2023 Annual Return: a year of consolidation and defining our strategy for the future

We have recently completed and filed our annual accounts for Free UK Genealogy CIO, the charity that operates FreeBMD, FreeCEN and FreeREG projects. Our 2023 accounts show that we have consolidated the progress made in 2022, when we reported a £43k surplus. In 2023, we increased our income and endowments but also increased our spending on our charitable activities and so ended the year with a £37k surplus.

This leaves us in a strong financial position going forward into 2024. As always, financial stability is not an end in itself but it means we can continue to focus on supporting our websites, our volunteers and delivering our objectives – making genealogy records available –  in the best way possible.


Achievements

Let’s start by taking a closer look at our achievements in 2023. Headlines include: increasing our income from adverts by £21k (24%) and donations by £1.6k (6.4%); and also surpassing our Big Give target. We also held our very successful Strategy Weekend which brought together staff, volunteers and trustees to discuss priorities and create our strategy for the next decade: “Quality, Value, Growth" (see more on this below).

In addition, we improved our processes by taking ownership of FreeComETT, and completing the move to CSVProc for automated checking and error reporting in FreeCEN. We also recruited a Technical Project Manager volunteer for FreeBMD2.
We are also proud to report that we became a Real Living Wage Employer.

A year of consolidation
Now let’s look at our 2023 figures, which reflect some real highs, but also some challenges:

Note on the numbers: We have revised our standard measure of active volunteers which now uses transcribers who have uploaded at least 100 records to FreeBMD, or at least one file of transcriptions in FreeREG/FreeCEN in the year.  Due to the change in measure, comparative figures are not available for FreeCEN.

Following significant changes in people in the previous year, 2023 was a year of consolidation. Whilst our financial position strengthened, our number of transcribers has continued to fall, as the projects mature. We continue to add new transcriptions to the projects, although at a slower rate than previous years. 

That said, the good news is that an impressive 11.8 million new records were added in 2023 – taking us to over half a billion records in total. We would like to thank ALL our hard-working volunteers and our staff for this achievement.


Future strategy
Our Strategy Weekend was held in Birmingham in June 2023, where we agreed a new approach to put our mission at the centre of how we organise and operate.

Our plans and targets for 2024 aim to revitalise our projects and focus on growing the value that our users benefit from our high-quality transcriptions. 

Quality is the basis for our tagline “human transcription”. Good Quality for us means:

  • Our transcriptions accurately represent what is written in the transcribed record (“Type What You See”)
  • If there is alternative information that is different - e.g. if it’s thought that the census taker misspelt the name - we seek to include that information as well
  • We seek to have effective processes to measure and manage the accuracy of transcriptions
  • We seek to understand how the quality of our transcriptions compare to others
  • We seek to make transcription as easy and efficient as possible for our volunteers

Value for our users is fundamental to the public benefit in our charitable objectives. Good Value for us means:

  • We are committed to Open Data so our transcriptions are more accessible, more usable, and free to use, forever
  • If there is alternative information is different - e.g. if it’s thought that the census taker misspelt the name - we seek to include that information as well
  • We seek to meet Accessibility Standards for our websites
  • We seek to understand what makes our records uniquely useful to our users
  • We focus on transcribing records that are the most useful to our users
  • We work to improve the way users access our data so they can be most useful

Growth in our record sets is a key way to maximise the benefit we provide. Growth for us means:

  • Increasing the number of people using our data
  • Increasing the coverage of our transcriptions
  • We seek to increase the availability of source records
  • We seek to grow our community of volunteers
  • We are open to expand the scope of transcriptions, where there is value
  • We will never compromise on our standards - “Quality over Speed”
  • Growth must always be sustainable - financially and operationally

We look forward to reporting on the first year of progress made with this new strategy in our 2024 annual report.