Management And Administration News
Hand in hand into the sunset?
A title with more than a whiff of cheddar – I apologise! But the event I went to earlier this week left me feeling as optimistic as the title suggests. I attended the NCVO Corporate Community Involvement Seminar: A Climate for Change? A couple of coporate-charity partnerships presented: Sky and Global Action Plan, followed by WSP and Resources for Autism, and some thoughts from BITC’s Business and the Environment Campaign Director Jim Haywood, all pithily chaired by Dame Julia Cleverdon of aRead on
Reflections on yesterday's seminar
We had a great session yesterday afternoon at Third Sector Foresight’s latest Leading Lights seminar. If you weren’t able to make the session, I hope this will give you a taste of what you missed. If you were one of those taking part in a bursting-at-the-seams room, I’d welcome your comments on what most struck you about the speakers and the discussions. And if you’re interested in reading more, the links below will take you to drivers on key areas on our site.
Tessy Britton, our...
Lessons from Labour
Some time back, I wrote about the lessons from the fall-out from One Alfred Place’s change of strategy, which was seen by some members as a voiding of the terms under which they joined the Club. We may now be seeing similar patterns at play in political party membership.
Maybe it’s something about the British loving an underdog, but Labour Party membership dramatically increased – with daily recruitment levels up 1000% (though from what must have been very low numbers based on a back of the...
Private actions, public consequences
What One Alfred Place can teach us about how to treat your membership in the age of social media.
The private members club One Alfred Place is a very nice institution. I’ve had delicious lunches, relaxed teas and friendly drinks there, and admired the congenial, professional atmosphere and the people I’ve met.
But there’s trouble in paradise: the new Chief Executive, Sharon Brittan, has been forced to publicly apologise after emailing members to tell them their memberships have not been...
What do we value?
On the day we have officially come out of recession, and new research on our social attitudes has been published, I would recommend taking a look at the McKinsey interview with the extremely lucid Jim Wallis (you can watch, listen to or read it here on the McKinsey Quarterly website, though you will have to create a free account to do so). In the light of the current discussions taking place at Davos, he suggests that the question we should be asking about the economic crisis is not ‘when...
Walled gardens and climbing over fences
Last week I spoke at the NCVO Membership schemes conference on what the future of membership might look like. I raised one of the key things that has struck me in our research to date: the difference between recruitment and retention for membership organisations. As Colin Rochester puts it in his Making Sense of Volunteering,
“the cocktail of motives that lead people to engage [in the first place] may be very different from the factors that maintain their involvement”
In general – and I’d...
More on whether we get what we pay for
A while ago, I wrote a piece on the ‘freemium’ model that seems to be growing in relevance as people’s patterns of consumption of information and products, and their willingness to pay for them.
If you are interested in this topic and have a spare few minutes over the weekend, you might like to take a look at this slideshow (warning - there are 263 slides). Since we're all time poor, I thought I'd highlight that of particular interest to membership organisations are slides 200, 216 and 217...
Social media and membership organisations
The apparent threat (or opportunity) that social technology presents to membership organisations is summed up in the subtitle to Clay Shirky’s zeitgeisty book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of organizing without organizations. If ‘everybody’ can organise action by themselves (or rather, together), what possible reason is there for organisations to exist?
The first answer is, of course, that ‘everybody’ is not coming quite yet. Older people in particular – precisely those who,...
Raising the public benefit hurdle?
Will the failure last week of three charities, notably two private schools, to meet the first round of public benefit tests be seen as a watershed moment in the four hundred year history of charity law? The time when the tide turned to make charities really struggle against the waves of accountability to prove their worth? It remains to be seen whether the battle lines need to be drawn already - one Daily Telegraph columnist is getting ready nonetheless - branding it as nothing less than...
Trust us, we’re charities
Trust has to be earned, and re-earned
Third Sector reported yesterday that incoming RNIB chair Kevin Carey has questioned the efficacy of current charity law, asking instead for a new definition of social gain.
In a concern which seems to particularly hinge on whether trustees should be eligible to be paid, he asks:
Who says charities should have extra controls in case we hoodwink the public when we have a long record of trustworthiness that far exceeds other sectors?
To me, this called to mind ...
