Setting the framework

"Governance is not necessarily about doing; it is about ensuring things are done.” The Good Governance Action Plan, Sandy Adirondack, NCVO, 2000

As the governing body you help provide leadership and direction to your organisation by setting a clear framework for its work.

Vision and mission

The board ensures that the organisation is clear about its vision and mission and that all its activities contribute ultimately to their achievement. As a board member, you will participate in regularly revisiting the vision and mission to satisfy yourselves that they reflect your founding purpose and the current needs of your members or beneficiaries.

Values

Your board provides moral leadership in the values it embodies and the culture it fosters. These will in turn be reflected in the way that staff and volunteers work. One useful way of examining these is to ask what values you are encouraging in your organisation through the policies you adopt and the behaviours you reward? Do you instil confidence by demonstrating integrity? Have you made your values explicit, or have you signed up to existing values e.g. the Nolan principles.

Strategy

A well considered strategy is essential to your organisation's effectiveness. As a trustee you may not craft the strategy yourself, but it is your responsibility to ensure it exists and that  it is coherent, clear and consistent with your organisation's aims. Read more about the strategy development process.

Impact

An important role of every Board is to ensure that the organisation is achieving its aims. Board members need to be confident that the organisation’s activities are really making a  difference to the lives of those they are intended to benefit.  Board members can assist by ensuring they agree appropriate targets, and ways of regularly tracking and assessing progress.   It’s important to focus on the outcomes for your users rather than simply the size or scale of your activities. You need to look beyond efficiency to effectiveness.

Useful resources on effectiveness and outcomes can be found at the Charities Evaluation Services and at the Performance Hub .

Further information

Living Values Training Pack (NCVO) highlights the importance of identifying values, and acting consistently with them.

For further information on outcomes see the National Outcomes Programme run by Charities Evaluation Services.  For information on the popular Outcomes Star see Triangle consulting.

The New Economics Foundation has produced a useful guide to different approaches to proving impact: Prove and Improve.

CES’s Monitoring and evaluation resource guide offers over 100 online and published books, tools, discussion papers and factsheets on all aspects of evaluation.

Learning from your experience

• Does your board monitor and/or evaluate the work of the organisation?
• Who initiates this – the Board or the chief executive / director? Does it matter?
• What is the right proportion of time and money to allocate to Board evaluation of the organisation?
• Have you experienced a process that you felt was a waste of time? What was it and why?
• Is evaluation of your work  best undertaken by an outside consultant? If yes, why? If not, why not?