Our Impact

Our most intensive services are management consultancy and mentoring. We started 343 new consultancy projects in the year, and 139 new mentoring assignments. In total, we had 904 active consultancy and mentoring projects in progress in the year, including those which carried over from the previous financial year.

We are very conscious that the charities and other non-profits that work with us are dealing with many challenges – funding, high demand, staffing issues - and greater uncertainty about the future. This has led to a high number of enquiries during the year, with charity leaders seeking support as they manage greater complexity with limited organisation capacity.

The year has also been characterised by complex support needs in our charity clients, and a high proportion of client charities turning to us for ongoing support. Many of the charities we supported in the year have worked with us over the past two to three years, drawing on different types of support to address challenges and to continue to develop their organisations. Our Journey to Excellence (J2E) impact framework acts as a diagnostic which helps to understand each organisation’s need for support, and prioritise services delivered, and we are delighted that, through our range of services, we are able to help charity clients in different ways.

We are proud that so many charities establish a strong relationship of trust and work with us over extended periods, investing in organisation development. We recognise their commitment through our Journey to Excellence badge.

In the last year, we started to explore the data generated by J2E in more detail, and published a report on five years of J2E data (see p26). The report identified a number of key issues for charities, with succession planning consistently the lowest rated issue over the whole five years, in terms of organisations’ confidence. To address this, we are introducing services specifically geared to emerging leaders, to support succession and help the next generation of sector Chief Executives prepare to take on leadership roles. We have high demand for our services from emerging leaders, and expect this to be a substantial strand of our work going forward.

The last 12 months have been a period of change for Cranfield Trust: we have said goodbye to colleagues who have made substantial contributions to the Trust’s work and development, and welcomed new colleagues to our team. At the end of our financial year, we were delighted to welcome our new Chief Executive, Dan Francis, taking over from Amanda Tincknell, retiring after more than 25 years in the role.

With all the challenges that voluntary organisations and their leaders face, we are proud that Cranfield Trust volunteers and staff have received highly positive feedback in the last year. We are very grateful to everyone who makes our service possible – our volunteers, donors and funders, supporters and our staff and trustees.

We would like to thank Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal, Patron of Cranfield Trust, for her ongoing support and encouragement, and for enabling us to hold an event (‘Championing small charities: our national asset’) in her presence in early 2025. We are especially grateful to the organisations we serve, which provide vital services across the UK. They trust us to work with them, helping them to address critical social issues.

It is a pleasure to present Cranfield Trust’s impact report, we hope that you enjoy reading about our work, and the stories of some of the great charities we’ve been privileged to work with in our 2024-25 year.