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A Theory of Change can be a powerful tool. It can tell the story of how the world can be a better place, what it will take to get there, and how you are going to help make it happen.  

Yet in practice they are often “nice-to-have”. An abstract academic exercise that has little impact on the day to day challenges of running a social progress organisation.

Over the years we have developed a tried and tested approach to take teams through a process to deliver a Theory of Change that is practical and useful.

This article shares four common mistakes, and four lessons learned about doing it well and making it stick.

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The Charity Commission is the regulator for charities in England and Wales. It is funded by the Treasury but independent of government.

Its purpose is:

”To ensure charity can thrive and inspire trust so that people can improve lives and strengthen society.”

It is both the registrar of charities and regulator of charities. Which means it keeps a list of all the charities and investigates the bad ones. It deals with complaints, helps trustees be good trustees and occasionally shares its opinion about “charity”.

It does all this — keeps a list of around 170,000 charities and regulates £81.2bn of charity income — on a budget of £29.3m.

So for every £1,000 of charity income in England and Wales, 36p is spent on regulation by the Charity Commission.

As the tenure of the current Chair comes to an end, others have written thoughtful articles about the skills the incoming Chair should have. However, the problem goes deeper than the person at the top and has for some time.

It may be time to abolish the Charity Commision.

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We recently wrote about the death of fundraising and the threat to traditional ideas of charity as people embed ideas of impact and purpose into every aspect of their lives.

As with other long-term trends, this accelerated during the pandemic. Everything has become fluid. Governments have made unprecedented interventions and businesses are getting serious about their social purpose. Charities in the UK have asked for (and mostly not got) additional support. 

This raises some big questions. What is the proper role and relationship between the state and charities? Between business and charity? What can these sectors learn from each other? What’s the role for the voluntary sector if more and more “non-charities” are moving into this space? What’s the difference between a charity that earns some of its income and a business with a social purpose? Does it even matter?

Importantly – and practically – should charities stay in their lane when no-one else is?

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(originally published at www.firetail.co.uk)

• Scenario planning is a strategic tool designed to help organisations prepare for a range of possible futures. It is not about predicting the future. Fundamentally, it is about accommodating uncertainty.
• The obvious temptation is to wait for the ‘next normal’ to emerge before thinking about the future. But what if you’re waiting for the dust to settle – and it never does?
• Thinking about the future should reveal the work you need to do in the present.

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Even before the pandemic, traditional charity fundraising was stagnating.

The pandemic has turned a conversation about the challenges of long-term decline into one about short-term collapse. 

Thinking about “fundraising” in a silo misses an important bigger picture.

When it comes to fundraising income, charities do not compete with other charities. They compete with everything else a person might be trying to do to lead a meaningful life.

There is a big prize here. Charities need to think urgently about this wider framing, especially in the face of the current crisis

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[This is based on a quick twitter thread we published]

“We’re out of the whack-a-mole phase” according to one CEO I spoke to this week.

As organisations move beyond the day-to-day crisis mode of the last few weeks, they are starting to turn to longer term questions.

The tools you use to make decisions in the first phase of a crisis are different to the ones you need to plan for the future. Crisis planning tends to be inward-looking. Longer-term thinking must be outward-looking.

This needs a different set of questions and a different set of tools.

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This article is the third in a series on making strategy in social progress organisations. 

It explores three recurring themes in our conversations with our clients – about participation, platforms and power – and draws five practical implications for people trying to make an impact in the world. 

Our first article in this series argued that the traditional model of “doing strategy” isn’t working for most charities and social progress organisations. The challenge facing these groups is to move from “strategic planning” to “strategic thinking”. 

But as our second article argued, this is really hard in practice. 

In the summer, we brought twelve senior charity executives together over breakfast. They shared their thoughts about strategy, the real choices they were facing in their roles and some of the new approaches they were taking to “making strategy”.

This article tries to put some of those challenges in context. 

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