News

A merging of views

Finance | Gareth Jones | 1 Oct 2006

The news that three of the sector's big representative bodies have made a commitment to sharing office premises will come as little surprise to some. CFDG, IoF and acevo have been informally discussing plans to work more closely together for a number of years. While the disciplines that the three represent are distinct there is increasing recognition that, within charities, departments need to lose the mentality of working in silos.

Fundraisers need to talk more to finance staff and vice versa while an effective chief executive needs a strong handle on what both functions are doing, and their concerns. Therefore it is entirely logical for the umbrellas representing the different factions to open in the same direction. While the initial benefits to sharing offices, and the utilisation of support functions that is likely to follow, would seem to be one of saving costs, CFDG chief executive Keith Hickey is laying great store on the strategic benefits to be gained as being as equally if not more important.

For any membership organisation, the challenge for the leadership when contemplating significant change is to garner the support of the members, (and staff), whose initial fears will be about lack of representative identity and job losses. While all three organisations have taken great pains to stress that the plans are not about merging, IoF chief executive Lindsay Boswell said at the dissemination event to discus the proposals that "you can bet your bottom dollar that is how the sector press will view it".

Not if you don't want us to, Lindsay, but it doesn't mean that others, including staff and members, will see it the same way. And long term, would merger be such a terrible thing? If the real benefits to working more closely together are to be gained strategically, why not take it to the ultimate conclusion? This would give the sector a very powerful voice speaking on behalf of finance directors, fundraisers and chief executives as a cohesive whole while recognising and supporting the individual components of each job. This would be difficult for any stakeholder to ignore.

Credible and sustainable?

Few people must have envied Jo Durning the task of writing her report into the ChangeUp hubs. Not only was she expected to familiarise herself with a complex government initiative, get to grips with how it had manifested itself over the last two years, and filter mountains of virulent opinion about its worth, but she had just six weeks to do it in.

The result, though, is little less than a triumph. Her perceptive and insightful report shows that she quickly identified all the things wrong with the hub structure, and realised that some of these were way too intrinsic to be fixed with a little tweaking. She has left Capacitybuilders with a few options, but there is little ambiguity as to her own preferred direction - her report concludes: "Capacitybuilders should take responsibility for commissioning national programme". Capacitybuilders chief executive Simon Hebditch is now deciding which way to jump, but it's pretty clear how he too is leaning - why else would he have already secured a commitment from his board to keep the hubs afloat for a further two months after their current funding runs out so that the hub partners can manage redundancies in a "fair way"?

Apart from serious doubts about the sustainability of the current model, the main sticking point for many is the absence of a boundary between commissioner and deliverer. NCVO can wail as loud as it likes that the sector knows what the sector needs better than an arms-length government agency does, but it can't do anything to defend itself against criticism that it has been awarding money to itself. And that just doesn't sit well, no matter how effectively it might spend that money.

So for that reason the hubs could never be credible, let alone sustainable. Jo Durning saw this clearly, as can Simon Hebditch, it seems. All that remains now is for his board to see it too.

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Directory: Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations (ACEVO) | Capacitybuilders | Charity Finance Directors' Group (CFDG) | Institute of Fundraising | National Council of Voluntary Organisations (NCVO)
Who's Who: Keith Hickey | Simon Hebditch | Lindsay Boswell