Technical & digital consultancy for charities and NGOs.
Carbon accounting, from coalface to spreadsheet. Digital systems, set up and sorted. Websites that don't cost the earth. Carbon data tools and usage. Project management. Grant writing. AI without the hype. Local to North London. One consultant. No seven-and-a-half-million-year wait.
The carbon transition has created a significant demand for a type of consultant that does not, in any practical sense, exist: someone who understands both the science of greenhouse gas accounting and the unglamorous reality of making a WordPress site work. Most organisations resolve this by hiring two people who do not talk to each other, or one person who is quietly baffled by half the job.
Adam Hardy is the other option. Twenty years in software engineering, followed by five years directing EcoCounts, a London-based citizen carbon reduction charity, have produced an unusual combination of capabilities. Carbon footprint methodology, or whatever the requirement you have, and the system to track it can be handled in the same conversation.
Supply chain emissions, Scope 3, your organisational carbon footprint - measuring things most organisations would prefer not to know, then working out what to do about them.
Domains, hosting, email accounts, cloud storage, backup systems, and security. The infrastructure most organisations rely on without fully understanding. Getting it in order is less exciting than it sounds and more important than it appears.
Most organisations that have made a net zero commitment do not yet have a clear path to it. This is not as surprising as it sounds. What is surprising is how straightforward the path becomes once someone sits down and draws it.
Site builds, redesigns, plugin updates, hosting migration, using free and freemium tools wherever possible. Somewhere out there is the person who built your current website. They know where their towel is. You need someone who knows where yours is.
Running carbon engagement programmes for communities, staff teams, and member organisations. Combining facilitation, data collection, and behavioural design in a way that produces actual results rather than a newsletter and a pledge. Based on three years of doing exactly this with real people in real households.
Open-source software, freemium plugins, ethical hosting, and sustainable platforms chosen for what they cost and who runs them, not for what a supplier would prefer to sell. Includes assessment of AI tools against privacy, accuracy, and energy consumption criteria. Not all cheap tools are ethical, and not all expensive ones are safe. The digital equivalent of not buying what you don't need.
Building the tools that turn raw carbon data into something an organisation can actually act on. Tracking spreadsheets, visualisation dashboards, and automated reporting templates, designed for small teams without dedicated technical resource. Data without a dashboard is just guilt in a spreadsheet.
Keeping digital projects from becoming somebody else's problem.
AI tool selection, output verification, data handling, and UK GDPR compliance in an AI-assisted workflow. Whether you find AI mostly harmless or mostly alarming, it is now embedded in enough of the tools your organisation uses that ignoring it has become its own kind of risk.
The kind of structured thinking that larger organisations take for granted - funding strategy, workplans, governance, stakeholder management - applied at a scale that actually fits. Brought to you by someone who has done it, rather than someone who has read about it.
Facilitated workshops that help teams and communities understand climate change and their role in it. Includes Climate Fresk, the evidence-based card game used by over a million people worldwide. Better than spending a year dead for tax purposes, and considerably more useful.
Many charities write compelling cases for support and then lose marks on the specification. This is fixable.
Problem
Most carbon reduction programmes generate enthusiasm but no data. EcoCounts needed a methodology for collecting consistent, comparable carbon footprint data from real households over time, and a system for storing, analysing, and reporting on it.
Approach
Designed a longitudinal data collection framework covering energy, transport, food, and consumption. Recruited and on-boarded 25 participant households across the London borough of Islington and neighbouring areas. Built the data infrastructure, managed participant engagement over three years, and produced comparative analysis showing household carbon reduction over time.
Result
Nearly three years of continuous data from 25 households, one of very few citizen-science carbon datasets of this kind in the UK. Data is being prepared for academic publication in partnership with UCL.
Problem
EcoCore CIC launched with no digital infrastructure. Email, file storage, content management, website, social media, and volunteer coordination all needed to be set up from scratch on a near-zero budget.
Approach
Scoped and implemented a full digital stack using free and freemium tools: WordPress for the public website, Nextcloud for file storage and collaboration, MediaWiki for internal documentation, Trello for project management, and Mailcow email and calendaring. Produced a content management reference guide mapping each platform to its appropriate content type.
Result
A fully functioning digital infrastructure maintained by a small volunteer team, at effectively zero recurring cost except web hosting and domain name fees via a green co-operative hosting provider. The architecture has supported the organisation through five years of growth, volunteer use, partnerships, and academic collaboration.
Problem
EcoCounts and EcoCore CIC needed a coherent long-term strategy that covered membership growth, technology development, council partnership sequencing, academic outputs, and financial sustainability across two legally distinct entities with different governance structures.
Approach
Synthesised input from a founding manifesto, an existing theory of change, and a local authority funding strategy into a four-phase 5-year roadmap. It addressed funding bridge targets, app development sequencing, academic partnership milestones, and the sponsorship and charitable income balance across the two entities.
Result
A board-approved strategic document providing a clear framework for funding applications, partnership MoUs, and operational planning across both organisations.
Problem
A CIC needed to produce a 75-page promotional document to a professional visual standard. Applying a graphic designer's template consistently across the full document in Adobe Illustrator would have been time-consuming and expensive. The document also needed to meet PDF accessibility standards, with text remaining in the correct reading order for screen readers throughout, a technical requirement involving tagging in the internal document structure.
Approach
Used Claude LLM to apply the designer's visual template consistently across the full document, working from the finished text. Human oversight was maintained at every stage, directing the process, verifying every page, and managing the accessibility compliance. The graphic designer's creative work remained intact throughout. AI assisted with implementation, not with design.
Result
A fully designed, accessibility-compliant 75-page document produced at reduced time and cost compared to the manual alternative. The client's PDF accessibility requirements were met in full, with correct reading order for screen-reader software maintained across all 75 pages.
Twenty years as a software engineer across finance and payments, including BP, UBS, and BNP Paribas. Five years as non-remunerated Director of EcoCounts, a community carbon footprint tracking charity operating across North and Central London, with UCL academic partnerships.
Featured in Islington Faces, February 2023
All consultancy outputs are human-authored and verified. AI tools are used selectively and transparently, for research assistance and drafting only, never for anything a client will rely on without independent checking.
If you have a project that needs both a spreadsheet and a conscience, get in touch.
adam.hardy@cyberspaceroad.com
From £350 per day, according to project scope and organisation size. Reduced rates available for small charities.