Asking for advice

[billybiro]

If they're utter shambolic maybe we should be helping them improve? They also don't have deep pockets to be spending on IT systems, their purpose is to help others using the money donated to them. They can't afford to run a large project for it to fail, like the public sector can.
I like the thought of working with a charity for a while

Don't kid yourself. They really didn't care about maximising the money that actually went to the root charitable cause they were supporting. They couldn't afford the deep spending on IT systems, but they could afford to send an entire team of their execs off to far flung places in the world using first class travel and 5-star hotels all the way, mostly for simple, short "meetings" that could have easily (and considerably more cheaply) been conducted remotely over video conference.

And every project I did for them did indeed "fail" (for given definitions of "failure"). This was directly down to them wanting the moon on a stick and only wanting to pay peanuts for it. (The firm I was working through was the 4th firm in 3 years that this charity had used. This was because the first 3 had sacked the charity as a client!). They also absolutely insisted upon change after change after change (leading to massive scope creep) to the agreed project specifications without any equivalent alterations to cost or deadline. As such, every project was massively over budget, delivered late, and often without the "correct" features (i.e. "correct features" being whatever the client wanted that week). Failure by anyone's definition.

Worse, they never learned their lesson and continued to do the same idiotic things in every subsequent project leading to the (surprise, surprise) exact same results and no amount of attempting to "coach" them in running a successful IT project (no matter how "softly, softly" the approach) would wash.

Unless I was so desperate that there was simply no other work available anywhere else, I'd never work for a charity ever again.