Unicef has been seeking out ways to make the organisation as efficient as possible in the recession, calling on IT support to provide it with a customer relationship management (CRM) service, it has been revealed.

Head of IT for the UK at the worldwide children's charity Phil Durbin told Computing that it needed a system which was able to play to the demands of the donor and allow Unicef to process donations without any chance of excess waste in doing so.

"Both sectors want our IT architecture to help us go that extra mile," he said, referring to the charity and commercial aspects of business which work in tandem with the organisation.

He continued: "The bottom line is to ensure the architecture is robust, reliable and agile enough to enable Unicef UK to respond to changing business needs on relatively shoestring budgets."

Unicef is regulated by the United Nations General Assembly and is committed to "ensuring special protection for the most disadvantaged children" including victims of disasters, wars, extreme poverty, violence, exploitation and those with disabilities.

In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were guaranteed response times and allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues.