Project Type: Staff Optimisation
Location: London
Queens Award For HIV Charity Following Cranfield Trust Intervention.
Support from Cranfield Trust volunteer Michael Lofthouse has enabled Positive East’s volunteer programme to be embedded and ensured national recognition for their services.
Positive East is London’s leading community-based HIV charity, delivering practical and emotional support for people living with and affected by HIV in east London. Working in partnership with other HIV organisations, Positive East has between 1500 and 1750 clients receiving support during the year, provided by 30 staff and between 70-100 volunteers.
Volunteer Programme
Some years ago the charity determined to involve service users, working as volunteers, in the delivery of services in order to increase the service user base capability and encourage independence. Additionally, with the ongoing increase in demand and the continued threat of funding cuts, it became apparent that its ability to deliver quality services was becoming increasingly reliant on the use of a larger number of volunteers. It was therefore agreed that a robust and structured volunteer programme should be put in place. Following substantial investment in process, documentation and monitoring, it was expected that numbers would more than double from the current level. Finance Director Alastair Thomson led the restructuring but recognised that Positive East would benefit from external support in validating work done, as well as in reforming and updating the management of the volunteer process.
Roger Watkins, London Project Manager with The Cranfield Trust, worked with Alastair to compile a realistic brief, before matching him with Michael Lofthouse, a longstanding volunteer for the Trust.
As Alastair says: “Michael was exactly what was required in that he listened and looked at what we are trying to do and came up with the rebalancing that was required to get the volunteer programme firmly embedded within the organisation.”Furthermore, Alastair was keen for Michael to advise him on the level of paid resource the charity would need to maintain the volunteer programme effectively but at optimal cost, considering too the workloads of the volunteer central function. Michael therefore helped the charity to implement a monthly review of their key performance indicators around cost per area in order to measure progress against targets.
All those involved in the project were delighted when Positive East subsequently won a Queens Award for Voluntary Service in 2014.
Summing up his work with The Cranfield Trust, Alistair said: “Please make sure you tell your colleagues that they run an excellent service. There are a number of organisations out there offering similar professional advice but I can honestly state that I have not met one like Cranfield for overall excellence and comfort to work with. Your ethos is marvellous. And we got a Queens Award for Volunteering thanks to the support that Cranfield gave.”
Doncaster Housing
A new business strategy and annual delivery plan has been a critical piece of work to enable Doncaster Housing for Young People to re-tender for current and any future contracts.
Doncaster Housing for Young People was established as a charity in 1993 to provide housing intervention and support for young homeless or potentially homeless people for whom there were no clear structures of support or statutory responsibilities
Since 1993 there have been many changes in the provision for young people, but DHYP's aims and values remain unchanged. They are in brief: to provide a holistic support service for the young person determined by a professional assessment of their needs; subsequent interventions based on enabling the young person to break the cycle of disadvantage and vulnerability and to develop a more positive and independent future that benefits not only themselves but also the wider community.
DHYP originally started with one service, Supported Lodgings, and over the years has grown and developed into five core services to meet the changing needs of the young people it works with. The charity provides housing intervention and support for young homeless or potentially homeless people for whom there were no clear structures of support or statutory responsibilities. Clients are young people aged 16-25 years who reside within Doncaster Metropolitan Borough or who are moving to the Doncaster Borough.
Michelle Kielty, DHYP’s Operations Manager, identified the organisational need for robust strategic / business planning. Whilst there was a business plan in place, it didn’t feel fit for purpose and needed to be more functional. The charity also required a procedure for reviewing progress against any developed plans. Volunteer consultant Paul Davy from The Cranfield Trust was approached to help Michelle and her team. Paul’s extensive experience within Children’s Social Care as a Social Worker, Operational Manager, Strategic Manager and Performance Manager proved extremely valuable:
“Paul was extremely helpful, insightful and knowledgeable. He has supported us with producing a three year business strategy and an annual delivery plan that is a working tool for all levels of the organisation and external stakeholders and potential funders.” Michelle Kielty, Operations Manager Doncaster Housing for Young People
Paul provided guidance on the breakdown of the business plan to cover:
Immediate issues requiring action
Planned action and proposed outcomes
Future aims/goals and moves towards the vision
Monitoring, evaluation and monthly reporting against the plan
Strategy communication plan
Paul immersed himself into the organisation, attending meetings, making calls and carrying out research on the charity’s behalf. He facilitated the Annual Planning day and supported a business strategy working party with the Board of Trustees.
Paul found working with Michelle, her staff and the Board an inspiring experience.
“I was impressed by their dedication, insight, ideas and openness to a stranger – me – coming in to the organisation and were very accepting of my suggestions and support. They were clear about the direction they wanted to take. Our relationship was much more about my facilitating and helping them getting over what they do and where they wanted to take the organisation, to a wider audience including potential funders.”
DHYP’s new business strategy and annual delivery plan is a critical piece of work to enable the organisation to re-tender for current and any future contracts. This piece of work has also enabled the organisation to identify gaps in current provision for young people and target future funding applications to address those gaps.
Parkinson’s UK
Cranfield Trust volunteer, Caroline Roberts, shares her personal experience of volunteering with Parkinson's UK to help develop their support provision.
The project
The project’s aim was to develop recommendations on how Parkinson’s UK can best develop its support provision in order to become equally effective in supporting carers of people with Parkinson’s, as it is in supporting people with Parkinson’s. This involved building on previous groundwork in identifying carers’ needs, analysing all the organisation’s processes and support services including the volunteer network, conducting research with focus groups, and synthesising the findings down to identify recommendations that would be practically achievable within the organisation’s structure, and would have real impact. The project ran for approximately 11 months from February to December 2016. A project manager was assigned to this project to work 2 days per week.
My role
My role was to support the project manager in developing the project approach and delivery plan, including developing the project mandate and documentation, and establishing a cross organisational steering team. The latter was particularly important given the crucial need for cross organisational buy in, in order that the recommendations could be accepted. Having supported the establishment of the project management framework and formal initiation, I then supported the project manager as a mentor, sounding board, an additional pair of hands, and helped to maintain momentum and ensure the project achieved its objectives.
The project was challenging because of the need to achieve truly effective engagement across the entire organisation. Early on in the project it became clear that supporting carers was not something that could be bolted on to Parkinson’s existing functions and support programmes, but should be integrated into everything that the organisation does. Thinking about how the organisation supports carers needs to be embedded throughout the organisation and to become as fundamental to the DNA as thinking about people with Parkinson’s. Cross organisational appreciation of this was essential in order to ensure the project’s recommendations could be accepted and adopted. From my experience of leading many strategic projects spanning many different policy areas across government, regulators and not for profit organisations, I was able to add particular support to the project manager with this aspect of the challenge.
How we worked together
Parkinson’s UK largely operates with a virtual office, with staff working from home across all regions of the UK. Three of us – Nicole (project manager), Laura (Nicole’s manager for this project) and I established a pattern of weekly telephone conferences, and project steering committee meetings once every two months, at which we reported on developments and agreed the next stages of the project. Ahead of each call or meeting, I provided oversight support to Nicole with the drafting of papers, plans and recommendations. We followed up with a discussion about how to take the work forward.
The outcome
The outcome of the project was a presentation by Nicole to Parkinson’s UK’s Theme Team steering committee in December 2016 with a set of recommendations to be adopted – recommendations ranging from changing the terminology used to refer to carers to be more inclusive, adapting all of Parkinson’s client support provisions to ensure there is a carer focus, and establishing a permanent dedicated resource to overseeing delivery of the recommendations. The recommendations were all approved by the steering committee, and the Nicole received a round of applause for her work, which is far from normal in such meetings. 3 months later, the appointment of a new member of staff to deliver the recommendations is underway, and some of the more urgent and straightforward recommendations such as revising the organisation’s website, are already in hand. On this basis, I would regard this challenging project as having delivered real success.
How my involvement helped the project’s success
Particular skills and experience were:
Considerable experience of major, cross organisational, complex projects where stakeholder buy in is essential
Project management expertise, to mentor and support the project manager in structuring the project to develop and maintain momentum
Dedicated time to provide assistance and mentoring support to the project manager throughout the project
External insight, to add fresh thought and draw on external experience.
With special thanks to Caroline Roberts, for sharing her personal experience of volunteering with the Cranfield Trust.
If you are interested in learning more about the latest research into ways to help those suffering with Parkinson's Disease, you can find out more here.
Reach Out
Type: Marketing
Region: Scotland
Background
Reach Out was established in 1996 by parents and carers of adults with learning disabilities. They now have three social enterprises in Moray, each providing a valuable space for vulnerable adults to gain training and work experience and which promote a greater understanding of vulnerable adults needs.
The need/challenge/Issue
In order to keep providing placements for adults with learning difficulties, Moray Reach Out needed to increase income generation for their social enterprises. General and Business Development Manager for Moray Reach Out, Shona Radojkovic, was keen to ensure they were sustainable and less reliant on public service for income. She recognised that they could achieve this by diversifying their customer base and turned to the Cranfield Trust to support their ambition and provide mentoring support to their Graduate Trainee.
Moray Reach Our had a number of targets, including developing a marketing plan, increasing website hits, developing a blog, increasing social media engagement and identifying new commercial customers.
How we helped/Solution
Shona was matched with Cranfield Trust Volunteer Consultant, German Cancino, an expert in marketing with a wealth of commercial sector experience. Together they worked on a project brief, to help guide their journey and establish clear outcomes for both their strategy and marketing. It was decided that the first step was to have an operational review, which supported the development of a business plan, and marketing plan. Along the way, German provided mentoring to Moray Reach Out’s Graduate Trainee, Shona commented how helpful this had been, “The advice we received through meeting German was inspirational to me and our Graduate trainee and simplified things for us.”
the project, German helped to clarify and define what the Moray Reach Out did as part of a re-brand. Shona found the process very useful, saying, “I always found it difficult to sum up what we do, as we offer so many different training opportunities to vulnerable people. German summed it up nicely by saying what we were about was 'empowerment'. It was like a light bulb went on. That's exactly what we do and now our strapline is 'Empowering Lives' and it's so easy to describe it”.
Shona continued, “As German so rightly put it from the start, we were a team and together we would achieve the new marketing message. German became part of that team to bounce our ideas off.”
Impact and Outcomes
German worked with Shona and the Moray Reach Out team for 12 months. During that time a number of changes were made, both in defining the organisations overall strategy and having a joined-up approach to their marketing efforts. Shona is very pleased with the outcomes, commenting, “The changes can clearly been seen in all of our marketing materials, our Facebook page and our website. Our website traffic has increased, our trainees love the new logo and we feel much more connected as a team.”
Shona found German’s support invaluable, summing up her overall experience of working with the Cranfield Trust by saying, “I think that German's input, and thanks to the Cranfield Trust, had a ripple effect on the organisation. With that one word 'empowerment', we were soon creating waves! Sometimes that's all it takes, someone with the relevant experience and external to your organisation coming in and having a look, listening, understanding what you are about and then looking to see if your website and marketing materials actually get that across.”
You can find out more about Moray Reach Out's work by visiting: www.morayreachout.org.uk
Omega
Type: Strategy
Location: Midlands
Omega was awarded £125,000 worth of grants following a management consultancy project with the Cranfield Trust.
Background
Omega is the National Association for End of Life Care that works across the West Midlands and the surrounding area to raise standards in end of life care, health, and social care. Omega's network of talented volunteers engage with people who urgently need extra help and offer them access to supportive opportunities, information and a range of non-clinical support.
The Issue
Omega’s Development Director, Tom Memery was always keen to improve the charity’s productivity and sustainability. The charity had previously been awarded a grant from Lloyds Bank Foundation for England & Wales to fund its work with carers. With the grant, the Foundation offers additional organisational development support to all its grantees through its Enhance programme. This provides charities access to free, impartial and tailored business support relevant to their individual needs.
Tom and his Foundation Grant Manager discussed the specific challenges Omega faced including challenging the existing business plan, developing a robust framework to help them address priorities and desire to improve how Omega measured and reported the value of the services they provide.
Under the Enhance programme, Lloyds Bank Foundation will match charities to relevant consultants and suppliers and pay for them to support charities. The Foundation felt Cranfield Trust, would be best placed to support Omega because of the range of different business disciplines and skills support they can offer and their track record in delivering great results for charities.
One of the key elements Cranfield prides itself on is matching a charity with the right volunteer consultant. Tom was clear when he first met Cranfield that he wanted more than just help writing a new business plan and producing a reporting system, he wanted to be challenged.
“Cranfield was responsive from the start; they took time to carefully match us with Mark, a volunteer consultant with exactly the skills and experience we needed”.
Any reservations Tom may have had about taking on a management consultancy project dissolved instantly when he met Mark.The solution
Working with Omega was Mark’s first volunteer assignment with the Cranfield Trust. Having taken early retirement in 2009, Mark wanted to share his professional skills and experience to benefit the voluntary sector, “When I retired I wanted to do something truly valuable. Initially I found it difficult to engage with charities needing professional business support but when I found the Cranfield Trust, I had a way in with a trusted brand”.Mark had enjoyed a long career as a Project and Programme Manager, working on everything from multi-million pound IT projects to finance systems and manufacturing. He was used to developing and adapting methodologies to fit, so was used to challenging processes, a perfect match for Omega.
Having produced a business plan template for Tom to follow, Mark stayed in regular contact and over the course of several months, Tom and Mark met, exchanged emails and phone calls, going back and forwards until they were able to produce the ideal business plan and reporting system for Omega. The project was not all plain sailing. A capacity issue at Omega caused the project to stall, Tom recalls, “At one point I didn’t have the time to devote to the project Mark was very patient and understood the situation we were in, so I didn’t feel under pressure.”
The outcome
After things settled down, the project resumed and went on to produce a dynamic business plan and reporting system, which is being rolled out to individual projects. Omega emerged from the process, stronger and more confident about the future. The charity is no longer reliant on statutory funding and Tom attributes this success to the support provided by Cranfield Trust and Mark, saying, “Without the help of the Cranfield Trust, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Since the project finished, we have secured £87,000 from the Henry Smith Foundation, and Lloyds Bank Foundation extended our grant for a further £38,000. Our funding applications have an enviable 52% success rate. We have expanded our flagship services ‘Omega Bereavement Support and Chatterbox Action Against Loneliness Programmes and are in the process of recruiting a Director of Operations to support our valuable services. It was a worthwhile experience which has had a big impact on Omega.”
Mark’s first project experience was also positive, he took a pragmatic approach, saying, “I was completely flexible and the whole project took less than 10 days of my time, it was just spread over several months, to fit in with Tom’s schedule”.
With kind thanks to Tom from Omega and our volunteer consultant Mark for their contributions to this case study.
Richmond Carers Centre
Background
Richmond Carers Centre (RCC) was established in 2002. RCC works with unpaid carers of any age living and caring in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. They provide a range of services to adult, young adults and young carers. Including advice, informal emotional support, mentoring, leisure and social activities, wellbeing services such as counselling and complimentary therapies, as well as training and learning opportunities.
Issue
RCC has worked with Cranfield Trust before; benefiting from the specialised business expertise in communication planning, mentoring and governance we provide. In September 2018, RCC completed a project reviewing their internal & external communications planning.
“This work has influenced a culture change which has been successfully adopted. There needed to be an internal culture change, ensuring the charity’s brand is consistently communicated externally.” - Melissa Wilks, CEO
Following this piece of work Cranfield Trust’s Project Manager and Melissa Wilks CEO jointly identified a need to improve governance/organisational risk management processes. There was a recognised need for the board of trustees to identify and respond to the most impactful risks, enabling them to manage the charity at a strategic level. The current risk management needed to highlight the key risks. It needed to be relevant to Trustees, enabling them to actively manage the real business risks and integrate this risk management into governance discussions and day to day operational activity.
Solution
Melissa had an intense, one-off session with a Cranfield Trust volunteer. They worked through ideas to change the approach and organisational, in particular the Trustee’s, mind-set to assessing risk. The process was simplified and Melissa was upskilled and felt
empowered to lead the process herself.
“I felt much clearer about a way forward and felt very comfortable talking to the board about proposing a shift in our approach, getting their ownership, and integrating risk and solutions into our operational practice” - Melissa Wilks, CEO
Impact
RCC gained tools to support the board to change its approach. This led to ensuring the identification and reduction of risk was fit for purpose within the organisation. Creating a much simpler and integrated approach to risk management has ensured organisational health and ultimately the longevity of the organisation.
The trustees agreed a new risk assessment process. As a group, including staff, the top 5
organisational risks have been identified, together with actions to manage, control and reduce that risk. An assessment of impact and probability also integrated into discussion around risk. A process of deep diving into each risk at board meetings has also been implemented. The first of these discussions is scheduled for January 2019.
‘Change has happened and trustees feel ownership of it.’ - Melissa Wilks, CEO
"The key to this project was to Keep It Simple and intuitive and not become a slave to process. This meant valuable saved time could be spent on actually mitigating the key risks rather than defining them in any more detail" - Peter Whiting, Cranfield Volunteer Consultant.
Caxton Youth
Working with the Cranfield Trust has enabled Caxton Youth Organisation to plan its future with a management team and board who are more effective, realistic and decisive.
Background
Established in 1948, Caxton Youth is a local charity working to advance the personal development of young people with multiple disabilities living in the City of Westminster. They tackle disadvantages including prejudice, exclusion, lack of employment or workplace skills, poor social skills, and high dependence. Their four main programmes focus on communication, independence, opportunities, and health and personal care.
The need
With a change of Chairperson on the horizon, Caxton Youth Organisation decided it was a good time review board policy and practice, implement improvement strategies and strengthen their management committee. As a small charity with an income under £150,000, only 3 full-time members of staff and 3 trustees, the board was keen to draw on the advice and guidance of the Cranfield Trust to improve their governance and sustainability.
How we helped
From early conversations with Caxton Youth Organisation's trustee board and CEO, it was agreed that that having a Board and Management Committee improvement programme in place was crucial. Volunteer consultant, Stephen Cowburn, was on hand to mentor and guide CEO, Rachel Akehurst, every step of the way. With a strong background in line-management and developing individuals and teams in the commercial sector, Stephen worked with Rachel to make sure every aspect of the charity's governance and leadership were explored. Once areas for improvement were identified, a plan of action was put in place, which Rachel, her team, and trustees was able to put into practice.
The charity's young service users are already benefitting from a new approach to meetings, as CEO, Rachel Akehurst explains, "Previously, Young People's Representatives came along to Board Meetings, which were referred to as Management Committee meetings prior to this project, where they had to sit through an agenda that wasn't of much interest to them. They now attend Operational Meetings instead, which didn't exist prior to the project, where every agenda item directly effects them. It's a much more effective way of working, and a far better use of everyone's time."
Impact and Outcomes
Since completing the project trustees are clearer about their individual roles, board meetings are more focused on strategic matters, rather than replicating operational meetings and new systems and procedures bring have increased confidence when making funding applications.
"The project achieved more than it originally set out to, including a rewrite of the organisation's governing document. Stephen supported us to formally recruit two new trustees, review board meetings and create an agenda that encourages us to think strategically rather than operationally. We now have improved leadership, improved structures and a more strategically-focused Board of Trustees. Caxton Youth Organisation is better prepared for the future as a result of the project with The Cranfield Trust." Rachel Akehust, CEO
Caxton Youth Organisation now feels stronger and more prepared to take advantage of opportunities and deal with the everyday, and strategic challenges they may face.
