy, they are part of an ongoing picture.

Any cash received, via the shop or collection tins income, are now formatted so it can be imported directly. When Naomi missed 3 weeks of counts due to events and holidays, caught up in around 20 minutes. Straight into Donorfy, straight to Xero.

"At the end of the month, I refresh the report and I can get all the data I need. Rather than 'give me half an hour to run through the spreadsheets'."

Volunteer compliance: where Donorfy really earns its place

Most charities use a CRM just for donors. Naomi uses Donorfy for crew compliance too.

Her operations team face a range of annual compliance requirements that have legal and insurance implications. A crew member without a valid medical certificate cannot go to sea. A tractor driver whose DVLA check has not been completed is uninsured. This information is requested on MCA inspections and Donorfy now manages all of it.

The tractor driver declaration is one of the most elegant examples. Every year, Naomi needs driving licence details and a DVLA check code from each driver, along with declarations about disabilities, insurance claims and motoring convictions required for the charity's insurance renewal. Previously this meant chasing people on training nights, hoping they had their licence with them, and trying to copy check codes accurately from emails where formatting often corrupted the data.

Now Naomi sends a single form link to the crew Facebook page at the start of February. Volunteers complete it themselves. Their responses create an activity with a task notification in Donorfy. She opens it, copies the licence number and check code directly into the DVLA portal, saves the result and logs the renewal date for the following year. A report tracks who has completed and who has not. Anyone still outstanding when insurance renews is named on a list sent to the operations committee.

"They know that they are not insured if they haven't completed it. It's there in black and white."

If a driver ticks yes to any of the insurance declaration questions, a second activity with task is automatically created with all the insurer's required fact-find information already captured. Naomi screenshots it and sends it straight to the insurer. No retyping. No missing information. No delays.

Medical certificates follow the same logic. Reminders go out three months before a certificate expires, giving crew enough time to book optician and GP appointments. A crew renewals view in Donorfy shows every upcoming expiry across the whole team, structured by year and month, so nothing is missed.

New volunteer onboarding has been transformed by forms too. When someone joins, Naomi sends a welcome email with a single form link. The volunteer fills in their own contact details, next of kin, date of birth and volunteer role. Tags are assigned automatically. Their annual two-pound membership fee is paid via Stripe. Information arrives complete and ready to use, rather than needing to be collected in person and entered manually for each of the 50-plus volunteers on the team.

Lifeguard recruitment got a whole lot easier when set up as an activity on Donorfy. DBS checks, swim test passes, casualty care qualifications, contract returns and payroll details are all tracked . A list can be run to keep up with recruitment progress. What used to be held across separate files and spreadsheets is now a single volunteer record.

Naomi is not a professional fundraiser. She is the only paid permanent member of staff at a rescue charity where safety, compliance and community trust are everything. Donorfy has not just saved her time. It has given her a level of governance and accountability that would be difficult to replicate any other way.

Trustees receive monthly figures at the click of a refresh. The support team running the shop can see how the month has gone, broken down by day. The operations committee knows who is cleared to drive the tractor and who is not. And Naomi knows that the information she's presenting is accurate, current and audit-ready.

"To be able to have that at your fingertips is priceless."

Going back is not something Naomi would consider. Donorfy has become indispensable, not because the charity needed a better way to send newsletters, but because it needed a better way to run.

"If you have money coming in from all sorts of places and volunteers to manage on top of that, just get it all into one place. Donorfy does that. I would absolutely recommend it."

If Naomi can run a rescue charity on one system, imagine what Donorfy could do for yours. Whether you're managing donors, volunteers or both, Donorfy brings everything into one place so you can spend less time on admin and more time on your mission.