THE ORGANISATION
ORGANISATION DESCRIPTION:
Organisation H emerged from the womens movement within the conflict of the miners strike of
the 1980s and has been established for 30 years. Initially the project was a community led
association providing volunteering activities to support families, within a project run by the
Childrens Society. Over time the Childrens Society withdrew and the organisation became a
completely independent Community Association and is a Registered Charity and Company Limited
by Guarantee.
Today, the organisations focus is mainly on childcare. However, that childcare is provided within
the context of wider support and the philosophy that it is provided to support local families, in
particular women, to access work and training, as well as broader support through signposting and
being a trusted, local and friendly face. Also, within the service context, the organisation provides
training and employment opportunities through volunteering, work experience placements,
internships, apprenticeships and jobs.
The organisation serves a community in South Yorkshire which can trace its agricultural roots to
Roman times and was a significant and affluent settlement in the Middle Ages, but is now easily
recognisable as a large former coal mining village. It was one of many mining villages in the
Yorkshire coalfield that suffered high levels of unemployment when the British coal mining industry
was restructured in the 1980s. Since this time of major industrial decline, the area has also
experienced significant loss of commercial business and landscape buildings, although there has
more recently been investment in social housing and the former colliery has been redeveloped into
a park with a range of facilities.
This was a time of rapid change in the organisation in terms of developing the business model. The
key drivers for developing the LSF application included:
The organisation had been developing its business base in recent years but still required
top up grant funding.
Grant and other funding was becoming increasingly difficult to achieve for the organisation.
There was a growing awareness of a dependence on staff for decision making, with a Board
of established, very supportive Trustees with great skills and knowledge of the organisation,
but without strategic skills.
1
Document title
As an opportunity to take time out and have additional capacity / support to consider the
future.
To gain funding to support organisational development and governance skills.
The marketing and communications activity was led by the Chief Executive and the funding allowed
the employment of an intern to develop this work.
The governance work-stream was focused around achieving the PQASSO quality mark. It was led by
the Chief Executive, with input from the staff team, the trustees (with one trustee in particularly
taking a more hands-on role), the advisor and the intern. The Chief Executive and the intern
carried out most of the day-to-day developments that arose from working towards the PQASSO
standards and putting together evidence for the standards.
The organisation worked with an Advisor who works for a local third sector funding advice service
and was included at application stage. His role was to support the PQASSO process. In addition, the
organisation is worked with a local solicitors company which has a commitment to supporting
social enterprises. The aim was that business advice and networking would be key elements of this
role, although in the event, the latter role did not take off during the course of the programme.
2
Document title
At the start of the LSF project, the project team articulated their aspirations for the project in a
number of ways. They wanted to create an organisation which:
Was resilient and sustainable.
Could keep going in times of austerity.
Was safe and independent financially, but not at the expense of serving the community
and people in need.
Was able to run those elements of the service that are loss-making but necessary, as well as
the profitable ones.
Was a quality child care service.
Was well-run and therefore could attract more funding because of its good governance.
Serviced the community well.
Worked more efficiently in some administration areas, through the use of online solutions.
Partway through the At the end of the After 5 years Who for?
project funded project
New website New and existing
customers
Easier admin for staff
List what procedures Idiots guide to In use and updated as All staff
need writing down procedures complete needed
and which need
updating
Updated and More followers on More customers New and existing
refreshed Facebook Facebook Better customers
pages communications
PQASSO plan in place Well on way to
and being delivered achieving the PQASSO
up on standard
Better understanding
of the Boards
3
Document title
Partway through the At the end of the After 5 years Who for?
project funded project
motivations and
sensitivities
A robust organisation
Providing services for
the local community
based on what is
needed
Looking at new
opportunities for uses
of the building
mental health through
family play project /
party venue
Explore new revenue
streams that can be
offered outside the
building by the staff
team being a
mentor for other
organisations
4
Document title
They were really pleased with the actual amount of comms work they had got done,
including a new website, a Mailchimp email system, Doodle polls, Text Local, Facebook and
much more.
They were particularly proud of their new systems. Before the project there had been a tension
between allowing staff to respond to what was happening on the ground day-to- day, and change
policy and procedure, and also the need to apply good governance practice through trustees
making decisions on policy and procedure. The organisation found methods to resolve this tension
that suit the way they work and the size and type of organisation they are, but also mean they
incorporate best practice into decision-making. For example, there is now a communication diary
now where all important events and decisions are recorded. In this way, they believe that they
have found a workable middle ground that suits them well, between trustees being in total charge
and staff having an appropriate amount of autonomy, while at the same time being able to be
responsive enough to meet the needs of their beneficiaries and the community.
At this stage, their intention was to focus on completing PQASSO and their procedure files, and
embedding what they had learned about marketing and their new systems into the organisation.
They intended to continue to identify where they had gaps and assess how they could fill them
through the PQASSO process, for example, a trustees away day to look at big picture strategy for
the next few years. This was a completely new thing intended to help ensure that trustees were
more engaged.
They had found that having an intern in the organisation focused on setting up new marketing and
communication systems was excellent, but they were keen that learning did not disappear from the
organisations when he goes, so they were intending to work on including all the new methods and
knowledge into procedure files so it could be picked up by anyone in the organisation.
5
Document title
confident that they know what they are doing, including what they do to market
themselves, how often and why other marketing activities are not used.
All online communications and payments systems are in place and working smoothly.
The IT upgrade is also complete.
They noted that online surveys about user experiences of their service are working well, e.g.
opinions about holiday club, payments, hours, what did children did in the day and, as a
result, found out why boys and older children do not want to come to holiday club.
Another outcome is that they have now begun to timetable activities in advance for people
who work flexibly.
They are now more confident that they are delivering to what the service users want and
need. They note that they have been able to tweak the service to make it easier and take
the strain out of family life.
They have been able to draw in funding and continue to develop money making services
which are more responsive to specific needs. LSF has enabled this to happen by providing
extra capacity to free up time for the CEO to develop a new product that could attract
funding and through the LSF process of focusing on what the purpose of the organisation is.
They feel that they have developed sustainable and good governance, through identifying
gaps in their previous governance arrangements and strengthening where gaps have been
identified. They note that the key to this process has been the use of the PQASSO tool. In
particular the role and involvement of the board has been strengthened and the delegated
decision-making made much more clear.
Providing training and an away day for the board members has changed the way the board
has related to the day to day work of the organisation and the board is beginning to be
more involved now.
They are more confident that they will break even financially in this year; this was not
guaranteed before LSF.
They feel that they now have the right evidence for funders on how the programme is
governed, and that they have good policies and procedures in place.
The organisation has quicker and smoother internal systems.
They feel that they now have suitable marketing in place, through social media activities for
current users and web site improvements for future users,
6
Document title
The project lead considered what these successes have meant for different stakeholders:
Reflecting on their achievements, they think that there were some things that really helped them:
In particular, they have found it helpful to have the extra capacity funded by LSF, as well as clear
tangible targets and goals.
The organisation felt that they would not have done the PQASSO process without the help of their
LSF-funded advisor, as there is no direct impact of not doing it, although they believe that they are
better off for going through the process.
And there was just one thing that hindered what they could achieve:
The time needed to find a business partner and not finding one, proved a distraction.
7
Document title
In future, the organisation will continue to market themselves more effectively and look at new
ways that they can service their beneficiaries through new products that fit local need, but are also
a stream of income, developed through talking to users and other partners.
The organisation attributes a lot of their success to LSF, in particular because LSF has provided the
extra capacity, expertise and time to enable the building blocks to take place.
AT the early stage of the project, they were able to put action plans are in place for both
workstreams for what the project aimed to achieve. Key actions and outputs were being delivered
upon. The group found that the process was smooth to start with and noted that they approached
the activities in a planned way. They felt that day-to-day activities could hamper progress, but the
organisation reported that on the whole it was manageable.
They found the funders delay to be frustrating, but the organisation reported that they had learned
to expect this, so coped with it. The delay from April to June did cause a few headaches relating to
employing the intern but the organisation worked around this. Changes to the payment structure
from the funder made delivery and costs management a bit more complicated and they note that it
left a serious challenge of a six-month gap.
At this point, the organisation reported that delivery of the project had gone as they had expected
and had been very straightforward.
8
Document title
However, they noted that an unexpected part was that the whole process has been a lot more
empowering than they had thought it was going to be. Senior managers noted that they have had
really interesting discussions where they could be creative and from this, they developed flexible
systems that really helped and suited them. Linked to this is just having the time and resources to
thoroughly look at everything that impacts on your organisation, take a step back and work out
what to do next.
They found that their new systems really helped when senior staff had some difficult news to share,
as did their transparency, helping them to build more trust at a time when they feel that they could
have lost a lot of trust.
Looking back over the whole period of the LSF funding, the project lead reflected that delivery had
gone quite smoothly.
With the benefit of hindsight, they think that they got the design of their project about right. The
main change to the programme that Organisation H might have made would be the need for a
business partner, as their experience was that time spent on trying to achieve this was a distraction
and it was a huge ask to find someone suitable within this type of work sector.
9
Document title
have liked advice or templates for employing external contractors, e.g. setting outputs and
reporting, to enable the organisation to know and manage what it is getting.
LEARNING
Also, they felt that it is really hard to find the time and space to go through PQASSO on your own in
a small organisation, so having such a large amount of time from someone who knew both the
organisation and the sector was a big help.
Raising awareness through social media marketing takes time and skills.
THE MOST IMPORTANT LESSONS THAT THEY WOULD LIKE OTHER ORGANISATIONS IN A SIMILAR
POSITION TO THINK ABOUT IS
Think carefully about what you want from your external advisors and mentors.
Starting with no ideas set in concrete is a good plan; that way you can maintain flexibility
and respond to how people react to your marketing and you find out what does and doesnt
work. We have used this explorative approach and it has made us stronger.
Make sure that work for an intern is clearly set out and is task focused, so that they are
doing extra things and enabling staff to take advantage of the extra capacity.
10