Making an Impact - Simon Vaux, The King's Trust

Making an Impact with Simon Vaux

Welcome back to Virtue & Virtuosity after the Christmas/New Year break. For those new subscribers, this is a newsletter that runs alongside the podcast Virtue & Virtuosity. The newsletter has highlights from the podcast episode, alongside news updates from the world of charity and technology.

This week’s episode features:

Simon Vaux - Head of Data and Analytics at The King’s Trust

In the first episode of 2025, Stuart talks with Simon about how he has developed an approach to Data and Analytics with The Kings Trust (formerly The Princes Trust)

Tech and Charity News

If, like me, you took the chance over Christmas to take a step-back and try and see the bigger picture, you might be finding the first week of 2025 hard work, with the full-on return of ‘noise’ from powerful people trying to shape the world to how they want it to be.

Out of this noise I’m going to signpost a thought-provoking long read from Brad Smith at Microsoft on the opportunity around AI (for America). I’m most clearly not the audience for the article (there is a lot of mention of US leadership over the next four years). There also seems to be a lot of subtext - and its hard not to read into it some concerns about where the incoming US administration will put its priorities. Setting all of this to one side, though, take a look at the numbers. They are eye-watering - in particular Microsoft’s $80 Billion of investment in AI infrastructure in 2025 (roughly split 50:50 between USA and the rest of the world). That’s a lot of CoPilot licenses!

To help understand scale, every one of the 100 poorest countries in the world has a lower annual GDP than this investment from Microsoft. But - in the article - there is the suggestion that as this investment is spread across the globe it could help development. For example - this other announcement from Microsoft this week on how they aim to develop the AI workforce and infrastructure in India, including a partnership with SaaSBoomi. The massive sums being invested in all elements of AI, including the people, skills and frameworks to develop it, mean that it will definitely continue to have a big impact.

This might all seem light years off from what is going on within your charity, but with so much investment, we can guarantee that 2025 will see a lot of new B2B SaaS services appearing, many of them from Europe and the US, but also many of them from across the globe which makes it ever more important to get the right AI product governance in place. For every CTO who’d finally got their business partnering working well to avoid / embrace Shadow IT - don’t be complacent, otherwise 2025 will be your year of Shadow AI, and all of the associated data governance, privacy and compliance headaches.

Season 2 Episode 6: Making an Impact

In this week’s episode I talk about being data-led with Simon Vaux from the Kings Trust. Over the past few months, I’ve been doing a piece of work with the excellent team there, and have been really impressed by their approach to Data and Analytics. Simon talks through how he grew the team and demonstrated success to the business. Its a great case study in developing an organisation-wide approach to data for organisations - a must-listen for organisations that are still in the starting blocks - or want to hone their approaches in 2025.

Something else we briefly touch on is digital trustees (a favourite topic of mine). Whilst most organisations have now got one or two strong digital trustees, there are organisations like the Kings Trust who have managed to assemble all-star volunteer Tech-committee panels to guide their approaches. We touch on the benefits to leadership of being able to draw on the expertise of a regular panel with top-level tech industry experience.

Stay Tuned for more insights in future episodes

If you’re new to the podcast - then definitely take a look back at some cracking episodes. Whilst there is a storyline flowing through the episodes, they work in any order, so don’t feel obliged to listen to them in order. My podcast stats platforms tell me that people generally start at the beginning and work their way through. I’d advocate for the Roses chocolate-box approach - just dive in and pick whichever one takes your fancy. Episode 4 with Avril Chester and Mary O’Callaghan has been the most popular of Season 2 (if you wanted the Pro-Tip for those looking for the ‘hazelnut in caramel’)

Virtue & Virtuosity ‘aspirationally’ comes out fortnightly, or given work pressures sometimes closer to monthly. If you’re keen for me to feature something going on in your charity, please get in touch - and do comment on anything in here, or in the podcast that you like.

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About our host and guests

Simon Vaux, The Kings Trust

Simon started out in a corporate career building and developing new teams and data capability in the telco and financial services industries. He joined the charity sector in 2021 forming a new Data & Analytics team at The King’s Trust. Simon has recruited a diverse and inclusive team who are transforming the organisation to be data driven and insight led shaping their work with some of the UK’s most disadvantaged young people.

Outside of work Simon is a keen runner and enjoys culture and history through travel.

Stuart McSkimming, Podcast Host

Stuart is an independent consultant and founder of the sector-specific Technology consultancy, Virtue Chain . He is an award-winning leader with over twenty years’ experience in NFP/Charity leadership roles, predominantly in the technology/digital and transformation space. He is an expert in getting the most from teams and focusing organisations on strategic goals to get the most from Technology & Digital. He is passionate about organisations focusing on inclusion and finding ways to attract a diverse mix of top talent into their teams. He has worked as a CIO for two organisations – Shelter and Royal British Legion, and also a variety of roles elsewhere. Stuart is extensively networked in the not-for-profit sector both in the UK, and internationally, and is the Vice Chair of top membership organisation, Charity IT Leaders. Stuart enjoys regular public speaking, and also has been known to do stand-up comedy gigs occasionally.

Virtue Chain offers a unique model for charities to access technology advice from experts with relevant experience within the sector across a number of different specialist skillsets. If you or your charity are looking for one-off tech-focused advice, or an ongoing call-off service with our experts, then get in touch with [email protected]

Virtue Chain offers fixed price strategy and roadmap development particularly with AI, and exclusively for NFP and related sectors.

In case its not obvious, views expressed are Stuart’s own view, and don’t represent those of any organisations he is working with or mentions.