Coping with cuts: Practical advice guides

Smart planning and creative thinking will be crucial to remaining sustainable and resilient in the current economic climate. Here we pull together a selection of our practical advice guides to help you future-proof your organisation in tough financial climes.

• Funding and finance
• Strategy and impact
• Managing and developing your workforce
• Collaborative working
• Innovation
• Use your Compact

Funding and finance

Our Sustainable Funding team provide a variety of tools and resources that can help you develop and implement a sustainable income. They also offer comprehensive advice about financial management and oversee Funding Central, our free website which gives you access to thousands of funding and finance opportunities.

• Planning for change - Sustainable Funding in times of uncertainty
  Information and guidance that may help you to plan for the future and take action to secure sustainable funding.
• Financial difficulties - managing a crisis
  Information on income shortfall, restructuring and refinancing and the mechanics of dealing with a crisis or facing insolvency
• Future financial stability
  Broaden your income base and explore sustainable funding not as a single source of income - but as a process comprising several related parts. 
• Financial strategy
  Discover how to plan strategically and holistically to effectively manage your financial resources.
• Minimise waste
  Don't hesitate to renegotiate contracts, look at loan pricing, review safety of assets as well as make some hard decisions and trim excesses within.
• Sustainable funding in practice - video case studies
  A new series of video case studies that give real life examples of organisations implementing a sustainable income approach.
• Winding up an organisation - there are many different reasons for closing down an organisation. We have brought together resources, from advice guides to real life example to help support you during this process.  

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Strategy and impact

Defining what your organisation wants to achieve and learning how to demonstrate the impact of your work will help you manage uncertainties and track progress – increasingly important in the current political climate.

• Addressing Needs
  Making the case for your cause has never been more crucial - make sure you know how to understand needs, demonstrate needs convincingly and respond to need effectively.
• Focus on your mission
  Keeping sight of your organisation's purpose will help you make the best decisions for your beneficiaries or cause, maintain a clear sense of direction, and become less likely to slide into fire-fighting mode.
• Demonstrate your impact
  Being able to demonstrate your impact is crucial to your organisation's future success; and never more so than in the economic downturn.

In addition to these guides, you can find stacks more information on our Third Sector Foresight website – a useful resource for identifying key trends that may affect your organisation and plenty of pointers to help you respond.

Managing and developing your workforce

Spending cuts are likely to have a direct impact your workforce - our Workforce Development resources will guide you through the difficult processes of restructuring and redundancy, as well as giving you key tips on recruiting and motivating volunteers.

• Staff management
  How to communicate and appear transparent during restructuring and motivate and engage staff at such a difficult time.
• Avoid redundancies (PDF)
  Redundancy might seem the most obvious cost-cutting solution, but there are alternatives you should consider first.
• Ensure fair redundancy
  Redundancy needs to be handled sensitively - make sure you first read how and when an employee can be made legally redundant.
• Develop your staff on a tight budget (PDF)
  A skilled workforce will be critical to your success – here’s how to keep developing your staff during difficult times.
• How to manage volunteers
  Turning interest in your organisation into a committed volunteer workforce can bring lasting benefits.

Our HRBank service also includes eight example policy documents about redundancy and restructuring – you can request them directly from the team and then tailor them to meet your own needs. Make sure you download our free sources of HR Support PDF too.

Collaborative Working

Informal networks, joint delivery of projects or even full mergers – there are many ways charities can work together to improve their efficiency and effectiveness in times of financial difficulties.

• Merging and shared resourcing
  An introduction to some of the key issues for exploration, and a downloadable checklist to help you decide whether to embark on collaborative working.

• Browse our Collaborative Working hub for more information about working with other organisations, including FAQs, common working models and recent case studies.

Innovation

Innovation is not about having ideas, it is about having the ideas that you need and making them happen. 

NCVO Innovation is here to support you with thinking differently; making the most of opportunities; rising to challenges; and adapting your organisational approach to innovation. Find out more and have a work your way through our resources.

Use your Compact

The Compact is an agreement between the voluntary sector and the Government to ensure better working together. Learn how to use your Compact to navigate new funding relationships by reading these bite-sized guides (produced by our Compact Advocacy team and published on compactvoice.org.uk).

• Guide to challenging unfair funding cuts (PDF)
  This quick guide brings together the resources that you can use to check if funding cuts are made in the right way, and how you can challenge unfair decisions.
• Cuts - to challenge or not to challenge? (PDF)
  This guide from Empowering the Voluntary Sector gives advice, case studies, scenarios and tips on how the Compact, public law and equalities duties can be used when challenging cuts.
• Safeguarding Stability [PDF]
  Discover how to make "smart cuts", rather than unstrategic short-term cost savings.
• Case Study: Good Practice (Thurrock)
  Compact principles can sometimes be overlooked when money is tight – here’s how the Compact helped the local authority of Thurrock through a difficult situation. Read more case studies like this on the Compact Voice website.

Still looking for more advice? Don't forget that if you're a registered user of the site you can use our online discussion boards or community groups for peer to peer support.

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