On Tuesday, the charity sector celebrated an announcement from the Payments Council that it was abandoning it target of abolishing cheques by 2018. I think there’s a possibility that the sector may be cheering an own goal. This is partly because it’s cheering the end of something that was never going to happen. The Payments… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Uncategorized
There are no hard and fast rules about charity campaigning
Acevo chief executive Sir Stephen Bubb appeared before a committee of MPs recently to issue a stirring defence of the idea that charities must be allowed to campaign for what they believed in. However he was stumped when asked by Tory MP Robert Halfon what the difference was between campaigning by Shelter and by the… Read more »
Could merger problems be eased by matchmaking?
Our coverage of RNIB and Guide Dogs failing to find a common path this week and last leads back to an age-old question: why aren’t there more mergers in the charity sector? In our analysis on the subject, Richard Gutch and Craig Dearden-Phillips both said that basically, for mergers to go ahead, charities need two… Read more »
Why is the charity sector being outdone by private businesses?
This week, we’ve published an analysis of welfare-to-work provision. This is historically an area where charities have ended up as subcontractors to private providers. Many feel the sector gets stiffed by this process. Looking at the ages of those private providers, though, it seems the sector may have missed a trick somewhere along the way,… Read more »
Fundraising and finance: the oddly successful couple
A while ago, I interviewed a finance director who claimed she could tell which department of a charity she was in, just by looking in the fridge. Go into the finance department in her organisation, she said, and the fridge was full of sensible sandwiches: ham and cheese on plain brown bread. The fundraising department… Read more »
Sir Ronald Cohen’s uphill struggle with the MPs
Last week, Sir Ronald Cohen, the creator of the Big Society Bank and one of this country’s richest men, spent an hour and a half explaining to a committee of Parliamentarians all the ramifications of the bank and of social impact bonds (which he also had a hand in – his consultancy, Social Finance dreamt… Read more »
MP Chris Chope’s bill for volunteers shows how difficult reforms of CRB checks will be
Conservative MP Chris Chope has tabled a private member’s bill that he thinks will solve the problem of potential volunteers being deterred by the prospect of waiting for a criminal records check. The answer, he says, is simple: we should ask volunteers to sign a “fit and proper person certificate” saying they have no criminal… Read more »
Valuing unsold charity shop stock won’t work
“Strategies are okayed in boardrooms that even a child would say are bound to fail. The problem is there is never a child in the boardroom” Victor Palmieri, American corporate turnaround specialist A while ago an article on this site by Ray Jones of the Charity Commission observed that sometimes, in the pursuit of… Read more »
There’s a long road ahead for social impact bonds
Will the social impact bond ever attract commercial capital? At least one professional investor believes it eventually will – although he doesn’t think it will be quick or easy. The social impact bond was introduced last year as a means of funding early interventions on reducing reoffending, drug use, the number of children in care…. Read more »
Battling on with the big society
People who do not read Third Sector, or are unlikely to read the full contents of the Giving White Paper, will be under the impression that yesterday David Cameron’s slightly ambiguous big society concept was launched yet again. To name but a few, the Guardian published an article just before the launch event of the… Read more »