Why do charities need IT help?

I'm sitting on a train, traveling to Manchester, reflecting on what I do. I spend my time split between two roles at the same company. I work with young people, teaching them IT, and ensuring they have the knowledge necessary to be outstanding IT consultants. My other role is why I'm traveling today. I'm on my way to visit a company that's expanding. They're based in Manchester and have just opened an office in Liverpool, with plans to open a few more around the country. There are a few challenges inherent in expansion, and the one I'm concerned with is IT.
I work with charities. Charities work with the vulnerable and the needy. They're started by people with passion, and a burning drive to do something good. They're rarely started by people who understand IT, let alone how IT can facilitate or inhibit organisational growth, change, and improvement. That's where I come in. My role is to help charities understand what IT means. Not necessarily in the day-to-day infrastructure sense of the word (servers, support, etc), but in the sense of IT being a fundamental part of how the organisation works. Like fundraising, management, or finance, organisations can run without IT for only so long before they become unwieldy. This is what I thought when I first started working with charities - that if I could help them understand IT, things would all work out.
It turns out, I was wrong. My role as originally envisaged doesn't work. If the focus remains on IT, then there is rarely any openness to the idea that what needs to change is how the organisation thinks (about IT, about systems, about itself). What does seem to work is going through a process, which is the same between charities but which plays out in very different ways, of mutual learning and growth. Through my understanding of IT, systems, and management, and their understanding of how their organisations work, we learn how to make changes, and test them, in ways that ensure the continual improvement of the charity, long after I'm gone.
The end result of successful consulting, is not a delivered project, or a report, but a changed system, where it seems obvious that the new way is an improvement, and nobody is interested, or capable, of going back to the way things were before. IT plays a part in this story, but it's not the hero. The hero is the charity. And like any hero, each charity goes through its own hero's quest, first encountering challenges, and then slowly learning how to overcome them, until at some point, it looks back and is astounded by how far it's come, and how much better things are now than they were.