Partner Success with AWS / Social Services / United Kingdom

January 2025
Lyra Africa
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Softcat Scales Lyra in Africa’s Charity Donations Using AWS

Discover how AWS Partner Softcat volunteered to build UK charity Lyra’s online payment platform to automate donation collection.

100%

of development costs funded by Softcat and AWS

100%

automated processing of donations

Complies

automatically with Gift Aid tax relief program

Overview

UK-based charity Lyra in Africa helps children in rural Tanzania attend and complete secondary school. Established in 2012, it has delivered 15 hostels for girls in rural government schools and provides an offline digital learning program to partner high schools, each with a computer lab with learning content preloaded on the computers. Lyra also works with two teacher training colleges to boost IT literacy among teachers. Until recently, the organization relied on service providers in the UK to collect donations from individual sponsors, but that was proving an expensive fundraising strategy. Lyra turned to AWS Partner Softcat to build a low-cost online donation platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The system has automated payment processing and recordkeeping that helps the charity automatically benefit from the UK government’s Gift Aid tax relief program.

Hands Holding a Paper Cutout of a Family Representing Care, Inclusion, and Diversity

Opportunity | Innovating Collections for Small Charities

Since its launch, Lyra has provided a safe place to live for over 4,000 teen girls in rural Tanzania and each year it helps more children complete their education. The Tanzanian government is investing in digital education for its high schools, but many rural areas lack basic infrastructure and all Lyra partner schools lack internet connectivity. To address this, Lyra equips and installs computer labs in rural schools with learning content preloaded on the machines.

Collecting donations from individuals is expensive for small charities. Lyra founder Maria Spink realized that improving the way it collected donations online could reduce the cost of relying on partners to collect funds. It already had a function on its website for collecting donations, but needed a solution that offered donors different options to give money and to provide the option to donate from different countries. Specifically, Lyra needed a version of the platform that could accept donations from Finland, where a new Lyra office opened in 2022, which has strict recordkeeping requirements.

Lyra also needed to efficiently collect the donor information required to claim the Gift Aid relief offered by the UK government on eligible donations. Gift Aid provides charities with an additional 25 percent on funds donated if the charity can provide properly maintained records of donor information along with a declaration from the donor that they consent to Gift Aid being applied.

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Softcat developed a much more comprehensive platform. Now we can collect and process that information about the donor in a much better way.”

Katy Sklan
Chief Operating Officer, Lyra in Africa

Solution | Streamlining Recordkeeping for Donations

Lyra lacked the in-house skills to build a solution, so Spink posted a request for help on the Matchable website, where corporate employees can donate their skills to charities. This call for help was answered by Debbie Johnson, a senior IT leader at Softcat.

Johnson pulled together a team of volunteer technical experts from Softcat and proposed a donation platform built on AWS consisting of database, storage, payment processing, and monitoring systems with a page offering supporters easy donation choices. Realizing that many charities faced similar challenges, Johnson also set out to build a low-cost, scalable, and secure donation platform that could be easily used by other organizations in the future.

The team built the backend system on AWS, enabling Lyra to accept donations through its website and store the information required to make Gift Aid claims. Lyra’s online donation platform uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to serve the donation page and store reports, while AWS Lambda processes the donations. Lyra’s Amazon DynamoDB serverless NoSQL database stores an audit trail of donations. In the background, Amazon Cognito authenticates online donors.

The Softcat team set up AWS CloudWatch to monitor Lyra’s donations platform. It chose to log application resources with AWS CloudTrail and protect Lyra’s data with AWS Backup. Softcat also integrated a payment processing system for Lyra on the platform.

Outcome | Softcat Helps Lyra Build Support for its Mission

Softcat, which recently made Lyra its international charity partner, manages Lyra’s donation platform at no cost and covered 100 percent of the development costs. Lyra’s website now offers donors the option to donate any amount of money, which can be sent once or set up as a recurring monthly donation. The platform now automates 100 percent of donation processing. UK taxpayers can check a box to confirm they want to use Gift Aid, providing Lyra with the information it needs to make claims with the UK tax office. “We had a very expensive way of collecting donations for a small charity,” says Katy Sklan, chief operating officer (COO) of Lyra. “But the system couldn’t easily collect the information we needed from our donors to claim Gift Aid. Softcat developed a much more comprehensive platform. Now we can collect and process that information about the donor in a much better way.”

Lyra’s work with students in Tanzania remains its core mission. Softcat helped Lyra acquire new computing equipment by introducing it to UK-based logistics and computer refurbishing firm Greensafe. This resulted in the launch of another support program called Tech Connect, which saw Greensafe donate a 40-foot container full of refurbished computing equipment for Lyra’s computer labs. Lyra installed its offline learning programs on the newly donated computers. “There is a chronic lack of teachers in rural Tanzania. Our offline learning programs allow students to study by themselves when they haven’t got teachers there,” says Sklan.

About Lyra in Africa

UK-based charity Lyra in Africa’s mission is to provide a safe environment for young girls and all children in Tanzania to complete their education. The charity is supporting the government of Tanzania in furthering its ambition to use digital education to improve the lives of young people. Lyra is striving to build an integrated model of support tailored to the environment in which children in rural Tanzania live. Lyra provides safe living spaces, computers, technical support, education applications, and content that inspires children in rural Tanzania to reimagine their future.

About AWS Partner Softcat

Softcat drives innovation and digital transformation in enterprise organizations in the UK and Ireland. Softcat provides cloud migration, IT asset management, business intelligence and analytics, collaboration, commodity sourcing, data center infrastructure, end user computing and mobility, networking and security, and software licensing and IT services.

AWS Services Used

Amazon S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

Learn more »

Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon DynamoDB is a serverless, NoSQL database service that allows you to develop modern applications at any scale. As a serverless database, you only pay for what you use and DynamoDB scales to zero, has no cold starts, no version upgrades, no maintenance windows, no patching, and no downtime maintenance.

Learn more »

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources, making it the fastest way to turn an idea into a modern, production, serverless applications.
Learn more »

Amazon Cognito

Amazon Cognito lets you add user sign-up, sign-in, and access control to your web and mobile applications within minutes. It is a developer-centric, cost-effective service that provides secure, tenant-based identity stores and federation options that can scale to millions of users.

Learn more »

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