Stewarding resources

Your governing body will be keen to ensure that your organisation:

• attracts the resources that it needs
• uses the resources wisely
• accounts for their use.

Even if you have staff to help you, the ultimate responsibility rests with you. These pages therefore focus on the role of the governing body.

Money and financial assets

All governing bodies have the central task of making sure that the organisation has the financial resources needed to deliver its aims, uses them to achieve its full potential and accounts for their use.

• Raising money
• Budgeting, controlling and accounting for money
• Financial risk

Further information

The Finance Hub produced a wide range of useful resources on fundraising and finance (before its closure in March 2008).  These include: Introducing Funding Finance miniguide (PDF, 740KB).

Unlocking the Potential: A guide to finance for social enterprise produced by the Social Enterprise Coalition focuses on non-grant finance.

Climbing the ladder: Step by step finance for social enterprise edited by Andrew Bibby for Social Enterprise London

The Charity Commission has a number of relevant guides on funding and finance and accounting and reporting. e.g. Charity Reporting and Accounting: The essentials; Charities' Reserves; Charities and Fundraising.

The Institute of Fundraising has produced a special guide for trustees: Trustee's guide to fundraising.

People

Whether it is volunteers or staff who make up your workforce, you need to act within the law and enable them to give of their best. The governing body needs to ensure it has appropriate policies and processes in place, for example relating to volunteers and to the recruitment, support and management of staff. Take care how you treat volunteers, you could inadvertently make them employees in the eyes of the law.  

Members of the board  should  know the structure of the organisation, salary scales and the range of posts within your organisation. You may also feel it helpful to know about salary and reward packages in the sector – especially relating to your chief officer.

Further information

The annual Croner Reward survey is a useful source of salary information, particularly of Chief Officers. You may be able to see it at a local CVS. 

People Count™ Voluntary Sector is a human resource benchmarking tool run by Agenda consulting. 

See also the you and your team section.

Reputation

Reputation is critical for nonprofit organisations. Your reputation gives people the confidence and inspiration to donate, volunteer or choose your product or service over someone else’s. A strong brand will help you gain support. Reputation is hard earned and easily lost.

It is essential to safeguard your reputation. Risks can come from many different sources: a bad experience for a user, volunteer or donor; perception of money being wasted; concern about campaigning activities; an ill-advised link up with a company; a complaint from a neighbour; an invoice not paid, injury to a worker or criminal activity. It is essential that everyone involved in the organisation plays their role in maintaining and enhancing your reputation.

As board members, questions you may wish to consider include: Does your organisation have ethical policies on areas such as suppliers, procurement, accepting donations or investment.? Are you aware of your stakeholders' views on key social and ethical issues, and particularly of any mismatch between their expectations and your practice? How are you investing to improve your reputation?

Further information

Relevant Charity Commission guidance includes: Charities and Commercial Partners

See also: brand section. 

Knowledge

Knowledge management is much underrated within organisations and therefore by governing bodies. Too often  knowledge is held only in the heads of the staff – and is easily lost when they leave. There is often a low understanding of the potential of information technology. Understanding the value of what the organisation’ knows’ and enabling that information to be shared and captured will help the organisation be more effective.

Further information

The Information and Communication Technology Hub (which was wound up in March 2008) produced a wide range of useful resources on ICT. These include an ICT survival guide for trustees.

Learning from your experience

• What resources have you found useful?
• Does your finance committee work well? Why and how? What are your top tips?
• Have you had a trustee who has jeopardized the reputation of your organisation? What did you do? What was the outcome?
• How can a governing body stay well informed about the staff and volunteers without interfering with management? Tell us how you do it.
• Does your organisation have a policy or articulated approach to knowledge management? How does it work ? Tell us about it.
• What does your governing body know about how your organisation tries to collect, collate and share its knowledge? Could you be doing more?
• How does a governing body ask about the knowledge management work within the organisation and get an intelligible response?

Either add your comments here or talk with others on the governance forum. 

(Help with reading PDFs - Adobe conversion tool is a free way to convert PDFs to web pages so you can read them online.)