We support across the sector - online learning
Our free webinars have continued to provide popular development opportunities for charities during the year.
Webinars
Focussed on topical and developing areas of interest, we have two webinar strands: ‘Learning with Leaders’, which provides fresh thinking and original insight from academics and leading practitioners, and ‘Essentials to Excellence’ which focuses on practical skills development and knowledge sharing on key charity management topics.
“Thank you to Cranfield Trust for the care and expertise you offer the charity sector. I am learning so much - these webinars help us to feel less isolated and more supported and bolstered in our leadership and executive roles.”
During the year, we had 2,276 attendees at one or more of our 10 live webinar sessions and a 60% attendance rate with 3,777 registrations overall. 100% of attendees at the live webinars said they would recommend our webinars to others. Everyone who registered for a webinar received a link to the webinar recording, the slide deck and signposts to wider reading related to the webinar topic. In addition to the live webinars, we also ran five online workshops for grant holders as part of funder partnership programmes.
The most popular webinar, with our highest ever number of registrations, was on the topic of succession planning. From our report ‘Five years of Journey to Excellence’ we discovered that charity leaders lacked confidence in their organisations’ succession planning and we offered this webinar in response. The next most popular webinar was focussed on providing practical guidance and advice in fundraising. This reflects what we know to be a worrying issue for charity leaders, with 52% of the people registering for our webinars telling us their most pressing challenge was a difficulty in raising funds and generating income.
Our third most popular webinar was in another area growing in importance for charity leaders, AI. The webinar, ‘Getting started with AI language tools for charities’ provided practical guidance on what AI can do, when to be careful around confidentiality and simple ways to get started. This has also been our most viewed webinar recording.
Online resources
We host an extensive collection of free resources on our website designed to help charity leaders, managers and trustees strengthen their organisations.
Covering the essential management areas of leadership and strategic direction, people management, financial management and sustainability and performance and impact, our online resources continue to be a trusted source of practical support across the sector.
Our ready to use templates, tools and guides are free to download. This year we were delighted to see two of our landmark reports featured in our top five downloads and blogs, reflecting the continued value of our insight to the sector.
We are grateful to our volunteers and colleagues who contribute articles and blogs to our website, as well as practical templates and tools drawn from their work supporting charities. Our wide selection of charity stories highlight the impact of our consultancy, mentoring and other services, inspiring others to see how pro bono support from Cranfield Trust helps charities to thrive.
Growing impact of Charity Management Month
We ran our second ‘Charity ManagementMonth’ during May 2025. We introduced the themed month to raise awareness of the services we offer to support and develop strong charity management, and to encourage organisations, managers and leaders to prioritise learning and development. During the month we introduced a variety of new resources, articles and content to support small charities. A new resource, Charity Manager Blueprints, was introduced during the month. The Blueprints have been designed to guide managers through essential skills for specific roles and to signpost to available training from Cranfield Trust and key partners. The top resource pages visited during the month were those proactively shared during the campaign, these included the Blueprints, new resources and live webinars. Cranfield Trust is honoured to have become the custodians of the former Getting on Board training videos for charity leaders. We launched the Cranfield Trust Governance Channel, ensuring these valuable videos and learning resources continue to be available to boards and the sector after Getting on Board closed its doors.
Find out more
Discover more about our online resources, upcoming live webinars and our on-demand webinar library.
