News
Summer fun and worthy causes
Music festivals all around the UK are attracting more and more music lovers and party-goers every year, and are an increasingly lucrative market for anyone with goods to sell, an idea to promote or a cause to support.
Charities in the UK have been amongst the first to discover and to exploit the great potential summer music festivals have, targeting the huge audiences they bring together over the span of a few days.
Larger charities now have their name associated with various festivals, taking ...
Local and European Elections 2009 - What do they mean for the VCS?
The local elections last week were devastating for the Labour Party and fantastic for the Conservative Party in particular. For a table summary of these results have a look here on the Guardian website. According to the BBC's projections, the Conservatives would have 38% of the national vote, Labour 23%, an historic low, the Lib Dems 28%, and other parties on 11%.
The Labour Party has suffered further losses in the European elections, gaining only 15.8% of the vote and coming overall third – ...
Opportunity to get involved in Future of Membership project
The Future of Membership project will undertake new research into what membership means and what motivates people to become members. It will map the different challenges, purposes and models of membership, and develop strategic scenarios for the future. The project will run until April 2010.
The project is run jointly by NCVO, the RSA and a group of membership organisations. Outcomes of the work will be shared online on this website, as well as informing a forthcoming Future Focus guide.
Take...
What will the UK population be like in 5 years' time?
All organisations know how much changes to funding streams and policy initiatives will affect them in the future but how often does your organisation think about how changes to the UK population will affect you? And I’m not just talking about the ageing population, although that is obviously important, I’m talking about increasingly important drivers that are often overlooked like changes to the work and skills base of this country. Future demographic changes arguably have some of the most...
Local Elections 2009
So about a third of England is off to the polls again next Thursday to inflict what is increasingly looking like it’s going to be another drubbing for the Labour party as declining support for Labour (currently at its lowest level since last June) is reflected in local election (and European) votes. With just under half of the statutory income to VCOs coming from local government [1], the results of these local elections are important to the VCS for a number of reasons. They are also likely...
Cooperation is better than conflict
Good news! Cooperatives UK has just reported a big rise in the number of registrations of new cooperatives registered this year (as reported in this Third Sector article).
Cooperatives (legally defined by that bastion of cooperation, Wikipedia as ‘a legal entity owned and democratically controlled equally by its members’) are one extreme of membership organisations (at the other end of the continuum would be a traditional company or charity model where membership is only paid lipservice). ...
What is happening to legacies in the downturn?
The latest data from the Legacy Foresight’s Legacy Monitor service (which benchmarks 38 of the UK’s leading charities, who together account for 56% of the legacies market) has shown that in the mid "noughties" the legacy sector enjoyed healthy growth. Between Q1 2004 and Q1 2008, legacy income grow by one third - from £658m to £877m. However, the latest data confirm that the economic crisis is taking its toll. In the 12 months to March 2009, legacy income across the Legacy Monitor Consortium ...
How do leaders view the future?
Like a ship in troubled waters
The 5th Charity Forecast survey results have been released by NCVO. The survey is a ‘confidence/trends’ survey. This survey looks at the opinions of charity leaders - chief executives and trustees - on a variety of topics, particularly looking at finances, staffing, campaigning and other issues in their own organisations and their opinions on wider issues such as the state of the sector and its relationship with government. This particular survey was conducted...
The growth of social lending
Declining trust in banks and the difficulty of obtaining credit in the current recession may prove a catalyst for some already growing trends, the use of mutual finance through credit unions and ‘social lending’.
The credit union movement has seen a significant growth in recent years, the number of members growing from 224,674 in 1997 to 607,400 in 2007, according to The Association for British Credit Unions Limitied (PDF). It is expected that numbers will be boosted further by the current...
Budget 2009
On Wednesday Alistair Darling delivered what was a fairly dramatic budget when compared to recent years. Dramatic because of the forecasts it contained about borrowing and debt, and because of how these forecasts and the response of the government to the recession have been debated by the main political parties in the days since.
As always, the budget provided updated assessments and forecasts of the economy and public finances. In a time of great uncertainty, the Chancellor’s medium term...
