Good afternoon, I’m delighted to be here with you, celebrating the vital work of trustees across our nations.
The basic facts about charities and trusteeship may be well known to many of you.
But they bear repeating, because they are extraordinary.
There are 170,000 charities on our register, many thousands more so small they are not required to register. Those registered are overseen by 700,000 trustees who together hold nearly a million trustee positions.
Charities are not fluffy, nice-to-haves operating in the margins of an otherwise functioning society. Charities are civil society – they provide vital services that support the most vulnerable, and that help make communities stronger, kinder, and more connected.
And what unites all these charities, large and small, local, national and international, are trustees.
Trustees are a driving force in charities, whose work is often unseen, taking place behind-the-scenes of charities’ front-line work.
Trustees’ Week gives us a welcome opportunity, once a year, to bring their work into the limelight, to celebrate and thank trustees for the contribution they make, and support and encourage more people to step up and take on the rewarding role.
Over the four months since my return to the Commission I have had the pleasure of meeting some of the 700,000 people who serve as trustees.
I’ve spoken with trustees of charities working with veterans of the armed forces, charities supporting asylum seekers, religious leaders, food banks, community well-being centres, and community foundations.
I’ve been impressed, and moved, by the commitment, dedication and skill of everyone I’ve met and by their sense of public spirit, their desire to use their time to make a positive difference for others and within their communities.
Trusteeship is leadership – and while it’s largely unpaid, the personal rewards for those willing to give of their time and skills are significant.
We’ve been working with Pro Bono Economics on research to better understand who trustees are, and what their skills are.
We intend to use the findings to help us better support trustees through the advice and guidance we provide. We also want to work with the sector to think about how we can make trusteeship more attractive so that charities can fill trustee vacancies, and at the same time benefit from having a broad range of skills and experience on their boards,
We plan to publish the full findings in the new year and look forward to working with the sector in thinking about and responding to what they tell us about trusteeship today.
In the meantime, and in time for Trustees’ Week, I’m pleased to share a few emerging findings from the research, which point to the positive benefits those serving as trustees reap from the experiences.
The new research suggests that one of the major rewards trustees gain from trusteeship is that it helps them feel more connected to their local community – around two thirds of those asked say they benefit in this way.
Most – again around two thirds – value the opportunity to apply existing skills in a new context.
The overwhelming majority of trustees – around 9 out of 10 of those who took part – say their contributions are welcomed and respected by staff and volunteers.
And crucially, at a time when many charities carry trustee vacancies on their boards, most would recommend trusteeship to others. On a scale from 0, that they were not at all likely to recommend being a trustee to others, to 10, that they were extremely likely to recommend it, 80% answered 7 or above.’
These early findings offer us some confidence that, while trusteeship is no doubt demanding and can be challenging, most of those who serve as trustees do so, at least in part, because they too benefit.
These findings echo wider research on the psychological and social rewards of volunteering, of contributing to something bigger than yourself or your immediate family. Research by NCVO, published a few years ago, showed that, among other benefits, three-quarters of volunteers (77%) report that volunteering improved their mental health and wellbeing.
I say all this because we know that many charities are carrying vacancies on their board and that charities can struggle to recruit people with the skills their charity needs.
NCVO has published new research this week suggesting as many as 4 in 5 charities may be carrying a vacancy on their board, indicating what NCVO consider a ‘crisis’ of trusteeship.
The Commission’s own qualitative research on trustee attitudes, published over the summer, found that trustees are often keen to recruit new trustees but that those who would be appropriate or relevant to their charities’ purpose are often not those most eager to take the role.
Whilst being hugely grateful to those who already serve, we certainly need more skilled people, with diverse perspectives, to join charity boards.
And while I don’t wish to pre-empt the wider findings of the Pro Bono research, I strongly suspect that accountancy skills such as those offered by BDO’s many staff members would be much in demand in many charities.
Also looking forward, we expect to publish updated Commission guidance on finding new trustees this Spring, drawing on our joint research with Pro Bono as well as other insights to provide sharpened pointers for boards on how to fill their vacancies. This will include advice to help make sure that the door to trusteeship is open to everyone. It will also reflect the importance of trustee induction to make sure that new trustees are well supported when they join a board, so that they feel confident to contribute and to stay the course.
Commission support and guidance
Our strategy to 2029, published earlier this year, places great emphasis on our role in ensuring trusteeship is and remains an attractive proposition.
Our online guidance offer is a crucial part of that, giving trustees the information they need to undertake their roles.
Sadly, as things stand, take up of our guidance isn’t what we’d like it to be.
The research into trustee attitudes which I mentioned earlier revealed that only around a quarter – 26% – of trustees use our information at least once a year, whereas nearly two thirds seek advice from a trusted colleague or fellow trustee.
Yet almost all (93%) of those who have used the Commission’s information find it helpful. And those who use our guidance have a better understanding of their responsibilities – again our research shows this.
We want to change that. Over recent years, we have done a huge amount to overhaul and improve our suite of guidance, ensuring it is clear, accessible, and actually used by trustees.
Our suite of 5 minute guides aims to help trustees understand the basics, quickly, clearly, and to ensure they know where to go for more detailed guidance.
They are now firmly established as crucial resources within the sector.
More recently, we have produced new guidance on accepting, refusing and returning donations – guidance that is helping to underpin and grow a strong philanthropic culture in the UK, and helping trustees make decisions that are right for their charities.
We have also started an improvement programme for our key governance guides. In September we published an improved version of our guidance on charities and decision making, keeping to the 7 principles set out when we first published that guidance 11 years ago, and retaining all its other key points, but making the guidance more concise through smart editing based on clear writing principles.
This summer, we updated our guidance on charities and meetings, bringing it up to date with the Zoom era, and encouraging charities to ensure their governing documents and policies keep pace with changes to the way in which people meet. This accelerated during the pandemic, during which we gave updated advice, now formalised through the redesigned guidance.
And most recently, we updated our guidance on managing finances. We have made the guide much more accessible, splitting its content into three separate pieces, making it easier for trustees to find the information that best relates to their situation, whether they may be starting to experience financial struggles or, worse, facing insolvency.
And we’re not just improving our guidance, we’re also doing more to bring our guidance to trustees, rather than hoping they come to us.
Our trustee campaign, which is currently running on social channels, features an interactive quiz, with new questions for 2024, as a way of encouraging existing trustees to refresh their knowledge of our guidance.
The quiz invites trustees to think about how they would respond to certain situations arising in their charities, and has again proven hugely popular.
The quiz has been taken 43,000 times so far – and with great success – with an average score of 8.9 out of 10.
Federated structures
We’re aware of course, that we are not the only source of authoritative advice and guidance for trustees.
The focus this evening is on the recruitment of trustees to federated charities. Federated structures offer those considering trusteeship, especially for the first time, a great foundational experience.
Federated charities play a crucial role in communities across the country, combining local insight and knowledge, with the efficiencies, and strategic oversight that national structures offer.
Many of our household name charities operate a federated structure – Citizens Advice bureaux, Scout groups, Age UK charities, Women’s Institutes, Trussell Trust food banks, local branches of Mind, Mencap, Emmaus homeless charities – several of which are represented here today, and to name just a few.
Being a trustee of a charity that is part of a wider brand in some ways, amounts to having your cake and eating it. And let me be clear, I am very much in favour of eating cake! In federated charities, trustees gain a sense of being part of a wider national movement, while being firmly embedded in a local community. And they develop all the experiences and skills of running a charity, while being supported by guidance, knowledge and structure offered by the parent organisation.
We also know from our case work that, as well as offering huge benefits, federated structures also present challenges. A particular risk is the reputational hazard of a national brand being only as strong as its weakest link.
These vulnerabilities make it even more important that federated structures attract trustees with the right mix of skills, helping to ensure that local charities deliver what is needed in their communities, while managing the relationship with parent organisations appropriately, and in line with their governing documents and legal provisions.
The Commission is keen to understand more about the scale of federated charities, and for that reason included some new questions in the Annual Return for 2023 to help us establish whether a charity is part of a federation.
More data on this will, we hope, help us make more targeted interventions or offer more bespoke messaging where we see issues in one charity that is part of a federated structure that might be helpful for others to learn from.
All charities should have filed their annual returns for 2023 by the end of last month – and so we should soon be able to offer data on the scale and breadth of federated structures and the role they play in the wider charitable infrastructure.
I encourage anyone pondering trusteeship to consider how they might benefit from, and contribute to, a charity that is part of a wider federated family.
Conclusion
Now, Trustees’ Week is about celebration and positivity. I don’t want to detract from that when I say that we know many charities are facing enormous challenges at the moment.
The successive impacts of the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis have eaten away at many charities’ resilience, financial and otherwise, and sadly, it feels like hardly a week goes by without another charity, filling a vital gap, folding.
It would be remiss of me during Trustees’ Week not to mention the sadness I feel, and I know many share, around the demise in recent weeks of Getting on Board, a charity that has done so much to encourage and promote trusteeship, especially among groups traditionally underrepresented on boards.
But it’s precisely during challenging times that trustees can make the greatest difference for their beneficiaries and the causes they support.
It’s when times are tough that those of us who can are called upon to dig deeper – to give more of our time, resources, and skills to charities.
So to all those here today who are not already trustees – please consider volunteering today.
And to those already serving – I want to say thank you – personally, and on behalf of the Commission.
Your work and your contribution are seen and valued by us, and, I have no doubt, felt and appreciated by your beneficiaries and the causes you promote.
Thank you.
