Interview with Russell Marriott, Co-Founder and CEO at Charity Cloud Storage Platform: GoodCloud

GoodCloud is the first cloud storage platform specifically developed to help charities and social enterprises thrive. The platform is all about making media and document management easy and intuitive, as users can store and share their artwork, documents, audio, video and imagery no matter where they are, and have them to share instantly with the people they wish to collaborate with.

There are more than 168,000 charities and 471,000 social enterprises in the UK, most of them small, local organisations run largely by volunteers. All of these charities urgently need to raise donations for their activities, and they do so through marketing and public relations. Managing large numbers of documents in different versions often leads to disorder – such as overwriting or unauthorised deletion of files, an inability to locate files in time to meet deadlines, and the use of uncorrected and draft versions. Each of these failures represents a lost opportunity for publicity, a loss of donations, and potential issues with GDPR. Similar problems are experienced by small businesses, media companies, and startups.

Managing large numbers of digital files manually is possible, however, it represents the problem rather than the solution. There are four alternative commercial services available on the market which seek to offer a similar solution to GoodCloud: Dropbox, Frontify, Third Light and Swivle. In general, these services have fewer functions, do not offer unlimited admins or users as standard, are not as intuitive, and are more expensive compared to GoodCloud.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for GoodCloud and how has the company evolved during the Pandemic?

 
Through our decades of experience working in the charities sector, we realised that most charities already work remotely in a large way due to the diverse geographical spread of their teams and volunteers.

This is how we identified a growing market for an inexpensive and easily accessible tool for creating and managing libraries of valuable digital assets. Combining our experience with software expertise has resulted in GoodCloud, which launches at a time when the charity and other sectors are under pressure to save costs, and work remotely.
 

What can we hope to see from GoodCloud in the future?

 
We aim to be the go-to brand for charities, social enterprises, families, and individuals who need cloud storage and want to give something back. We have an ambitious but attainable growth target of 2000 clients by the end of year one and, within three years, 20,000 in the UK and 100,000 worldwide.

Based on this we are currently planning to launch our GoodCloud charitable foundation, as we have pledged to give 25% of our next profits back to the charity sector in the form of grants, which would make us one of the largest grant-giving foundations in the UK within five years. That equates to over £25 million per year going back to good causes.

We would also provide a ‘comparison tool‘ for donors who wish to give to charity. For example, if you are interested in donating to a cancer charity, we would provide the details of those in your area, show how much of each pound goes to the end-user, how much is spent in admin and overheads, and enable you to donate directly to that charity with no commission or deductions in a tax-efficient way.