Management And Administration News
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 ...
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 – ...
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). ...
X and Y: the future of the paid workforce
In the current economic climate, it is more vital than ever that you have a committed, effective workforce. Recruiting is a costly business, which no-one wants to have to do too often! The Foresight seminar on the impact of the changing workforce looked at the ways the VCS could address this, examining the external trends and forces that can change the shape of the workforce, and the impact these might have. As highlighted in the seminar, awareness and planning is key to attracting and...
Make campaigners history? The impact of large scale campaigns
In 1985 Live Aid changed the way people thought about and participated in campaigning. For the first time in history, activism was not confined to the zealous few devoting their lives to the cause; the campaign opened up participation to all, and in doing so, made people feel that their actions could make a difference and indeed ‘feed the world’. The success of this campaign saw rise to other mass campaigns; Children in Need and Comic Relief became annual TV bonanzas, raising millions of...
