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Aggressive fundraising tactics and lack of regulation mean rescue helicopter charities are heading for collision

There is still a sense of novelty and high drama when an air ambulance swoops down on the scene of a road crash or some other serious accident. But rescue helicopters have become part of the fabric of the emergency services over the past 25 years, with one taking off somewhere in Britain every 10 minutes during daylight hours, and they have done so without most of us knowing very much at all about how they operate or who pays for them.

The truth is that air ambulances have been set up across the country with no overall planning, no agreed funding and no clear, bespoke system of regulation. As a result, there is an imbalanced patchwork of services, heavily skewed towards southern England, all relying to some degree on charitable donations but some receiving much more state support than others. Unsurprisingly, there are tensions and rifts.

Talks are due to take place Thursday to try to bridge a growing divide between the Association of Air Ambulances, which represents 14 of the 19 services in Britain, and the Air Ambulance Service (AAS), which operates two services, one for Warwickshire and Northamptonshire and another for Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Rutland. The AAS says it takes not a penny of state or lottery funding, and is critical of other services for doing so at a time when the NHS is under acute strain.

While this difference of approach is cause enough of ill-feeling, relations between the two sides have been soured further by the AAS's launch of the Children's Air Ambulance (CAA), a self-styled national service for the transfer of critically ill babies and children to or between hospitals. The Association of Air Ambulances questions the need for the service and accuses the AAS of jeopardising other groups' income by its aggressive fundraising activities – including the opening of CAA-branded charity shops far beyond its Midlands heartland.

Clive Dickin, the association's national director, says the AAS is sowing confusion among donors that "will ultimately almost certainly lead to a drop in fundraising income for all [air ambulance] charities".

Rather like hospices, which on average get a third of their income from the government, air ambulances have developed alongside the NHS, but are complementary to it. We are talking here primarily about "Hems", helicopter emergency medical services, which airlift casualties to hospital. However, the precise role of the individual services varies widely: London's Air Ambulance responds only to major trauma incidents, whereas other services will fly to "retrieve" people who have suffered heart attacks or broken bones and will undertake inter-hospital transfer. Most carry only a paramedic, but the London service always has a doctor too and – another point of argument – the AAS says it now does so on 80% of its callouts.

High quality

As this suggests, the AAS presents its service as being high quality. It stresses its exacting standards (claiming to have pioneered consultant-led clinical practice in the sector) and rigorous training regime. AAS also points out that, unlike most of the other charities, it has direct registration with the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the healthcare regulator.

Andy Williamson, AAS chief executive, does not hold back from criticising what he sees as unacceptable practice elsewhere. While insisting it is "nonsense" to think the AAS is aiming to take over the other charities, Williamson says: "There is a lot of money being wasted that could be better used." Joint operation of services by one organisation is more efficient and cost-effective, he argues, and brings demonstrable patient benefits.

To be sure, the AAS's very name, adopted in 2011, smacks strongly of ambition. Williamson, who has a background in the charity sector with the former Cancer Research Campaign, Marie Curie and the NSPCC, explains that a generic and simple title was needed for the umbrella group with the impending launch of the children's service. But the choice rankles with others. Graham Hodgkin, chief executive of London's Air Ambulance, says: "The AAS is clearly combative and clearly confusing in terms of the general public."

Yet even Hodgkin, a former investment banker brought in this year to grow the London service's funding base, admits to admiration of the AAS's fundraising record. Its total income shot up from £5.5m in 2011 to £9.4m last year, although its fundraising costs – £1.6m in 2011 – have been substantial and it courted the wrong kind of publicity by paying for stars of the BBC's Strictly Come Dancing show to help lead a staff team-building day. Williamson's remuneration in 2011 was more than £110,000.

Alex Toft, AAS's director of clinical service and operations, who joined from the biotech sector, says: "We are a change agent. We do push the envelope. If that makes us unpopular along the way, so be it."

The AAS's extensive fundraising – it has 26 charity shops, including two under the CAA banner in Crouch End and Muswell Hill, both in north London, and is "opening new shops all the time" – means that it pays for everything it does. From the moment it is called on by ambulance control, it says, no cost falls on the NHS. Most other charities rely on paramedics provided by the local ambulance services with which they work, or get all their drugs and equipment from them, while some simply fundraise to lease a helicopter for the NHS. Only if the charity itself provides patient care, defined as "treatment of disease, disorder or injury", is CQC registration required.

London's Air Ambulance, which in the past has had sponsorship from Express Newspapers and Virgin, had 18 personnel seconded from the NHS in 2011-12 at a value of more than £1.2m. In addition, the charity received an NHS grant of almost as much again, representing more than a third of its cash income.

Williamson, who estimates that the NHS is putting £60m a year into air ambulances, thinks they should be funded much more, perhaps entirely, by charity. "It's a hugely expensive business, but it's easier to fundraise for something like this than it is for, say, mental health or care of older people. That's where the NHS money should be going, especially at a time like this." He has harsh words, too, for air ambulance charities sitting on big cash reserves while still taking state aid. "There's £75m held in reserves by air ambulance charities around the country," he says. "We need to be pulling together to use some of this money better."

At the Air Ambulance Association, which also represents three-quarters of ambulance services and the leading helicopter leasing operators, Dickin insists it is unexceptional for a charity to be holding "£6m or £7m" in reserves to ensure its services could continue for up to 18 months in the event of a sudden loss of income, and/or to save for replacement aircraft.

's talks between the association and the AAS are likely to focus largely on the latter's new children's service. It is a costly operation – the designated helicopter needs £134,000 a month to stay operational and carries £300,000 of equipment, including a £25,000 paediatric stretcher designed for the job. It undertook its first mission in May, flying a one-day-old baby between hospitals in Scarborough and Hull in 15 minutes, when the journey by road would have taken a good hour. Yet critics say the overall operation took almost five hours, allowing for collection of a specialist NHS clinical team from Leeds and the return flight to the AAS base in Coventry, and they question its cost-effectiveness.

Lack of evidence

Dickin says there is "currently no clinical evidence" to justify the CAA service when his members already fly paediatric transfers, though the association is carrying out its own assessment of the case. But Williamson insists the AAS went ahead only after establishing there was a clear demand for its help with some of the 5,800 such transfers taking place every year.

"The doctors are the ones who wanted a nationwide specialist air transfer service for critically ill children and we responded to that need," Williamson says. "We are doing virtually one move every day now and I'm confident that demand is only going to grow. There was a great debate about whether it was needed – there still is – but we've just got on with it."

• Emergency services
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• Charities
• Voluntary sector
• Public finance

David Brindle
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Aggressive fundraising tactics and lack of regulation mean rescue helicopter charities are heading for collision

There is still a sense of novelty and high drama when an air ambulance swoops down on the scene of a road crash or some other serious accident. But rescue helicopters have become part of the fabric of the emergency services over the past 25 years, with one taking off somewhere in Britain every 10 minutes during daylight hours, and they have done so without most of us knowing very much at all about how they operate or who pays for them.

The truth is that air ambulances have been set up across the country with no overall planning, no agreed funding and no clear, bespoke system of regulation. As a result, there is an imbalanced patchwork of services, heavily skewed towards southern England, all relying to some degree on charitable donations but some receiving much more state support than others. Unsurprisingly, there are tensions and rifts.

Talks are due to take place Thursday to try to bridge a growing divide between the Association of Air Ambulances, which represents 14 of the 19 services in Britain, and the Air Ambulance Service (AAS), which operates two services, one for Warwickshire and Northamptonshire and another for Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Rutland. The AAS says it takes not a penny of state or lottery funding, and is critical of other services for doing so at a time when the NHS is under acute strain.

While this difference of approach is cause enough of ill-feeling, relations between the two sides have been soured further by the AAS's launch of the Children's Air Ambulance (CAA), a self-styled national service for the transfer of critically ill babies and children to or between hospitals. The Association of Air Ambulances questions the need for the service and accuses the AAS of jeopardising other groups' income by its aggressive fundraising activities – including the opening of CAA-branded charity shops far beyond its Midlands heartland.

Clive Dickin, the association's national director, says the AAS is sowing confusion among donors that "will ultimately almost certainly lead to a drop in fundraising income for all [air ambulance] charities".

Rather like hospices, which on average get a third of their income from the government, air ambulances have developed alongside the NHS, but are complementary to it. We are talking here primarily about "Hems", helicopter emergency medical services, which airlift casualties to hospital. However, the precise role of the individual services varies widely: London's Air Ambulance responds only to major trauma incidents, whereas other services will fly to "retrieve" people who have suffered heart attacks or broken bones and will undertake inter-hospital transfer. Most carry only a paramedic, but the London service always has a doctor too and – another point of argument – the AAS says it now does so on 80% of its callouts.

High quality

As this suggests, the AAS presents its service as being high quality. It stresses its exacting standards (claiming to have pioneered consultant-led clinical practice in the sector) and rigorous training regime. AAS also points out that, unlike most of the other charities, it has direct registration with the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the healthcare regulator.

Andy Williamson, AAS chief executive, does not hold back from criticising what he sees as unacceptable practice elsewhere. While insisting it is "nonsense" to think the AAS is aiming to take over the other charities, Williamson says: "There is a lot of money being wasted that could be better used." Joint operation of services by one organisation is more efficient and cost-effective, he argues, and brings demonstrable patient benefits.

To be sure, the AAS's very name, adopted in 2011, smacks strongly of ambition. Williamson, who has a background in the charity sector with the former Cancer Research Campaign, Marie Curie and the NSPCC, explains that a generic and simple title was needed for the umbrella group with the impending launch of the children's service. But the choice rankles with others. Graham Hodgkin, chief executive of London's Air Ambulance, says: "The AAS is clearly combative and clearly confusing in terms of the general public."

Yet even Hodgkin, a former investment banker brought in this year to grow the London service's funding base, admits to admiration of the AAS's fundraising record. Its total income shot up from £5.5m in 2011 to £9.4m last year, although its fundraising costs – £1.6m in 2011 – have been substantial and it courted the wrong kind of publicity by paying for stars of the BBC's Strictly Come Dancing show to help lead a staff team-building day. Williamson's remuneration in 2011 was more than £110,000.

Alex Toft, AAS's director of clinical service and operations, who joined from the biotech sector, says: "We are a change agent. We do push the envelope. If that makes us unpopular along the way, so be it."

The AAS's extensive fundraising – it has 26 charity shops, including two under the CAA banner in Crouch End and Muswell Hill, both in north London, and is "opening new shops all the time" – means that it pays for everything it does. From the moment it is called on by ambulance control, it says, no cost falls on the NHS. Most other charities rely on paramedics provided by the local ambulance services with which they work, or get all their drugs and equipment from them, while some simply fundraise to lease a helicopter for the NHS. Only if the charity itself provides patient care, defined as "treatment of disease, disorder or injury", is CQC registration required.

London's Air Ambulance, which in the past has had sponsorship from Express Newspapers and Virgin, had 18 personnel seconded from the NHS in 2011-12 at a value of more than £1.2m. In addition, the charity received an NHS grant of almost as much again, representing more than a third of its cash income.

Williamson, who estimates that the NHS is putting £60m a year into air ambulances, thinks they should be funded much more, perhaps entirely, by charity. "It's a hugely expensive business, but it's easier to fundraise for something like this than it is for, say, mental health or care of older people. That's where the NHS money should be going, especially at a time like this." He has harsh words, too, for air ambulance charities sitting on big cash reserves while still taking state aid. "There's £75m held in reserves by air ambulance charities around the country," he says. "We need to be pulling together to use some of this money better."

At the Air Ambulance Association, which also represents three-quarters of ambulance services and the leading helicopter leasing operators, Dickin insists it is unexceptional for a charity to be holding "£6m or £7m" in reserves to ensure its services could continue for up to 18 months in the event of a sudden loss of income, and/or to save for replacement aircraft.

's talks between the association and the AAS are likely to focus largely on the latter's new children's service. It is a costly operation – the designated helicopter needs £134,000 a month to stay operational and carries £300,000 of equipment, including a £25,000 paediatric stretcher designed for the job. It undertook its first mission in May, flying a one-day-old baby between hospitals in Scarborough and Hull in 15 minutes, when the journey by road would have taken a good hour. Yet critics say the overall operation took almost five hours, allowing for collection of a specialist NHS clinical team from Leeds and the return flight to the AAS base in Coventry, and they question its cost-effectiveness.

Lack of evidence

Dickin says there is "currently no clinical evidence" to justify the CAA service when his members already fly paediatric transfers, though the association is carrying out its own assessment of the case. But Williamson insists the AAS went ahead only after establishing there was a clear demand for its help with some of the 5,800 such transfers taking place every year.

"The doctors are the ones who wanted a nationwide specialist air transfer service for critically ill children and we responded to that need," Williamson says. "We are doing virtually one move every day now and I'm confident that demand is only going to grow. There was a great debate about whether it was needed – there still is – but we've just got on with it."

• Emergency services
• Health
• Charities
• Voluntary sector
• Public finance

David Brindle
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New Google for Nonprofits programme gives charities access to online collaboration tools, free advertising and advice

Google has launched a new programme, Google for Nonprofits, for organisations in England and Wales. The service allows charities to use for free Google products that businesses have to pay for. Charities that use the programme will also receive money in advertising credit to promote their causes across Google's platforms.

The service will be the first Google for Nonprofits to be launched outside of America, where the programme began in 2011.

Dan Cobley, managing director of Google UK, said: "Through Google for Nonprofits, we want to support the incredible work of charitable organisations in the UK by eliminating some of the technical challenges and costs that they face.

"We hope our technology will help them to reach more donors, improve operations and raise awareness so they can focus on changing the world for the better."

Charities that sign up to the programme will have free access to the online communication and collaboration suite Google Apps, which includes Gmail, Google Talk, Hangouts and Drive. They will also receive up to $10,000 (approximately £6,647) a month in advertising credit on Google AdWords, to help them reach potential donors.

Non-profit organisations will be able to access premium features within YouTube and Google Earth Outreach, tools charities could use to raise awareness and help potential donors visualise their cause.

The programme will contain a number of further resources, such as educational videos, examples of how other organisations are using Google's tools, advice on better ways to connect with other nonprofits, and a support forum for technical issues. Charities will also be invited to join Google+ and use it to communicate with other organisations.

To find out more information click here.

• This article was amended on 16 July. It previously referred to UK organisations and this has been changed to clarify that Google for Nonprofits is for nonprofit organisations in England and Wales.

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Whether funded by grants or trading income, sustainability of the social mission is key

Many businesses receive grants, but in the world of social enterprise, it's a position of principle not to.

It is a social enterprise aspiration, at least in theory, to distinguish themselves from traditional charities, which rely on 'handouts' from the government or grants trusts. Yet this doesn't always lead to social enterprises avoiding grant income altogether.

For umbrella body Social Enterprise UK, "social enterprises are businesses, so they must aim to generate the majority of their income through trade rather than from donations".

The underlying thinking behind this position makes sense as, US-based non-profit expert, Joanne Fritz explains: "Grants are great, but they can create a dependency within non-profits, use up valuable resources such as staff time and energy and they can be taken away or not renewed. It has been estimated that by the time funds from traditional grant-making arrive, 20% of the money has been spent just on acquiring it."

In a recent piece on the Skoll World Forum for Pioneers Post Graeme Oram, chief executive of Five Lamps, provides a succinct expression of the prevailing social enterprise view on grants and sustainability: "... far too few socially enterprising ideas reach transformational levels of scale. Equally, too many remain grant reliant and unsustainable. Social enterprises winning contracts creates disruption – new models of public service delivery."

It's certainly true if you sell goods and services at a price customers or organisations are willing and able to pay, there's a strong chance of sustaining a business. If you can simultaneously achieve you're social mission by selling products and services at a profit, there's no logical reason why you should be looking for any other model.

Unfortunately, this does not tell us much about the challenge of sustaining a social organisation that cannot achieve its social mission by selling goods and services at a profit.

There clearly are ways that social organisations can grow and sustain themselves without being profitable trading businesses. One of the most obvious ones is getting large numbers of people to give you money.

Large charities do this very successfully. For example, Macmillan Cancer Research generated 98% of its £155.7m annual income in 2012 from donations - but many other large charities generate their income from a mix of sources.

According to NCVO's Civil Society Almanac, a total of £14.1bn of UK civil society's £38.3bn annual income comes from grants and donations and £11.23bn comes from state contracts.

The almost tautological reality is that the sustainability of any source income is based on how likely that money is to continue coming in and that will be different for each organisation depending on their circumstance.

If, to use an entirely hypothetical example, you're setting up an organisation to provide homes for retired llamas, possible sources of income might include:

a) Fees from zoos who are legally responsible for providing homes for llamas in old age

b) Regular donations from people who are keen to see retired llamas have a good home

c) Grants from grants trusts with an interest in llama welfare

d) Admission fees from people who want to come and visit the llamas in their retirement

e) Fees from the NHS for providing experimental 'Llama care therapy' for their patients*

f) Selling llama-related t-shirts and merchandise

These are all potentially legitimate sources of income for your home for retired llamas.

(a) is the ideal source of income because you're being paid by a customer who needs your service to deliver that service.

(b) + (c) would be the next best things because you're being paid by some people who want to pay for (buy) the social activity you're providing.

(d), (e) and (f) all involve providing services and products other than the social activity your organisation provides, in the hope that these services and products will make a profit to enable you to deliver your social mission.

To find a sustainable business model two factors need to be assessed: how much income can be generated from each option and which options are likely to lose money.

Ultimately neither grants and donations, or trading income are intrinsically more or less sustainable than each other. If you can deliver social good by selling goods and services and making profit, that's great but the key point is to start from your social mission and work out the most likely way to generate the cash to deliver it on an ongoing basis.

*I don't know if this treatment is offered on the NHS and am not advocating that it should be

David Floyd is managing director of Social Spider CIC. He writes the blog Beanbags and Bullsh!t.

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The Occupy Wall Street activist and London native explains what 'gentle anarchism' could do for voluntary sector organisations

Carne Ross is not the kind of person that comes to mind when most people think of anarchism. The New York-based, south London native is generally found in a suit and tie, with early hints of grey offering the air of maturity one might expect from a career diplomat. Yet Ross has named his political outlook a gentle anarchism.

"Anarchism is [...] about shared decisions about things that affect us, where everyone with a stake gets a say," Ross said, following a panel he spoke on at Left Forum in New York. The panel aimed to address whether charities and trade unions make the transition to horizontalism, a reference to the broadly-anarchistic organising practices used at Occupy camps and within other social movements around the globe in recent years.

Ross made headlines by stepping-down as Tony Blair's Iraq expert at the UN in 2004, over the country's decision to go to war, going on to set up the world's first nonprofit diplomatic consultancy, Independent Diplomat. He is also a member of Occupy Wall Street (OWS).

"[Occupy] has shifted from a protest phase to an action phase," Ross says, rebutting claims of the movement's death. "Occupy Sandy was the most effective voluntary response to help the disaster victims." It beat the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Red Cross into many of the city's hardest hit neighbourhoods, and was there long after these older institutions had left.

He also points to several other ongoing efforts by OWS working groups, addressing issues ranging from personal debt, to home foreclosures and financial reform. These include the Occupy Money Cooperative, an alternative finance body Ross is helping set up to provide banking services to its member-owners, "particularly the forty million "unbanked" in America, who are rejected by the big banks and ripped off by check cashing services and prepaid card providers."

Where can voluntary organisations fill a gap left by the state or private sector and challenge the political conditions which have created that gap?

In regards to so many organisational attempts to influence government, Ross feels "protest is very limited in effect". He explains that "power is resistant to complaint and is extremely skilled at pretending it cares," pointing out that even the Chinese government offers their own citizen-generated petition website, but which has done little to fill the country's vast democratic deficit.

But protest and advocacy are bedrocks of civil society – what has Occupy done differently? Tammy Shapiro, an Occupy Sandy organiser speaking at another Left Forum panel, described "services as a starting point for radical organising," explicitly linking disaster relief efforts with the issues of structural racism, poverty and urban neglect that made Hurricane Sandy so much worse for some, than for others.

Working with affected communities as equals during moments of extreme crisis, organisers built up relationships in hard-hit neighbourhoods at the height of the storm, well before the official relief agencies were on the scene. This helped open doors to collaborative longer-term community building efforts, such as coop incubation, community childcare initiatives and guerrilla gardening, where communities reclaimed public green spaces to plant vegetables and provide healthy, cheap and local food options in the heart of various affected communities.

Their efforts were shaped by on-the ground situations, whether in the Rockaways, Sheepshead Bay, or Staten Island, responding, as Shapiro described, "in ways that fit the group that they had, fit their skills and fit their interests," rather than applying a pre-meditated strategy or blueprint, as has been a hallmark of so many traditional relief efforts.

Could charities devolve greater decision making power to a local level, allowing people to shape their own responses?

Ross sees two fundamental points where meaningful change can begin to emerge, organisationally and beyond. "I believe that we have to build new and better systems, methods of working and institutions. Our systems must reflect our fundamental political values," he says.

"The first rule of good theatre is show don't tell,'" Ross reminds organisations looking to demonstrate their commitment to fairness and democracy through their mission statements alone. "It applies to good political action as well."

So what might it mean for a charity to show and not tell? OWS projects have shone some light on potential examples, aiming to create alternatives to various failing mainstream institutions, from relief agencies to banks, while ensuring that these new structures are practical reflections of the values they operate from. Doing so means decisions are made through group consensus, power is evenly distributed among participants and individual autonomy is respected, with Occupiers free to find their own ways of supporting a cause, rather than being slotted into a premade volunteer opportunity or job description. Can voluntary sector organisations take on similar processes?

Organisationally, this might mean an overhaul of management structure (several charities, such as People & Planet and the Otesha Project, have eschewed a single chief executive or director, in favour of a flatter, more collaborative executive), or a democratic cooperative ownership model, in which all employees have equal say in a range of organisational decisions. It could also affect the ways projects are organised, with less emphasis on permanent teams, and more on ad-hoc collaboration across departments, based on individual skills and enthusiasm for a particular project.

But there's also a more personal element to the kind of change Ross advocates. "If the passions [of staff and supporters] are truly engaged, people become incredibly powerful; momentous change becomes possible." Unfortunately though, he adds: "most organisations contrive to destroy the passions that inspired people to join them and the more hierarchical they are, the more demoralised is the staff".

How does an organisation invested in a top-down way of doing things begin to offer those within and around it a true sense of agency to shape the organisation's work and direction? "Just ask them what they want," Ross states emphatically, while adding the critical disclaimer that it only works when you listen to (and take steps to implement) their answers.

Ross is clear that gentle anarchism is a constant work in progress. "Part of me loves to control and to exert power, but it's not the best part of me at all. What I am slowly learning is that allowing others to have power too makes us a better organisation – many brains are simply better than one."

Liam Barrington-Bush is an activist, social change consultant and author of the upcoming book Anarchists in the Boardroom: How social media and social movements can help your organisation to be more like people, due out in September 2013. He Tweets as @hackofalltrades.

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The key points from our online discussion on switching to the third sector

What's on offer for healthcare professionals in the voluntary sector?

Joop Tanis, independent consultant in innovation and entrepreneurship in health and social care: "There is a great opportunity for NHS clinicians and managers to organise themselves into co-operatives or social enterprises. This provides diversity of options for commissioners, and the opportunity to deliver the services you are passionate about in a way that is less constrained by the big NHS apparatus."

Neil Hogan, team leader and recruiter for Charity People: "Areas of opportunity that I've come across for healthcare professionals include policy, service delivery, leadership, campaigning, commissioning and bid tendering."

John Illingworth, policy manager at the Health Foundation: "We employ a wide range of people - project managers, research managers, communications, policy and corporate services professionals. In other words, roles and skills that you would find in a range of healthcare organisations."

James McHugh, responsible for research and policy at Skills - Third Sector: "In addition to the opportunity for NHS professionals to spin out into co-operative or mutual structures, there are also many opportunities for healthcare professionals to work in the existing third sector. Over half of the third sector's 800,000 paid employees work in health and social care. There are also around 37,000 organisations in the UK third sector which are active in this area. Much of this employment growth has been as a result of increased commissioning of such services from third sector organisations."

The advantages of working in the third sector

Neil Matthewman, chief executive of Community Integrated Care: "The voluntary sector, I have found, can offer greater freedom from bureaucracy and the opportunity to develop more influential relationships, raising the profile of our charity, influencing organisational development and directly improving the quality of the support that we are able to offer."

Steve Hindle, programme lead, Macmillan Cancer Support: "The ability to work for organisations such as Macmillan offers far greater scope and flexibility than many will have enjoyed in the NHS, as well as the satisfaction of making a difference, potentially at a national level."

Neil Matthewman: "In the third sector, we don't have this same level of restriction/support [as in the NHS]. So, organisational development can be lead by your own personal experience and skills. I have been able to influence the strategic direction of Community Integrated Care in a way that I couldn't directly do when working in the NHS and have been able to develop strong partnerships with other organisations as a result personal initiative. This has been refreshing and exciting."

The challenges

Neil Matthewman: "As a financial consideration, leaving the NHS Pension Scheme is a potential challenge for some people. From my personal experience, this has been a barrier to some people joining the third-sector. I found that leaving my existing well-established professional networks was also slightly daunting."

Claire Westall, Macmillan Cancer Support: "Things move more quickly and decisions are made faster so I think that can be a significant culture shock sometimes. People may find they have a unique level of responsibility and ownership in the third sector, that didn't exist in the NHS, and this can be challenging at first."

James McHugh: "There are also a higher proportion of temporary roles in the third sector (around one in ten of all jobs) and the funding streams may seem more precarious in the third sector."

The differences between working the NHS and the voluntary sector

Joop Tanis: "I was surprised by the sense of empowerment and the ability to make decisions and actions quickly, but also the need to focus on delivering outcomes and milestones, which in my experience was much more 'immediate' than it felt in the public sector. However transferable to core skills - and they often are - the approach and culture is very different."

Neil Matthewman: "I was struck by the lack of external influencers when I moved to the third sector, other than organisations like the Charity Commission or CQC. In the NHS, we had milestones, world class commissioning etc. which heavily guided organisation development. This was a bit scary at first but liberating in many other ways, as it relies on you, as an individual leader, to take the organisation forward, based upon your knowledge and experience."

Joop Tanis: "While my managerial responsibility (budget, headcount etc) was much greater in the NHS, my ability to do things and have an impact was greater outside."

Steve Hindle: "I think a further difference for people moving from the NHS may be the way that the voluntary sector can work with the media to highlight awareness of issues and spread innovative solutions."

John Illingworth: "I think people moving from the NHS feel a certain degree of liberation, from daily fire-fighting to championing good causes in order to deliver real improvements for people."

Steve Hindle: "What I've found during my time at Macmillan is that colleagues who have recently left the NHS are invaluable for their expertise, often based on decades of experience, and their understanding of the way current issues are impacting on outcomes."

What skills do you need?

James McHugh: "From a third sector perspective some of the skills/expertise around commissioning, service design, people management, governance, monitoring and evaluation, and partnership work are immensely valuable."

Joop Tanis: "Apart from the obvious clinical or service skills, [healthcare professionals] have an in-depth knowledge of the current services, standards and decision making processes. They often understand commissioning."

Steve Hindle: "There are a range of skills that can transfer into the voluntary sector - speaking for my survivorship team, I have people with combinations of clinical expertise, service development and service redesign expertise, commissioning skills, policy work, project/programme management, user involvement and negotiating and influencing skills."

Neil Matthewman: "At a senior level you need an ability to lead people strategically and to set the direction for the organisation. The ability to hold people to account is also important. From a personal perspective, understanding commerciality is also particularly important."

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As someone who has been there, here's my advice on how to appoint a strong board and make the best use of their skills

Last year I resigned the post of trustee of a small British charity. I gave the chair of the board a list of the usual reasons – family circumstances, growing responsibilities in my day job – but in truth I was simply fed up. After almost three years as a charity trustee I was frustrated and disillusioned.

I hadn't stepped into the role blind. I had been involved with the third sector in the past and knew well the myriad issues facing voluntary organisations. I understood the complex job the charity was tasked with, and all within very limited resources. So why was I ready to give up so quickly?

The reality for many small charities is that the recruitment and management of the trustee board is not well planned or handled. Recruiting a board can be time consuming and expensive, but neglecting this area of work reaps its own destructive rewards in the long term.

The board on which I sat was largely comprised of trustees recruited through friendship groups and existing business connections. Most were long-standing volunteers of 10 years or longer. I found very little motivation for innovation and improvement.

The fear of change and a sense of defeatism dogged debate. Plans set out in productive meetings then sat at the bottom of a staff in-tray for months, with little sense of movement or progress between each meeting. Cold water was often poured on new ideas and, in my inexperience, I was overambitious in response. With such a small staff team there were few resources to follow through even the most carefully planned board level strategies.

The staff team, in return, were so stretched they regarded trustees as additional members of staff. Volunteer trustees were unable (and sometimes unwilling) to perform these roles with the quality and commitment that would be expected of paid staff.

These are common pitfalls for small charities, and they hold organisations back. Ultimately they discourage aspiring trustees – especially younger volunteers – from giving their time. They stop small, local charities from reaping the rewards of creative thinking.

So here is my advice for chief executives and chairs of small charities, to avoid falling down the common potholes when money and time is tight. These five tips will help in the process of appointing a stronger trustee board and making the best use of their skills.

1. Recruit professionally

It can be very difficult to find trustees for small charities, especially those which don't represent "sexy", media-friendly issues. But the answer to a recruitment crisis on the board is to search more widely, not shrink your horizons. Even if the organisation is very small, it's important to work towards ensuring that your trustee board represents the diversity of your users or beneficiaries.

Use organisations such as the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) to widen your search for new volunteers, and consider advertising within university careers services for younger trustees. Talk to local employment services to see what support you can offer jobseekers in building skills through volunteering as a trustee. Think about the skills that your board lacks, and then recruit through the professional channels for the industries that will find you a best match.

2. Offer fixed-term positions

To avoid a long-standing trustee board becoming stale, set fixed term positions of no more than three or five years. This allows new trustees to get involved with longer-term projects and see the fruits of their labours, but also ensures that new voices are constantly challenging your trustee team and making changes. Fixed-term positions can also prove attractive to potential volunteers who may fear getting involved in an open-ended commitment.

3. Avoid empire building

It's great to have a bond between your trustees, but if your board is essentially a friendship group then work simply won't get done. Look at moving responsibilities around so that one individual or small team can't monopolise work on a core area. If you decide to set up subcommittees within your board to work on projects then make sure these are refreshed annually or biannually.

3. Set boundaries

Every trustee should have a core area of responsibility, and understand what is expected of them as part of their commitment to the charity. Setting out a clear set of goals and guidelines will help to channel the enthusiasm of younger or inexperienced trustees into achievable aims. It can also help a charity to understand exactly how the trustee board can assist in moving the charity towards achieving its goals (both long and short term) through use of their connections and skills, other than by scrutinising staff efforts.

4. Make volunteering useful – for both charity and trustee

When resources are tight, think about how to make the most of what you have for both parties. Look at what each member of your senior staff team does and match their portfolios to your trustees' areas of expertise. Introduce your staff, and your trustees as advisors and mentors where possible. Allow trustees to use their experience as a volunteer to build up new skills of their own, which may then prove useful in their own careers or personal lives. A strong trustee board should prove beneficial for the charity, but if being a trustee doesn't also benefit the volunteer then something's going wrong.

5. Finally, let your trustees be ambitious – however naive you think they are

There's nothing more frustrating or demotivating for a new trustee than hearing a chair or chief executive say: "No, we can't do that because we're too small". Allow your trustees to think big. Avoid saying no by asking trustees to work with you to plan backwards from an ultimate ambition to design a realistic strategy which can be implemented over a number of years. For small charities, having a good relationship between staff and trustees can help to manage this process.

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Government needs to be humbler, businesses more open and the voluntary sector more willing to collaborate, says Nick Hurd

The government and businesses must collaborate more effectively with charities, minister for civil society Nick Hurd said today in an interview with Guardian Voluntary Sector Network editor David Mills.

At Business 4 Better, an event that aims to connect private and voluntary sector organisations, Hurd said "we've got to get those pieces working together. Government needs to be a lot more humble, open doors for people and say come in and we can help you. Businesses have got to be more engaged and the voluntary sector must recognise that it needs to fill some gaps in terms of its skills."

Hurd said that there had been a positive movement towards greater collaboration over the past few years. "I think something is changing in the business world. Five years ago, businesses and charities barely talked to each other, but that's changing. Companies want to be better citizens and show their values and charities need business skills, as the world they're involved in is increasingly competitive."

Private sector organisations can help charities to become more self sustained, Hurd said. "Charities are thinking more about how they sustain themselves, as well as how they train people. Businesses can help voluntary sector organisations so that they don't have to rely on hand-to-mouth funding and the generosity of the British public."

However, he warned charities not to think solely about the money. "My urge is don't always think about asking for the cheque, think about persuading companies of your value to them as a strategic partner."

Hurd emphasised that charities can benefit from partnerships with the private sector in order to improve technology and digital media skills. "[Digital technology] seems to be an area where there's a huge amount of skill in the private sector that can transform the ability of the charity sector to inform and to reach people."

Partnerships are increasingly important because of trust, Hurd said. "We don't trust politicians, journalists, or businesses – but we do trust the voluntary sector. If you harness that trust with the ability of new technology to move and mobilise people then civil society is a massively powerful sector.

"When I've seen partnerships work it's magical," he said. "If over the next few years we get more examples of good partnerships then the sky's the limit.

"We're just skimming the surface of what can be achieved if we get businesses and charities to work closely together."

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Abby Young-Powell
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Thanks to a benefactor, Narrowgate night shelter can stay open until September – but after that the 28 men and women who regularly use it are in a precarious position

Interview with Lynne Elliot, chief executive of the Vegetarian Society, who has been named winner of Charity Voice 2013

It was the chicken beak and innards that first turned Lynne Elliot, now chief executive of the Vegetarian Society. Despite having grown up eating meat, it was only when she left home in her early 20s and "had to think about what I was eating" that "the whole reality hit home".

"I had to buy a chicken for the first time and it looked like a dead bird and you had to put your hand inside and pull out the giblets," she says. Getting pregnant at age 21 also forced her to reconsider her health, diet and how to explain meat-eating to a child.

So taking up her current role in March 2013 seemed a natural move. "It's really great to be doing a job where your own personal values are so closely linked to your work," she says.

However, the position marks a departure for Elliot, at least in a professional capacity, because she has spent almost her entire working life in the voluntary sector involved with older people, health and social care.

The winner of the 2013 Charity Voice award feels it is the advocacy and listening skills honed through her life working with service users that make her an excellent communicator. "I do try very hard when I'm talking in the media to be myself, which comes from years in the voluntary sector and having a background of working directly with people where I'm doing lots of listening as well as talking because any kind of communication is a dialogue," she says.

Prior to the Vegetarian Society, Elliot had been chief executive of Salford CVS for three years, supporting other charities to run themselves. As chief executive of Barnsley Arena from 2006 to 2010, a service users and carers-led organisation, Elliot represented users, "and helped them to speak – a very intensive three years".

She also worked in Leeds for six years from 1996 as a support worker at an older people's neighbourhood network where befriending visits, benefits advice and tea dances formed the mainstay of her role. But there is a link between her previous experience and working at her current charity: "A lot of the voluntary work that I've done has been around advocacy for people with learning disabilities or older people and [being head of the Vegetarian Society] is largely about advocacy – our members are really passionate – about animal welfare, health or the environment."

This range of passions exhibited by her members can make communicating a delicate balancing act, she says. "I'm very conscious that I'm representing a lot of people and vegetarians are not a collective voice – we're very different and there are some very strongly-opinionated people who are vegetarian who don't necessarily agree with each other.

"We try very hard to represent all vegetarians and that means we often have to put across several different arguments at the same time, which is a communications challenge – but I think that makes you work harder as a communicator."

Despite the challenges, Elliot feels confident communicating on behalf of her members because she says she has listened to and understood at a grassroots level what exactly their issues are. "As an organisation we've done an awful lot of talking to our members about how they feel – on Twitter, Facebook, face-to-face, on the phone. That's why it's easy to talk about."

Elliot's taste for the media was first whetted at age 14 when she volunteered for BBC Radio Nottingham as a link presenter on the Scout and Guide radio jamboree programme, with a bit of interviewing thrown in. "I do really like radio," she says. However, she has only had one day of media training at the Media Trust as well as some internal training at her current job, "so I'm just a rookie". The training has taught her not to be afraid of asking a journalist to repeat a question and to drill home key messages until they sink in.

She also learned to "keep talking until you feel the journalist has what they need". Being able to "go in with your own personality" is another point Elliot has taken care to integrate. So far, her media experience has involved mainly local newspapers and radio. "I've done a fair bit of public speaking but that's entirely different," she says.

"Because I'm quite new to it, I still find [speaking to the media] quite nerve-wracking because the pressure's on and you've only got such a short amount of time to get your message across. And because it's such a big message for us and because I'm very conscious I'm speaking on behalf of a lot of other people, it becomes very important to me to get it right."

The advice Elliot would give to the chief executive of another charity needing to engage media is, "Definitely get some media training, that's how you learn the system. It will make you confident and help you play to your strengths."

She adds: "You absolutely need to understand what you're saying and who you're saying it for. I'm quite new in the role but because I understand what our members think about our issues [by liaising with them whenever she can], I feel very confident and I think that comes across. You've got to spend time listening. And have a good comms team behind you."

Being a small organisation – the Vegetarian Society has 30 members of staff – means the two-strong communications team is vital to Elliot's job as communicator, from briefing her on key issues to facilitating meetings with people.

It also means that the chief executive must be able to communicate with confidence and pick up last-minute media requests. "We're such a small organisation talking about such a wide range of subjects, we could spread ourselves a bit thinly sometimes and that's another reason why the chief exec needs to feel confident to pick up some of those interviews," she says. "Because if something hits the papers – like it did with the horsemeat scandal – we're really stretched."

Elliot is now relishing the challenge of engaging through media, something which comes easily to her, "because I've spent most of my career in communication roles".

And it's this that has helped her more than anything. "If you've got good listening skills and you're used to having to sum up and talk on behalf of people, you're halfway there," she says.

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Anita Pati
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The new head of the child protection charity on the fallout of the Savile scandal and high-profile grooming cases

For most new chief executives of major charities the first few weeks of their tenure will involve run-of-the-mill activities such as taking stock of the organisation and getting to know their staff, but not for Peter Wanless, who took over the helm of the NSPCC little over a month ago. Within a fortnight Wanless was on Twitter reassuring the public that a volunteer who had written a reference for ex-BBC presenter Stuart Hall, who last month was convicted of indecently assaulting 13 girls, did so in a "personal capacity", was in no way representing the charity, and had swiftly stepped down.

With so much media attention and public outcry focused on child sexual abuse in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal, any threat to the NSPCC's reputation was bound to be taken seriously. "This involved a single volunteer acting without our authority. That's why she stepped down," Wanless explains. "In light of this incident we are reiterating to volunteers the importance of their role as ambassadors of the NSPCC and our work, and the responsibility that comes with that."

In part due to the fallout of Savile's litany of abuse, unfolding revelations surrounding other celebrities, and multiple grooming cases of vulnerable young girls, Wanless accepts that he and the charity have their work cut out. Calls to the NSPCC's adult helpline by adults abused in their youth shot up by 200% as the scale of Savile's crimes were revealed, and calls to ChildLine from abused children continue to run at higher levels than prior to the scandal. The 70 adult helpline councillors coped with the flood of calls by putting other, less essential, work, such as research, on hold, he explains.

Recent scandals

One aspect of the recent scandals that Wanless is keen to emphasise is that by so publicly exposing the extent of child sexual abuse, awareness of the issue has increased. "There is less need than there has been in the past to bang on about the nature and scale of the problem," he says, adding that the NSPCC has "had to work quite hard" over the years to convince people of the extent of it. "But you know what? That's not quite such a challenge [now]. It's on the front pages of the papers. We've seen not just historic cases like Savile and the rest of it, but the grooming issues that are happening now, and so it's really energising to be at the centre of promoting things that we can all do to eradicate this problem."

Wanless, 48, says that, despite being a household name and one of the most successful fundraising charities in the UK, the NSPCC is having to fight for funding in the difficult economic climate. It relies on donations for 90% of its revenue and saw a slight dip in total revenue in its last financial year. Yet it remains in a robust position, he adds.

So where do the millions of pounds go? "At the NSPCC I am determined that we will put our money where our mouth is. We will, and are, developing services that are designed to test some of the most cutting-edge practice with some of the most challenged children and families. We are a big charity. And £140m is a lot of money, but not a great deal in relation to the challenges facing children across the country," he replies.

Those pioneering services include Safecare, which involves home visitors working to prevent the neglect of under-fives; Minding the Baby, which supports new mums at home; and the New Orleans Intervention Model programme for children's mental health. Safecare has been operating in six areas of England since 2011, and one trial showed it had a sustained effect of at least six months beyond the end of treatment. Minding the Baby, which started last year in Glasgow, Sheffield and York is based on a programme developed in the US, where the health outcomes from the first stage of its pilot study have been very encouraging. Likewise the New Orleans model, also in Glasgow, is based on the work of US infant experts. Another programme, Letting the Future In, is, to the NSPCC's knowledge, the first randomised control trial in the UK, and possibly anywhere, of a systemic therapeutic intervention for sexually abused children. In contrast, its Offence Prevention Line is a controversial pilot scheme with West Midlands Probation Service to stop paedophiles from reoffending. It has been running for just over a year, and the charity says it is too early to comment on its effectiveness.

"The NSPCC cannot do everything and be everywhere, so we must ensure that our actions are targeted where they are most needed and are designed to have influence well beyond those we are able to help directly," says Wanless.

"Last year we spent over £111m on charitable services, over 90% of which came from sources other than the government. The public have always contributed generously to us and we would be delighted to be able to do more. However, it is sensible to recognise that even if we were able to double our activity levels, these would be small relative to the billions of pounds local and national government spend directly on children at risk of abuse and on picking up the pieces of the lives of those subjected to abuse. That's why we are increasingly focused on prevention of abuse and actions that all of us can take to make it more likely children can stay safe, speak out and be heard."

He stresses the need for continuity and cementing what he thinks the charity already does well – for example, nurturing ChildLine. "The thing the NSPCC has, of course, is ChildLine so we have access to the voices of children today who are phoning us … explaining and exploring with us the issues that are of concern to them, and that is a fantastic asset."

He talks also of the "positive" things he sees happening more generally and says he wants to concentrate on these. One example he highlights is justice secretary Chris Grayling's announcement that pilots are being set up to improve the ways in which children are expected to give evidence in court.

A career civil servant prior to leading the Big Lottery Fund, with stints at the Treasury and in education, Wanless says his insights into policymaking and the machinations of Whitehall will stand him in good stead when representing the NSPCC and lobbying on specific issues. But he stresses that, more than anything, working in education departments gave him "a passion" for children's rights. "I definitely had an interest and desire to see what we could do to make a difference for children," he says.

Other than prioritising the financial future of the NSPCC and making sure the local services it provides "are world-class", he is candid about what needs to be improved – including working more closely with local authorities. "Of course I understand and appreciate what terrible financial constraints all kinds of public services are under at the moment," he says. "I think the NSPCC has been seen as a kind of ivory tower observer/commentator on a problem rather than an active inspirer and partner in taking these things forward."

Distilling his goal for the charity, Wanless concludes: "It's no good the NSPCC designing and developing these brilliant interventions that touch a small  number of people in a small number of locations. We must have world-class involvement and engagement with mainstream services. I think that hasn't always been the case."

Curriculum vitae

Age 48.

Family Married, one son.

Lives Village near Sevenoaks, Kent.

Education Sheldon school, Chippenham; BA Hons international history and politics, University of Leeds.

Career June 2013-present: chief executive, NSPCC; 2008-13: chief executive, the Big Lottery Fund; 2006-07: director, families group, Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF); 2003-06: director of secondary education, DCSF; 1998-03: director of strategy and communications, Department for Education and Employment; 1987-96: various HM Treasury roles including head of private finance policy, principal private secretary to Michael Portillo as chief secretary and as secretary of state for employment.

Awards CB in the 2007 New Year's honours list for distinguished public service.

Interests Somerset county cricket club, Welling Utd FC and his iPhone.

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Mary O'Hara
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While there has been a substantial rise in volunteering in the UK, more are working part-time and fewer are receiving training

Volunteering in the UK is on the rise. Both formal and informal participation rates have increased substantially since 2011, halting a downward trend apparent since 2005, while the most recent Community Life Survey data shows an increase in social cohesion and a sense of belonging.

To what this can be attributed is not clear, however. "The honest answer is we don't know," says Justin Davis Smith, executive director for volunteering and development at the National Council of Voluntary Organisations (NCVO). "It's probably too soon to be talking about a long term trend but it is quite encouraging.

"The most obvious explanation is that some of the spirit from the 2012 Olympic Games has begun to seep through but my sense is that there's something more profound taking place, in how volunteering reflects the spirit of the age. People are definitely more aware of suffering going on around them, manifest in things like food banks for example."

As with other sectors, the voluntary sector has been affected by the economic fallout of that age in various ways. The numbers employed have increased, but so too has the number of people working part-time, specifically due to an inability to find full-time work, by 36% between 2011 and 2012.

Similarly, the number of employees who received training during that period fell by almost 25%. This has led to a reduction in the availability of certain skills and resources, a problem that Nick Hurd, minister for civil society, tried to address last October when he appointed Dame Mary Marsh to conduct a review of skills and leadership in the sector. The first output of that review has been the creation of Leading Social, a public space for social sector organisations to come together and tackle this skills gap by sharing their knowledge.

This decline in skills is indicative of government support for the sector right now, says Davis Smith. "If I were writing a report card I suppose I would say 'shows promise but could do better'. There's certainly a commitment to volunteering and a recognition of its importance, but the government has yet to recognise that volunteering doesn't just happen, manifest in a reduction in support for local infrastructure agencies like volunteer centres".

James McHugh, knowledge manager at Skills – Third Sector seems largely to agree. "We need to ensure such gains [in increased participation in volunteering] are underpinned by continued support for volunteer centres, volunteer management and other related infrastructure. Continued vigilance needs to be paid to the complex relationship between volunteering and paid work. This is especially true in relation to some of the grey area surrounding internships and volunteering whilst in receipt of benefits."

Similar observations were made in a recent assessment of volunteering and volunteering infrastructure by the Institute for Volunteering Research, which noted the challenge to "both the quantity and quality of volunteer placements". For those still seeking employment, a spokesperson for the Cabinet Office was keen to point out the benefits of volunteering, noting that it builds "both skills and confidence" and saying that "this is why the majority of FTSE 100 companies now offer an employer-supported volunteer scheme".

How does this situation compare with other European countries? It varies. There are similarities in Ireland, according to Yvonne McKenna, of Volunteer Ireland. She says her organisation has seen "a significant increase" in the number of people registering to volunteer since the recession – "effectively, a 100% increase on 2008 levels".

Historically, Ireland has not collected data on volunteering rates (though this is to change this year), making some comparisons between it and the UK difficult. The sector does seem to be under the same kind pressures of reductions in funding, skills and training of volunteers as the UK. "The recession has had a dual impact – organisations are relying on volunteers more, but volunteer management roles have been cut and so there are less resources to invest in supporting and managing volunteers or volunteer programmes," according to McKenna.

Another country whose sense of social cohesion has been in the spotlight is Sweden. Vanja Höglund, press manager at the country's volunteering networking organisation Volontärbyrån, says rates of volunteering have remained more or less static, but the situation is difficult to compare with the UK and austerity has ravaged Europe in general. In Sweden, volunteering is seen as part of a wider participation and involvement in society, meaning there is "no specific legislation relating to non-profit organisations and no specific regulatory system for them", according to Volontärbyrån.

For the UK, in addition to problems around funding and skills there are problems around "people's availability as they work longer hours or more than one job", says Davis Smith. "It's a challenge to make volunteering more viable for people like this, to wrap it around people's lives. "

"Casserole Club, an organisation that helps to facilitate the sharing of extra portions of cooked food with neighbours, is a good example. Technology can also help, through things such as virtual volunteering, whereby people use their computers during their lunch break to virtually mentor children in a local school. We're also seeing a growth in micro-volunteering. It's never going to replace face to face interaction but it can complement it."

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Winners of Project Oracle collected both quantitative and qualitative data and showed commitment to measuring impact

Charities should be as effective and efficient as they can be, and funders should prioritise the most effective and efficient charities. These are not controversial principles, but as everyone who works in the charity sector knows, it is not easy to turn these principles into practice. A major obstacle is the lack of clear measures of effectiveness and efficiency that tell chief executives, senior managers, and trustees, how their organisations are doing.

There is no parallel in the charity sector to measures of profit and share value that so neatly signal efficiency and effectiveness in the private sector. And there is no agreed set of social impact measurement rules and practices that mirror generally accepted accounting principles. So charities and their funders are left to their own devices to figure out how best to track their own effectiveness and efficiency.

This inevitably leads to a wide range of advice and practices, from doing nothing to over-complicating, and a lot of reinventing the wheel. Many charities, especially small ones that cannot afford a researcher, analyst, or economist to assess their impact, struggle to make sense of all this and end up putting the question "what difference do we make?" in the "too difficult" box. They do the minimum they can to satisfy their funder's demands and muddle along with an incomplete picture of what positive (and negative) impacts they might be having.

Project Oracle provides a different approach and last year I wrote about the evidence competition they were holding. Earlier this month the initiative, which is designed to help organisations who work with young people in London increase their use and creation of evidence, announced the winners of its three evidence categories. The three categories were for London youth organisations who have completed an evaluation with a strong methodology; for London youth organisations that have planned an evaluation with a strong methodology; and for any youth organisation in England and Wales that focuses on reducing youth offending, and either has or is planning a strong approach to monitoring and evaluation.

This prize is funded by the Youth Justice Board (YJB). Charities and statutory organisations that work with young people were invited to submit their past, current, and future monitoring and evaluation plans and reports to a panel of experts. This panel picked the best ten approaches and are making these available so that others can pick up good ideas and know what is "state of the art". There were 10 winners across the categories, all of whom provide great role models for others to emulate.

The winners had several elements in common:

• They have showed a real commitment to identifying the impact of their work. They invested time, energy and resources into understanding what difference they were making, going out on a limb to understand whether they make a difference rather than retreating to the comfort zone of the impact they think they see.

• They have been both ambitious and realistic about what they could achieve. They pushed the boundaries of what they can measure and evaluate, while shaping their approach to fit their service.

• They collect both qualitative and quantitative data from multiple sources, recognising that each set of data has some weakness and cannot be relied on to tell the whole story.

• They have given thought to what would have happened if their programme or service had not been around. Establishing an appropriate control group or counterfactual is a challenging task and was one they did not shy away from.

In the world of increasing funding constraints, lowering costs of technology, increasing availability of data, and increasing demand from funders for "impact", I believe that these elements will become the norm, not the exceptions.

In my work at New Philantropy Capital (NPC), we find too few charity leaders who eagerly step up to the challenge of measuring their impact rigorously. The winners of Project Oracle's evidence competition are among those; I am glad we have had this chance to reward their efforts and hope others will go on and learn from their example.

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While the wealth gap increases, we need to reverse the decline in charity and persuade the rich to commit to civil society

We face years of austerity and as incomes and tax revenues are declining, charitable giving is either falling or stalling. Inequality in Britain is increasing faster than most rich nations – it is no coincidence that the most unequal societies are also the most dysfunctional. More tax cannot be the solution without international agreement and while we continue to vote for parties who are against increasing tax and for maintaining non-dom status for UK citizens.

What has this got to do with charitable giving and why should we be bothered if it is falling? We have been giving since the beginning of time. We are programmed to be altruistic as well as competitive; just as the need to eat and procreate is rewarded by feeling good, the same applies to giving. Philanthropy helped us to establish the civil society we enjoy today and enabled law, education, hospitals, welfare and culture to flourish long before the industrial revolution required the state to address growing poverty. Today, perhaps because of the unprecedented material prosperity and massive debt created in the past 60 years, we are losing the plot. Just over half of us give to charities regularly but we seem to be giving less; the poor give proportionately more than the rich and only a small minority of the very rich are being philanthropic.

As austerity bites and some become even more selfish, we risk compromising our humanity as well as civil society. Tax cannot pay for everything; we need a strong voluntary sector. The challenge then is this: while the richest increase their wealth and the remainder grow poorer, how do we reverse the decline in charitable giving and persuade the rich to commit to civil society, both by paying tax and giving? What should the government do to encourage more philanthropy? How do we create a better society if not a big one, while the state is in retreat?

As research for my book Giving Is Good For You, I put these questions to 80 people who give or receive. Many believe that all UK passport holders should pay British taxes wherever they live; national honours should not be given to those who do not pay tax; business leaders should not be given honours unless they can prove they are charitable; there should be more honours for those who volunteer and give. Tax relief should be extended and simplified to motivate more donors, underpinning the principle that tax is not paid on money that is donated. However, to justify spending more public money to stimulate private giving, tax relief should be limited by a much stricter definition of public benefit.

The government and voluntary sector must learn what motivates donors, who are free to choose whether to spend their money on private pleasure or for public gain, although there should not be the expectation that philanthropy can compensate for reduced public expenditure. A national philanthropy strategy for the voluntary sector should have all party backing to ensure long-term planning by charities and commitment by donors.

Both the private and public sectors have hit the buffers and this gives us the opportunity to create a new social contract if politicians are up to the challenge. Philanthropists believe we should teach our children empathy as well as the virtues of a civil society and the role we should all play in sustaining it. There should be a national diploma for those at school who show commitment to the needs of others, an award that is valued by higher education and employers.

The "big society" may be a fantasy, made toxic by being politicised, but we can create a "better society", in which all should pay tax and everyone, whether giving time or money, can be a philanthropist.

• Charities
• Austerity
• Financial crisis
• Voluntary sector
• Philanthropy

John Nickson
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

We storified tweets from a Social Misfits Media workshop – 'online tools for offline targets'

It's important that charities understand digital tools and use them to achieve tangible, real world outcomes, such as to increase donations or build a relationship with supporters.

However, it can be difficult to obtain the knowledge and skills needed to use social media in an effective way. A recent workshop, put together by Social Misfits Media and called 'online tools for offline targets', brought key figures together to discuss social media.

Speakers at the event included:

• Karla Geci, director of strategic partner development at Facebook
• Damien Austin Walker, head of digital at vInspired
• Lisa Ellwood, senior digital manager at Brand for Good, Virgin Media
• Dan Calladine, head of media futures at Carat
• Zoe Amar, marketing and digital communications consultant

We've collated your tweets from the day and put them into a Storify. Anything we've missed? Share your advice in the comment section below.

Please note: this column is put together using Storify, which may not work on our mobile site and apps. If nothing loads below this paragraph, click here go to Storify itself, or use the desktop version of the site.

Come and join us on Twitter! You can follow us at @GdnVoluntary

• Charities
• Voluntary sector

Abby Young-Powell
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The welfare minister's attempt to link the rise in food banks to greed rather than poverty shows a withered meanness

I'm really only passing this on in case you missed it: it's so easy to miss a mid-afternoon debate about social security in the House of Lords. If you have a job, most likely you'll have been at work; if you don't, just admitting to have seen Lord Freud and his serpentine, clownish position-taking would probably be grounds enough to get you sanctioned.

Baroness Miller put a question about food banks. We all know the top line: their use has gone up from about 70,000 people two years ago, to Oxfam's estimated half million today. Many of us have visited a food bank, and seen first hand that peculiar, punitive blandness of charity, leaping from metaphor into real life: you can't put anything nice in a food parcel. Nothing fattening, nothing indulgent, of course nothing unusual, because realistically it will probably be kids eating it. It's the cold dead hand of a tin of frankfurters.

I don't mean this as a criticism of food banks. I'm sure they would love to add to their valiance and industry the occasional Ferrero Rocher or a potato that's not in a tin. But they're running with a crowd that sees anything beyond the means of brute survival as an outrageous gift from one human being to another. Jack Monroe, author of the brilliant blog A Girl Called Jack, who has used a food bank in the past, recalls: "There was an article in our local paper, one of the online commenters had spotted a box of Maldon sea salt, and said, 'I'm going to go and queue up at my local food bank so I can get free Maldon sea salt'. But if somebody's donated it, that's why it's there. You're at the mercy of dented cans of supermarket returns most of the time."

Anyway, yes, Lord Freud knew the very food banks of which the chamber spoke: he's a fan: "Local provision that reflects the requirements of local areas is absolutely right. Charitable provision is to be admired and supported." Well, a) he's clearly trying to make "local provision" sound like "seasonal produce", and have us imagine the destitute of Lincolnshire eating asparagus while the Kentish poor eat bacon. And b) he must know that it is not the charities we don't admire here, but the government.

The question was a technical one, about the criteria for issuing food vouchers at a Jobcentre Plus, and whether anybody was keeping tabs on how widespread hunger has become. But no, woman! The Jobcentre Plus offices "do not issue vouchers"; they have simply been "given the freedom to make local links with food banks".

Consequently, Freud said: "Food banks are not part of the welfare system. We have designed our welfare system to support people with advances of benefit where they require it. It is not the job of the DWP to monitor this provision, which is done on a charitable basis." Wait, what? People are using food banks because, for reasons of lateness or insufficiency or maladministration, their benefits aren't enough to cover food; but as soon as they're in a sub-benefit category, their referrals are no longer a DWP problem? It's like pulling the rug from underneath a person, and then saying: "I'm afraid I can only be responsible for people who are on my rug."

The Lord Bishop of Truro asked, evenly, whether ministers were prepared to concede that "there may be a link between benefit delays, errors and sanctions and the growing number of people using food banks". Here the abandonment of reason was almost festive. "It is difficult to know," averred Lord Freud, "which came first, the supply or the demand … Food from a food bank – the supply – is a free good, and by definition there is an almost infinite demand for a free good."

Infinite demand for a free good; he makes it sound so technical, so colourless, his opinion, when in fact this statement is emotionally quite charged. For an example of a normal, human evaluation of food banks, ask Katherine Trebeck, policy and advocacy manager for the UK poverty programme at Oxfam: "You have to be in a pretty desperate place to ask someone else for food."

But to factor in desperation or dignity or what a human being might need to feel part of the march of life and not trampled under its jackboot, that would take an imagination.

Let's not leave Freud wriggling on that hook; ask, instead, does his proposition make rational sense? In order for this phenomenon to be supply-led, food banks would have had to spring up from nowhere, expanding for no other reason than their enjoyment of dispersing free stuff, mainly kidney beans. The demand would have to meet and exceed supply, not because people were hungry but because they are grasping, and their appetite for free stuff had no limits.

But in that case, why don't we all (being rational creatures of the market) go to food banks? Because you have to be referred, by your local authority, or by the social services, or by a jobcentre; so now Freud would have us believe in a solid half a million people prostrating themselves before some or other agency, possibly – within his worldview – walking away from a job, for the sake of some stuff that is free. Some free peas. As an assessment of your fellow man, this is unhinged; I would say it bordered on a phobia. Maybe Freud was bitten as a baby by somebody he thought was poor.

What to do about this withered meanness, this denaturing mistrust of others? How prevalent is it? I have no idea. But when a Tory comes so close to saying who he despises and why (hungry people, for being so greedy), it seems important not to miss it.

Twitter: @zoesqwilliams

• Food banks
• Poverty
• Social exclusion
• Welfare
• Charities
• Voluntary sector
• House of Lords

Zoe Williams
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The Institute of Fundraising's national convention is told charities could tap into money in local enterprise partnerships

Local authorities are the equivalent of major donors looking for good ideas to support, so charities should proactively approach them with offers.

That was the advice given to delegates yesterday at the Institute of Fundraising's National Convention. The speaker was Kevin Curley, the former head of Navca (the National Association for Voluntary and Community Action). The audience of 120 people in London was also told they should tap into a substantial pot of money in local enterprise partnerships.

In a session called Trust and Statutory Fundraising in the Current Context – a Brave New World, charities were also warned that they were unlikely to receive money in the future without evidence of their impact.

Having a good working knowledge of The Compact, Best Value Statutory Guidance, Social Value Act and equality duty would also help get a slice of the pie, said Curley "I've spend the morning working with a borough looking to commission adult social care and they have many millions of pounds to spend," he said. "They've invited charities to come and say how they can use money to reduce demand.

"Local authorities are the equivalent of a major donor looking for good ideas. It's well worth going to them and saying that you have experience of tackling certain social issues to see whether they're interested in your innovatory solutions," he added.

Partnerships were a particularly good resource to tap into, Curley advised: "If you have any interest in getting people from minority groups into jobs, apprenticeships and volunteering opportunities, engagement with your local enterprise partnership will be crucial – they'll have serious money to spend. Charities have to organise to claim a share of budget."

He said the sector shouldn't be afraid to challenge councils on where their money was going, and a good working knowledge of various guidance and regulation such as the Social Value Act, passed early this year, would be crucial for stating their case.

Giving the council perspective, Alice Wallace, head of service, communities and the third sector at Camden council, said now was a good time for the council to test what was working, what services should be offered, to look at evidence of social value and to strengthen the sector to deliver social outcomes in the future.

She said: "The most important thing to think about is how are you evidencing impact, how are you showing how you're affecting people. If you're not providing evidence, you're not going to get money in the future."

Wallace, also a trustee of London Funders, an umbrella body, said the council did have money for the sector – if it could prove its value. Asked whether councils had reserves, she responded: "Yes we do have reserves, like any sensible organisation. But we have no idea what cuts are coming. There's a lot of caution around how reserves should be spend or whether they should be. But one things for sure, there won't be any more coming into the kitty, so we have to make sure we have enough for essential services."

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To join the voluntary sector network, click here.

• Fundraising
• Voluntary sector
• Charities

Claudia Cahalane
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Speakers at the Institute of Fundraising's National Convention press charities to think outside the box to bring in more income

Charities shouldn't leave start-ups or commercial giants, such as Nike, to break new ground, when they could capitalise with their own innovations.

This was the message given to fundraising professionals at the Institute of Fundraising's National Convention yesterday. Speakers from the charity marketing company The Good Agency and Save the Children said innovations such as the Nike Fuelband could be created by charities to bring in large amounts of funding and a stronger brand. The band retails at about £120 and tracks exercise output.

Reuben Turner, creative director for The Good Agency, said: "Nike is not interested in just selling shoes any more. They want to learn more about their customers, and the Fuelband allows them to do that. You can come up with a personal training product: there are all kinds of possibilities with the resources you have."

He added: "Charities are a major presence in sports sector, which is a growing area. You run many big sports events and have lots of data on the people who take part. I'd like to see you grab the bull by the horns and say: 'We can be innovators in this space'.

"As wearable tech becomes the next big trend and everyone wants to be fitter, how do we innovate in this space?" he added. "You don't have to be a big company like Nike to do this. There's an app called Charity Miles which uses your phone to track fitness training and posts updates to social networks. Corporates sponsor those updates, and the money goes to charity. There are many similar platforms existing which charities can use in an innovative way."

Turner was speaking in the Innovation in Giving section of the conference – a why-it-matters, where-it's-coming from and how-to-make-it-happen session, which was full to capacity. His co-speaker Joe Morrison, strategic innovation manager at Save the Children who addressed the age profile of people who give to charities.

"For many of us, our bulk of donors are ageing. How are you going to get a new generation in? They want flexibility, instant gratification, transparency, tangibility, immediacy, relevance and value exchange. Charities want guaranteed income and long-lasting relationships, planned feedback and unrestricted income ... Perhaps we have to accept that some people are just not going to give regularly ... the landscape is changing but the ask often isn't."

Morrison said later: "I'd be surprised if those who innovate have a 100% water-tight business case. It's fascinating how smaller companies and organisations innovate, but bigger ones have more resources to do so. You have scope to do it."

Turner encouraged charities to think about how they could put donors directly in touch with recipients of their charity or the cause. He suggested dreaming up pioneering ways. Charities should think about creating products to sell and ways that people could invest in a cause rather than just donate to it.

He highlighted a number of examples, including Solar Aid, which dropped its charity model to sell solar lamps instead of give them away, in order to keep recycling money and keep installing more. Another example he gave was the DePaul Box Company which sells storage boxes for people who are moving, to fund homeless projects.

"You can ask for £10 in many ways," said Turner. "Can you turn the ask into an event – and an investment? With a new landscape, how can you reframe your ask for people who don't normally give? That's what you need to think about."

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To join the voluntary sector network, click here.

• Fundraising
• Charities
• Voluntary sector

Claudia Cahalane
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Corporate charitable donations are not only down, but unequally distributed, with the most deprived areas losing out, according to new research

The "big society" is bigger in some areas of society than others. That's one conclusion you might take from the findings of new research which shows not just how much (or how little) large companies give to charities, but importantly, where their donations go.

According to the Directory of Social Change (DSC), the most recent financial accounts for the UK's biggest corporate givers (the majority for the year 2010-11) donated £603m worth of support to charities, including £470m in cash,

As may be expected in a recession, corporate giving is down, both in cash terms (down 16%) and as a percentage of pre-tax profits.

Interestingly, the financial services sector gives the most, accounting for around half the cash donated, or around 0.7% of pre-tax profits (compared to 0.3% across the board, but still below the 1% of profits some see as the benchmark for corporate charity giving). There are also some individual exceptions; but for the most part company giving is underwhelming.

As DSC chief executive Debra Allcock-Tyler said recently:

I surely can't be the only person who feels truly horrified by the evidence in this report of the paucity of company giving in Britain. Yes there are some who give, give generously and give well. But what is comprehensively demonstrated in the Almanac is that the vast majority of our companies in the UK have a great deal to be ashamed about.

What is also distinctive about company giving is how skewed the distribution of corporate largesse is. For the most part, companies are remarkably parochial about their charity support, says DSC; the biggest companies tend to be in wealthier areas, and focus charity giving in their own back yard.

DSC's Dr Catherine Walker, the author of the Company Giving Almanac 2013, told me:

The big story is that the money is not going to where the need is.

Again there are some exceptions: west Yorkshire, for example, has several of the most deprived boroughs in the UK, but corporate giving looks relatively healthy, explained mainly by the singular generosity of the late Jimi Heselden, an ex-miner turned multi-millionaire entrepreneur who made several generous donations to the voluntary sector in Leeds.

But the exceptions do not confound the wider pattern of corporate charitable giving. According to DSC:

The majority of companies firstly consider supporting causes which are close to home, figuratively and geographically, with many concentrating their giving around their headquarters, main offices or branches.

This leaves some of England's most deprived areas (the DSC data is shown in county areas, rather than by local authority areas, except in London) with apparently no support from large corporate donors. These tend to be mainly in the north of England, the west Midlands, and in rural areas.

So the table below shows that while 16.9% of south Yorkshire, which includes Labour leader Ed Miliband's Doncaster constituency, suffers from income deprivation, the total percentage of corporate donations invested in the area stands at 0.1%. At the other end of the scale, Oxfordshire, home to the prime minister, David Cameron, has an income deprivation score of just 6.4% but hoovers up 6.5% of charitable donations.

In London, this imbalance creates some interesting variations, as the graph below shows: Westminster, which has a mid ranking income deprivation score of 17.5% (shown in red) but a high density of big businesses, accounts for 35% of corporate donations (shown in yellow). Haringey, Enfield and Islington all have scores of over 20% of the income deprivation scale but, according to DSC, do not attract donations from big corporates. Tower Hamlets is the poorest of all, but, caught in the glow of the financial titans around Canary Wharf, it attracts 5.9% of corporate giving in the capital.

Luckily for charities, corporate largesse is a relatively small part of their total income (2%, compared with 43% from individuals, 37% for the state, and 9% from charitable foundations).

But the corporate giving figures confirm other uncomfortable big society truths: that charities tend to be concentrated in wealthier areas, and that volunteering and civil society is stronger in those neighbourhoods. They also compound the effects of the unequal distribution of local government cuts, which are most harsh in the poorest boroughs.

It may be of course, that all this puts too much emphasis on company giving as a marker of corporate social responsibility. How many of the big givers pay a living wage to their employees? How many "generous" companies can guarantee that the low paid workers who clean their corporate HQ's are not also dependent on charity food banks and school breakfast clubs?

The DSC data is by necessity broad brush. It doesn't include small and medium size companies. It doesn't claim that because a company is based in, say, Surrey, all its corporate donations stay in Surrey. But it points to a wider concern: that large scale corporate charitable giving is not efficiently, or equitably, distributed.

Walker challenges corporates to take a new approach:

What we want is for companies to stand back and look at the big picture... rather than just giving in their local community

• Public sector cuts
• Voluntary sector
• Charities
• Philanthropy
• Local government

Patrick Butler
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Social care minister Norman Lamb will outline neighbourhood watch-style scheme to help meet needs as care budget shrinks

Local communities should set up "neighbourhood watch" groups to support elderly people living alone or needing help with everyday tasks, according to the government's social care minister.

Norman Lamb risks criticism that he is calling on volunteers to step in to meet people's needs after deep government cuts in funding for councils that pay for care services.

But the minister will insist in a speech on Wednesday evening that he is not suggesting replacing "the safety net and essential care and support the NHS and local government provides, which is substantial and effective".

Rather, he will say, the rapid ageing of the population demands fresh thinking and action to meet growing care needs: "We have a grassroots movement to keep an eye on our neighbours' houses and property to guard against crime. So what about one to guard against isolation?"

The number of older people in England with care needs is forecast to rise by 60% over the next 20 years, but means-tested state funding will be guaranteed under government plans only for those whose needs are judged "substantial".

The number of people who received some form of council-funded care and support in their own homes dropped from 958,000 in 2009-10 to 802,000 in 2011-12.

Lamb, a Liberal Democrat, is due to float the idea of a neighbourhood watch scheme for the care of older and vulnerable people when he speaks at a Guardian debate on the challenges and opportunities presented by the ageing society.

The minister is expected to say: "I want to explore how we can reawaken communities' natural volunteer spirit to help provide an extra layer of support for older people. That means tapping into the energy of communities, bridging the gap between generations and encouraging everyone to help avoid leaving people lonely and isolated."

According to the Campaign to End Loneliness, one in 10 old people feels lonely "always" or "severely", and the effect of this on their health is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

• Social care
• Social exclusion
• Volunteering
• NHS
• Liberal Democrats
• Voluntary sector
• Older people

David Brindle
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds