"This isn’t something we could ever justify using supporter raised funds for – so it won’t happen unless we can identify a suitable volunteer"
Why not? If you cannot store and manage your archives professionally, you should consider finding an institution which would be willing to accept them. Otherwise, you could consider making a business case for a paid post, even a short-term or part-time one. You might be lucky to find a qualified and experienced archivist to do this work for nothing, but I doubt it.
There are at least three important organisational benefits to having good archives:
1. If your archives are being kept in a haphazard way, your records management probably needs serious organisation. If your organisation is just 20 years old, there must be some information in there that is still needed and risks being lost.
2. Making your archives available to researchers will help raise the profile of the organisation. When I was archivist of Save the Children, I had a number of internal and external researchers who used the archives in their work, including published books and articles. This helped to promote the organisation's contribution to the development of children's rights, which was an important but under-recognised part of our work.
3. Your archives can be a valuable fundraising asset. Again, at Save the Children, I made it my business to provide our fundraising staff with information, anecdotes and pictures from the archives which helped to give a perspective to our work. This was coming up to our 75th anniversary and our history was an important part of the publicity campaign. If you're now 20 years old, you will have materials which, with a bit of imagination, can be used to show what you have achieved.
You certainly need a professional to do this - unqualified volunteers can easily make things worse. Paying a professional archivist to do some of this, even as a short term project, need not cost that much. Perhaps some of the people on this list who are members of CHARM (the Charity Archivists and Records Managers group) can offer you further help with this?
Good luck, anyway!
Rodney Breen
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