Our Story
How a charity's struggle to find the right volunteers led to a product now used by councils, charities, and public sector organisations across the UK.
Two hundred volunteers.
No idea what they could do.
We were working with a mid-sized charity that relied on around two hundred volunteers. They came from every background imaginable – retired teachers, off-duty nurses, ex-military, students, tradespeople, professionals between jobs.
The charity knew how many volunteers they had. What they didn't know was what those volunteers were actually capable of beyond the role they'd signed up for.
Real examples. All invisible until someone asked.
We were paying an agency to run our social media. Three hundred pounds a month for two posts a week. Turns out one of our Saturday shop volunteers runs social media for a living – she manages accounts for three brands and has 40k followers of her own. She'd been pricing up handbags for four months and nobody thought to ask.
A charity manager. The conversation that started SkillDrill.
Everything else had already been tried
Spreadsheets
The volunteer coordinator kept one. It had columns for "skills" and "interests." Most rows said "happy to help" or were blank. It lived on a laptop that went home every night.
Induction Forms
New volunteers filled one in on day one. Ticked boxes for availability and DBS status. Nobody asked what they did for a living, what languages they spoke, or what professional qualifications they held.
Word of Mouth
The only reliable way to find someone with a specific skill was to ask around. Which worked fine until the one person who knew everyone went on holiday, changed role, or left.
The answer was already happening in tea rooms
The volunteer coordinators who actually knew what their people could do didn't use any system. They just talked to them.
A cup of tea and "So what did you do before you started volunteering here?" would turn into "Oh you were a bookkeeper? We've been struggling with our Gift Aid claims for months."
Those conversations changed everything. But one coordinator can know fifty people. A charity with two hundred volunteers across multiple sites? The knowledge just evaporated.
So we built an AI that could have that conversation with every single volunteer. Not a survey. A genuine conversation that follows up, probes, and captures the detail that matters.
What do you do outside of volunteering?
I'm a freelance content creator. I run Instagram and TikTok for a couple of small businesses, and I do a bit of photography on the side.
That's brilliant. What tools do you use – Canva, CapCut, anything like that?
Canva, CapCut, Premiere Pro, Lightroom. I also know Mailchimp really well – I set up email campaigns for a local bakery that doubled their repeat orders...
Skills captured automatically from conversation
Per-tenant encryption. Your data, your key.
Built, hosted, and supported in Britain.
No VC funding. No exit plan. Just building.
Frontline to boardroom. All skills matter.
My background is in building secure systems for organisations where data really matters. I've spent years working with police forces – in the UK and internationally – local government, and public sector bodies, building platforms that handle sensitive information and have to work properly from day one. That's the world I come from.
When AI started becoming genuinely useful – not the hype, the actual technology – I kept thinking about where it could do real good. Not chatbots on websites. Not generating marketing copy (ironic as I used AI to help me write this). Something that would make a tangible difference to how organisations work.
The answer came from a charity I was helping. They had incredible people volunteering for them, but no way of knowing what those people could really do. A volunteer with a graphic design degree was making teas. Someone with ten years of social media experience was folding clothes. Not because they didn't want to help more, but because nobody had ever asked.
"Does anyone know how to use Canva? We need a poster by Friday."
"Our social media hasn't been updated in weeks – is there anyone who could help?"
"We need photos for the annual report. Does anyone here own a decent camera?"
That's where AI comes into its own. Not replacing people, but having the conversation that surfaces what they can do – at a scale that no coordinator or manager could ever manage alone. And because of my background in secure systems, I could build it the right way: encrypted, isolated, GDPR-compliant, the kind of data handling I'd expect from a policing system applied to workforce skills.
SkillDrill is the result. It combines the thing I know best – secure, production-grade software – with the thing AI does best: having genuine, adaptive conversations that draw out information people didn't even think to share, in an ethical way.
If any of this resonates, I'd genuinely like to hear from you. No pitch – just a conversation about whether this could help.
See SkillDrill in action
Try a live AI skills conversation and search across real workforce data. No signup needed.