How the Charity Excellence Framework can help small charities
01 February 2024
01 February 2024
Helping charities grow stronger and more resilient is a key part of what we do because we know that funding – even unrestricted, multi-year funding – can only go so far. By providing additional development support alongside our grants, we hope charities can thrive beyond our funding.
Our Regional Managers meet with our charity partners to talk through challenges they’re facing and what areas they want to develop around. This could be improving governance, developing a fundraising strategy or introducing a new database.
As part of our mission to help small charities develop, we recently piloted the use of the Charity Excellence Framework (CEF) to help charities identify areas they want to prioritise so that we can find the right support for them.
“A clear framework to assess where a charity is at and to see areas that need strengthening.” – Charity leader who participated in the pilot
Branded as ‘a free one-stop-shop for funding, policies, help and resources’ on their website, the CEF is an online tool that supports organisations across the voluntary sector to:
Our work focused on using the CEF to identify strengths, weaknesses and signpost relevant resources. Charities can sign up to the CEF with a free account and complete questionnaires across eight areas: strategy, risk, governance, people, operations, finance & resources, income generation, and communications.
The number of questions vary depending on the information the organisation provides about itself at sign up, such as their size and sector. Alongside each statement, users are also signposted to a variety of resources including policy templates, videos and guidance.
We surveyed our charity partners and Regional Managers to hear what they had to say about the CEF:
Our charity partners said they would continue to use the tool to:
I have [used the CEF] over a number of years and will continue to use it on an annual basis as a quick double check that I've not missed anything when it comes to action planning for the year. I will also use elements of it to devolve responsibility and increase ownership to members of staff I am looking to develop. - Charity leader.
Our Regional Managers also praised the use of the tool as an aid to development conversations with charity partners:
It helped to focus the conversation and prioritise. In my experience charities do not need to do all the questionnaires to have a meaningful conversation. I would prioritise that they do governance, legal compliance, safeguarding and finance first and then build on the rest.
Using the Charity Excellence Framework is not a mandatory part of our process as we understand that capacity varies for every organisation. However, after hearing positive feedback from our charity partners that have used the tool, we encourage anyone wanting support to develop their organisational priorities to try it.