Small charities must adapt to survive and thrive

I love small charities. They make up the overwhelming majority of the sector and are crucial for democracy, embodying all that we as individuals with in a liberal society hold dear. Without intentionally sounding glib, they give a voice to those who would otherwise be left to suffer in silence.

This week is Small Charity Week organised by the Foundation of Social Improvement who for its launch, released a piece of research, the UK Small Charity Skills Survey. The research clearly showed that, for a number of reasons, small charities are not able to take advantage of the skills and experience of businesses or benefit from business volunteers, because they fail to connect with businesses.

The poorest skills performing ratings were given to lobbying, utilising social media, structuring communications, and latest HR laws and practices, in that order.

To address these gaps, the most popular actions were using training from voluntary sector umbrella and infrastructure bodies (43%), providing further training provision (42%) and using volunteers (41%).

Of course, this is all well and good and I'm all for these. But there was one key find that we have to address: 4 in 10 people in the survey saying that connecting with a business and using their skills and experience would benefit their organisation and help fill relevant skills gaps, but only 17% of respondents said that their organisation is using this as a resource – that’s a disparity of 44%.

This becomes more vital when you consider that the number of respondents who cite an inability to take on new work, and no room to develop services, is growing; now at 43% from 39% and 40% from 37% respectively, since the 2012/13 survey.

Moreover, the skills gaps identified in this survey are impacting on the workloads of employees. 61% reported an increase in workload across their organisations and 51% said delivery time for work had also increased. Terrible news for small charities and even worse news for beneficiaries.

This is where connecting with business and bringing in skilled volunteers pays dividends for charities.

In the main, charities are using business volunteers as trustees which comes with a number of benefits not least the strategic experience of many of these individuals – and happily we can say that this has been a growth area between the two sectors in recent years. But skilled volunteers working in the body of the charity on time limited projects for instance has seen far tardier growth. 

Skilled volunteers from businesses can have the Midas touch, transforming a small charity by injecting expertise into an organisation based on the requisite needs. And based on the increased workloads reported by the staff, more people working with them swill relieve pressure allowing them to focus on the key areas of their roles with greater effectiveness.

The top three reasons given as barriers to taking advantage of business volunteers were: time and resource (54%), uncertainty about the best way to approach businesses (46%) and no business contacts (35%). As a result, small charities are missing out on millions of pounds worth of fundraising potential through connecting with businesses as well as the capital value output of each skilled business volunteer.

I don’t recommend charities just go head first, launching themselves at businesses. Getting it right with business volunteers requires clear goals, planning, and a robust method for reporting and measuring value. This will all help extract the maximum out of corporate/business skilled volunteers and help you continually learn and improve.

We are lucky enough to work with corporates like British Land and Legal & General, who understand the reciprocal benefits of skilled volunteering for their employees from both the CSR and HR perspectives. And that's just it, CSR isn’t just seen as something that is done on the side, but in many organisations it becomes more embedded into business practices and HR policies – companies are increasingly concerned with living and breathing their values.

Small charities must adapt and make the most of businesses skills and expertise, which they have already recognised can be of major benefit to address their skills gaps. By failing to adapt and take this new challenge on, they risk not being able to help as many beneficiaries as need their services by growing too slowly or not at all.