18 Mar 2026
Harpenden resident Tomos Rees, CEO and co-founder of Philanthrify, explains how he came to launch a new platform designed to bring greater transparency and trust to charitable giving…
I grew up in Harpenden, went to St George’s School and have volunteered for local charity Spotlight on Africa for 19 years. Spending time in Uganda and helping build and run ICT centres has been the most rewarding work of my life.
However, during this time I also noticed a growing disconnect between the incredible work happening in Uganda and people’s impressions back home.
I heard constant doubts from those who said they wouldn’t trust an international charity to spend their donations correctly. I found this lack of trust in such a personal cause deeply troubling, but soon came to learn how it affected the entire charity sector.
Indeed today, only 16 per cent of people in the UK view charities as “very trustworthy” with almost 20 per cent claiming they don’t trust charities to spend their money wisely. A big part of the problem is a lack of transparency. Many charities struggle to show their supporters how their donations are being spent and impacting the causes they care about.
What’s more, charities have been slow to move into the digital and AI age, with only a quarter of charity leaders knowing which tools to use.
After working in the fintech and blockchain industries, I decided to combine my knowledge of innovative technology and experience in charity to solve this problem.
This led me to create Philanthrify: a platform designed to help charities build trust with their donors through transparency enabled by smart tech.
Philanthrify provides a space for people to give to charity and see exactly how their donations are used to make a difference on the ground.
Donors follow projects in real time, receiving regular and personalised updates from the field on how their donations are making an impact.
Our use of [investment service] Blockchain tracks every transaction, ensuring that donations can’t be altered or misused.
By showing donors exactly where their money goes and connecting them with their individual impact, Philanthrify instills transparency and trust at the core of people’s giving experience.
By handing donors a front row seat, Philanthrify allows charities to visibly showcase the incredible work they do, thereby developing trusting and lasting relationships with those very people. This is our mission: to help charities build trust with their donors and increase funding through tech-enabled transparency.
Philanthrify also streamlines the work that charities do by leveraging AI and keeping managing projects, monitoring spending, and reporting all in one place. Rather than spending hours sifting through spreadsheets and writing reports, charities can use our custom smart tools to automatically generate impact reports, personalised to individual donors.
Having incorporated transparency into their operations for years, Spotlight on Africa is now taking this to the next level with Philanthrify, and have already started to see significant results.
When asked about the platform, Sam Ejibu, head of the organisation’s economic empowerment projects had this to say: “Philanthrify brings us closer together with our donors. For us on the ground, the ability to upload photos and updates enables us to showcase our work, giving us the reassurance that we are being seen.”
This is exactly why we created Philanthrify. I saw that charities were carrying out life-changing work, but lacked the means to show it. Now, our platform can help them prove their impact and build trust with their donors using the most up-to-date software and technology. With donations in the UK at record lows, and technology changing more rapidly than ever, there is an enormous opportunity here to reshape charity-donor relations in the name of transparency and trust. At Philanthrify, we are pioneering this change.
Join us as we define the next chapter in our world’s giving story.
