As we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, with beneficiary demand pivoting and soaring, UK charities are in general modernising rather too slowly.

The slow modernisation rate isn’t for lack of trying. Charity workers in general have always had huge passion and big hearts – something that deserves massive, enduring respect and a debt of gratitude from us all.

Some of the modernisation gap is demand-driven and the inability of government agencies to themselves handle spikes in beneficiary demand. Think health, community, social care and education services. Meanwhile, within the charity sector, a paucity of charity overhead funding and extra taxes (NI) also act as a brake on charity aspirations and ambitions.

To aid charity modernisation, the backbeat of every charity staff members’ role now needs to resonate continuous innovation, reconfiguration and pioneership. Charity workers can’t afford to have an ‘imposter syndrome’ mindset – they need to think of themselves as sturdy pioneers instead.

Also, in the age of volatile-uncertain-complex-ambiguous (VUCA), more attention is needed on all four aspects of charity business flexibility: adaptability (evolution rate), agility (on speed and direction), organisational resilience and portfolio of options management. Ask yourself, when it comes to making enduring charitable impact, how often is business flexibility even considered?

Governance effectiveness

Charity modernisation isn’t just about automation and sophisticated data management, as vital as that is. It’s also about the mindset of leadership.

Regardless of diversity in age, skills and ethnicity, charity trustees and their committee members need to spend more time on the existential threats, latent opportunities and how to inject a new dynamic into charity governance. That will likely mean crowding out the trivial issues and rationing time for basic compliance tasks too.

The opportunity cost of poor governance is immense. Beneficiary and funder groups together need to hold charity leaders to account in their effectiveness. This becomes easier in membership bodies, where the members are both beneficiaries and substantial annual funders. Elsewhere, if beneficiary groups and funder groups (donors, grant makers & lenders) remain siloed from each other, their impact on charity governance is a lot less than it could be. A simple example would be the Executive planning for intense support to few beneficiaries, while funders and beneficiaries both seek a wider beneficiary provision, sooner.

Simon