(a charitable company limited by guarantee)
Registered Charity No. 1054914
Company Number 3182826
Members took part in a risk management survey (run in partnership with PKF (UK) LLP) – Managing Risk – Working With Others was launched in October 2006. This was the fifth year that we have run this survey and member involvement has remained consistently high with over 300 members taking the time to fill in the questionnaire. Some of the key risks identified this year were: trustee skills mix and training; staff and volunteer recruitment; cost recovery on public sector contracts and reputational risk. It is clear that more charities have taken steps to fully embed risk management within their organisations though there is still a long way to go.
We planned to incorporate the results of the regional membership survey into our strategic review. This was done and the views of our regional members had a significant influence on the development of the strategy. We planned to hold discussions with regional subscribers to identify opportunities to further support expansion of regional activity. This was particularly successful in the Northern Region where we managed to secure the support of Grant Thornton to develop our members’ meeting programme and the Co-operative Bank to support a Northern Conference in 2008. We planned to work with other umbrella bodies in the regions, to this end we piloted a joint members’ meeting with Acevo in the West Midlands. The meeting was well supported, and more joint meetings in the regions will be considered.
A total of 181 new members were accepted during the year to 31 March 2007. After allowing for the 115 members that lapsed during the year this resulted in a net growth of 5% (66 members). We aimed to increase membership income by 8% and in fact achieved an 11% increase.
As per last year’s plans we launched the completely re-structured and re-designed website in August 2006. However we did not manage to undertake the review of the Charities Resource Network (CRN), which will now be considered in the forthcoming operation plan.
As planned, we undertook – with Agenda Consulting – a ‘Finance Count 2006’ survey and held a series of related workshops to enable members to identify and share good practice. The resulting report, Finance CountTM 2007 will be launched in May 2007.
The Annual Conference in May 2006 focused on the subject of “Current Issues – Future Directions” and looked at a variety of charity finance and governance issues including a plenary on ‘The role of strategic financial management in a beyond profit economy’ by Geraldine Peacock and four streams focusing on: ‘Finance in the organisation’; ‘External influences on finance’; ‘Public service provision’ and ‘Performance reporting and impact’. With approaching 400 delegates this was our biggest conference to date. The conference, which was sponsored by haysmacintyre and Agresso, had excellent feedback from members, many of whom also made use of the networking opportunities of the reception at the end of the day.
Page 5 - Annual Report and Financial Statements 2007