Being an advocate for Cranfield Trust
As a volunteer, connecting with thousands of charities across England, Wales and Scotland on behalf of Cranfield Trust every year, you play an incredibly important role in representing us and the services we provide. Along with our Project Managers, you are often the main touch point and link with the charities we support and therefore also naturally hold a role as an advocate too.
At times we may ask you to formally represent Cranfield Trust and tap into your expertise by asking you to speak at conferences or local engagement events. Projects Managers will get in contact if any of these opportunities arise to see if you would be interested and available. Please do also let us know if you are approached to speak about Cranfield Trust and we can support you with materials and guidance.
Below is the narrative we use to describe Cranfield Trust and our services, to help guide in sharing information about the Trust.
Describing Cranfield Trust
The information below is how we talk about Cranfield Trust and helps to consistently explain who we are and what we do. This is useful for you as a volunteer and also useful for you to share with the charities you are working with and supporting.
Our 'Elevator Pitch'
Cranfield Trust is a national charity which aims to ensure that social welfare charities and not for profit organisations have the skills and support they need to manage themselves and deliver effectively for their beneficiaries.
We are a leading management support organisation for social welfare charities and not-for-profits. We deliver consultancy, mentoring, training, peer support, advice and resources to thousands of charities every year.
We deliver our support through a UK-wide network of volunteers, who are highly skilled in a broad range of management and business disciplines, and our staff team of project managers and coordinators based throughout England, Wales and Scotland.
In one sentence
Cranfield Trust is a national charity that helps welfare organisations to be successful and thrive by providing free management support, services and advice.
In three sentences
Cranfield Trust is a national charity that delivers free management support, training, advice and mentoring to thousands of human welfare organisations every year.
We match skilled volunteers with local charities to provide tailored, high-quality support.
We are a leading provider of support to the sector, strengthening and empowering welfare organisations with the capabilities and confidence to thrive and change lives.
Describing the support and services we offer
Our core services and support are delivered in three key areas and below is how we describe them:
Support for Organisations
Management Consultancy: Pro bono consultancy offers charities free intensive, tailored, 1:1 support to address critical organisational challenges and development. Each project is tailored to the needs of the individual client charity. Our Project Manager meets with charities to help scope their business needs. We assess organisations’ development needs at the start and end of each assignment using our Journey to Excellence impact assessment framework.
On Call: Our On Call service is a telephone advice service that offers voluntary sector
leaders an opportunity to book a call with an expert and talk over a particular challenge, gaining helpful short-term advice without a full consultancy project.
Support for Leaders
Mentoring: Mentoring enables leaders to discuss a range of issues, rather than focusing on particular business challenge or project.
Cranfield Trust has developed its own Mentoring framework for the voluntary sector in partnership with a leading Mentoring practitioner, Professor David Clutterbuck. We train
our volunteers as mentors and match them with charity leaders and
managers. Mentoring assignments typically last 6-8 months but many volunteers remain in touch with mentees after the formal assignment finishes.
Peer to Peer Exchange (P2P) has been developed specifically to meet the needs of voluntary sector leaders in smaller organisations. Our trained volunteer facilitators support groups of 6 to 8 leaders over four fortnightly sessions lasting up to 90
minutes. This enables them to explore issues and challenges in a safe and confidential environment and addresses the isolating nature of leadership roles, helping to develop a sense of resilience within the individual leader, the group and by default the sector.
‘Open Access’ support
Learning events and webinars: Cranfield Trust runs a programme of webinars on management topics, which are available to charity delegates anywhere in the UK. Since 2020, we have established two popular series of online training events:
Essentials to Excellence – covering key management topics and business areas
Learning with Leaders – fresh thinking and new views from leading practitioners and management academics
Our live webinars are available to view again in our online webinar library. We do not cover voluntary sector specific topics in our webinar series.
Information: we offer charities a range of useful information and resources via our website
Describing your Volunteer Role at Cranfield Trust
If you want to feature your volunteering experience at Cranfield Trust on your LinkedIn profile or CV, here's some example wording you can use:
Management Consultancy
I’m delighted to be volunteering for Cranfield Trust as volunteer management consultant providing pro bono advice and support to social welfare charities across the UK in areas such as business planning, financial planning.
Mentoring
I’m delighted to be volunteering for Cranfield Trust as volunteer mentor providing free mentorship support to charity leaders and managers of social welfare charities across the UK.
Peer to Peer Exchange
I’m delighted to be volunteering for Cranfield Trust, facilitating Peer to Peer exchange sessions between leaders of charities in the UK, guiding their conversations, encouraging discussion, problem solving and helping them to get the most out of their interactions with each other.
On Call
I’m delighted to be volunteering for Cranfield Trust, providing On Call support to social welfare charities across the UK, answering their crucial questions around issues they are facing such as the cost of living crisis or specific management concerns.
You can then include some detail about who we are, for example:
Cranfield Trust is a national charity which aims to ensure that social welfare charities and not for profit organisations have the skills and support they need to manage themselves and deliver effectively for their beneficiaries. They support thousands of charities every year through their free management consultancy and mentoring services.
You can find more information on how to describe us above.