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Guidestar UK chief leaves after one year in post

Finance | Tania Mason | 31 Mar 2009

Guidestar UK is seeking a new chief executive after its latest leader, Lewis Temple, returned to his roots with a new position at the helm of an international development charity.

Temple (pictured) is now chief executive of International Development Enterprises UK (IDE-UK), a small charity that uses an enterprise-based approach, mainly around irrigation, to help secure the livelihoods of smallholders in developing countries.

Guidestar UK – the part of Guidestar that runs the free public website – is now seeking a new chief executive. Temple had been with the organisation for a year, and joined IDE-UK two weeks ago.

Consultant Ian Gilmour is overseeing the Guidestar role on an interim basis while also running his own small mental health charity, OK2b.

Gilmour had been doing some consultancy work with Guidestar International, creating a ‘white box solution’ that other countries can use to establish Guidestar services in their own regions.  When Temple resigned, he was asked to step up to the CEO role.

Temple said he learned a huge amount at Guidestar and would liked to have stayed on longer to further develop the website and help charities derive more benefit from the database, but had to concede “my heart is really in international development”.

Guidestar still hasn’t broken even

He did not quite manage to make the organisation break even by now, as he told Charity Finance magazine last summer he would have liked to.  “It’s not been quite so easy as I hoped,” he admitted.

However, he paid tribute to the work done by colleagues in the Guidestar Data Services division, the part that extracts data from the website and sells it on.  This division has raised £600,000 since its inception in January last year, largely from the Office of the Third Sector which used the data to inform planning for the new Third Sector Research Centre and the national survey of third sector organisations.

“This means Guidestar data is informing policy on the third sector now, which has always been the aim,” said Temple.

He said the current grant from Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers would keep Guidestar UK afloat for another year, by which time it was hoped the income from Data Services would be enough to sustain the free website.

IDE-UK had income of £800,000 in 2007 but figures for 2008 are likely to be lower, because last year it had an interim chief executive and “things were let go a little bit”, according to Temple.  His priority now is to re-establish the organisation and build up some sustainable funding sources.

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