Real-life Tales of Earning - Speaking Up!

Trading training

This case study tells the inspiring story of Speaking Up!, a Cambridge based charity supporting adults with learning difficulties to take control of their own lives.

Over the last 5 years Speaking Up! has generated £75,000 nearly 20% of total income, from the sale of its innovative training and consultancy package, promoting user-led services and self-advocacy to the staff and service users of other social care organisations that work with people with learning difficulties.

'Not being able to speak up is not the same as having nothing to say.'

Speaking Up's trading activity derives from is core mission objectives: it is a form of mission-related furthering organisational mission objectives in a self-financing project and generating income for the organisation's core costs and

This case study's key message is twofold: to encourage thinking about how the expertise and know-how derived from an organisation's core activity might make money; and how trading mission-related products can generate income and fulfil central mission - how mission and money can be effectively intertwined.

You can find out more about Speaking Up! via their website at www.speakingup.org

What is 'Speaking Up!' ?

Speaking Up! is a self-advocacy project, encouraging people with learning difficulties to take control of their own lives. In its own words, 'Speaking Up! is about 'helping people to realise their talents, live their dream and fulfil their human potential.'

Based in Cambridgeshire, it has over 160 members and has been running since 1994. It is different because people with learning disabilities decide what the project will do: Speaking Up! is run by a Board of ten directors, six of whom have a learning difficulty. Out of its 13 staff, three have learning difficulties.

Right from the first Speaking Up! has generated income from trading. This is the story of how.

What does 'Speaking Up!' do?

Income generation is one of several activities that happen within the organisation. Members of Speaking Up! do many different things including

Meeting in self-advocacy groups

James Fletcher, Group Project Worker, explains:

'We learn about speaking up for ourselves, for our rights. Sometimes it can be difficult to make our own choices. The groups help you do this. We talk about different issues like transport, relationships and keeping healthy. It is good to get out of the day centres and meet new friends.'

These groups meet regularly to talk about issues that affect the lives of people in the group and exist around the county.

Campaigning & User Involvement

Speaking Up! campaigns for better services for people with learning difficulties.

Speaking Up!'s first campaign centred on the introduction of day centre charges, launching a 'Can't Pay Won't Pay' demonstration which reached the front page of the Cambridge Evening News.

More recently, Speaking Up! have set up the UK's first elected Service User Parliament for People with Learning Difficulties. Six times a year, 'MPs' sit down with senior managers from statutory services to plan the future shape of service provision.

Other activities undertaken by Speaking Up! include staging a county-wide annual conference attracting up to 200 people with learning disabilities; producing a quarterly newsletter called Louder!; a video about equal opportunities; Young People Speaking Up!; and numerous media projects within Cambridge city such as 'Speaking Thru Art', allowing people with no verbal communication skills the chance to express themselves.

How did 'Speaking Up!' come into this world?

Speaking Up! is modelled on Skills for People in Newcastle upon Tyne, a project for which Speaking Up's founder and director, Craig Dearden once volunteered. Skills for People works with people with learning disabilities providing opportunities for self-advocacy and related training on, amongst a host of other issues, welfare rights.

When he moved to Cambridge, Craig quickly realised that no such provision for adults with learning difficulties existed in the town.

At the time Craig was a Co-ordinator with Community Service Volunteers ( CSV ). Through this he met a local social worker who had the personal contacts to match Craig's experience of promoting and facilitating self-advocacy.

So they held a meeting for anybody interested and Speaking Up! was born into an unsuspecting Cambridge!

One of Speaking Up's first initiatives was a photographic exhibition, representing the lives of its members. The initiative exhibited in a well-known local art gallery to popular acclaim. This not only proved an excellent way of 'helping people realise their talents and fulfil their human potential', a stimulating and fun piece of creative self-advocacy - it also began to put Speaking Up! on the local map, raising awareness of its work and its central core message.

A clear sense of mission

The first thing to strike a casual student (such as ourselves) of the evolving history of Speaking Up! is the clarity and unity of its vision - a cleanliness of mission readily apparent from the organisation's literature and people alike.

The project's initiatives are built upon the simple aspiration of supporting adults with learning difficulties in Cambridgeshire to take control of their own lives. These aspirations are reflected in 'The Stibbington Statement', drawn up by members during a weekend retreat, setting out their goals for the coming years.

It is largely owing to this clear sense of mission, allied to a simple, transparent management structure, that Speaking Up! has been able to grow (in income terms) 90% between 1996 and the year 2000. Strong roots allied to clear aims and parameters have enabled the group to evolve consistently yet flexibly, extend and diversify the range of specific activity (including the rapid expansion of their trading enterprise) without ever losing sight of their underlying inspiration, values and reason for being.

Its annual reports are also excellent examples of turning a legal obligation into a slick public relations exercise. The report, crafted in the form of an enjoyable-to-read magazine sends a practical, realistic, inspiring account to its readers. It shares challenges, set-backs and achievements in a manner that is also likely to be well received by potential funders.

The key message here is that it's not 'just' the successful development of trading income, which has set Speaking Up! on a (relatively) sustainable footing.

So how has it made money?

Right from the moment Speaking Up! kicked and screamed its way into the world it has generated income from trading what might broadly be described as its intellectual property.

Speaking Up! is and always will be reliant on grant income, but its own enterprise generates crucial, unrestricted funds as an additional revenue stream.

Merging mission and money

Selling its know-how on user-involvement and self-advocacy, Speaking Up! trains other organisations how to involve service users in service delivery.

Because training is fronted by Speaking Up!'s own members, in addition to making money, trading activity is advancing organisational mission by enabling its members to develop skills and take control of their own life: few better ways to develop self-advocacy than to teach others in the art! Last year ten training leaders completed a City & Guilds course in Training.

Making a buck and involving, equipping and empowering it's client group - it's a creative intertwining of mission and money in a simple, self-sustaining and surplus-generating enterprise.

In fact when you look closely, Speaking Up!'s trading venture is a 3-way win

• Spreading the benefits of self-advocacy , developing capacity in other organisations to deliver a user-led service
• Developing the self-advocacy potential of its own volunteers delivering the training and consultancy programmes
• Generating independent income to help secure Speaking Up!'s financial well-being

Product specifics

Speaking Up! provides full day training packages at £500 to providers of social care from public, private or voluntary sectors. Training is available for:

Staff on:

• working with people who have a learning difficulty
• creating a user-led service

Service users on:

• asking for what you want
• getting involved in service provision
• creating a user-led service
• setting up and running a self-advocacy group

'User-involvement, self-advocacy. What do these ideas mean for your organisation?' is what the product demands of its market. Craig explains: 'It's about encouraging care providers to think in different ways.'

growing the business

Ever onwards, Speaking Up! didn't stop at training. It grew the training package into bespoke consultancy helping social care providers audit and evaluate their service and has sold consultancy in Hampshire, Warwickshire and the West Midlands

Again, the consultancy package is a product delivered by Speaking Up's client group. Typically, consultancy teams work within organisations to gain an impression of their current effectiveness. Working in either a pair or group of 4, which includes a Speaking Up! staff member and volunteer who has a learning difficulty, the team carries out a series of visits, observing the daily routines within a service and immersing themselves its current ways of working. Comprehensive reports and feedback days are delivered for management, staff and service users.

The next goal is to train other organisations like Speaking Up! to become trainers themselves, thereby putting Speaking Up! and its user-focused values and practices on the map not just in Cambridgeshire but across the UK.

Is the business successful?

Yes. Income-wise, Speaking UP! is £75,000 to the good with £50,000 of that pure profit.

In addition to advancing mission and contributing to core costs, selling its services has also given Speaking Up! a chance to market itself to a wide range of organisations, including Abbey National Group plc, Cambridgeshire Constabulary and Cambridgeshire Probation Service. Important messages about the rights of people with learning difficulties have been delivered in some of the harder to reach elements of society.

Individuals have flourished too. In 1998 the Chairperson of Speaking Up! won the prestigious Whitbread Volunteer Action Award for East Anglia and Northern Home Counties and in 1999 Darren Moore collected an Active Communities Award from the Prime Minister for his volunteering at Speaking Up! Three volunteers with learning difficulties have graduated from this work into paid roles within the organisation.

But don't take our word for it. Here is what some customers have said.

'Speaking Up!'s method of evaluating services is radical and effective. They are helpful people who provide genuine feedback from service users and their own volunteer consultants giving an impressive level of managerial insight. I personally recommend them.'

Graham Nice, Manager of Strategic Change, Lifespan NHS Trust

'Our work with Speaking Up! has proved invaluable in helping nursing students to understand the needs of people who have a learning difficulty.'

Tony Bottiglieri, Cambridge School of Health Studies

'The Team from Speaking Up! provided honest, helpful feedback. The report was viewed by both Service Users and staff as being constructive and one that can be used in a practical and straight forward way.'

Derrick Biggs, Operations Manager, Cambridgeshire Social Services

Where's the catch? How was the business built and what difficulties has it overcome?

A drain on time and energy?

Speaking Up! and its social enterprise activity are certainly built upon the considerable personal effort of a number of individuals and Craig was keen to point out that it hasn't always been easy.

But so too is he energetic in arguing that setting up any activity or organisation - social enterprise, private sector business or 'traditional' charity is replete with varying degrees of birthing pain. And fundraising, as we all know, bears its own burdens, draining capacity and resources - emotional as well as cerebral. Craig is also quick to point out that while filling in a grant form does nothing in itself to advance core mission, delivering a day of training puts money in the bank and advances the organisation's primary purpose. Earning income is a whole heap more creative than asking for it.

Balancing mission and money

But hasn't the focus on developing the business sometimes meant less time for core service delivery?

Craig certainly speaks about the ever-present worry of balancing mission and money. This is a theme that surfaces recurrently in organisations that have trodden the earning route.

But in addition to the intertwining of mission and money in this form of trading activity, the clear sense of mission embedded deep in the organisation guards against the threat of 'mission-drift'.

Attracting start-up capital and initial working costs

The start-up phase involved considerable personal effort from Craig and other key individuals (not always remunerated) and the help of a grant from the local Health Trust and Comic Relief and, at a slightly later stage, the National Lotteries Charity Board.

Beyond that Speaking Up! has benefited from the fact that staffing costs are minimised by the fact that its trainers are volunteers.

Attracting finance to develop the business has, however, proved difficult.

Voluntary organisations can take loans - debt finance. But they are unable to raise funds as private business would by selling shares in the company - equity finance, which typically tends to be a better quality than debt. It is cheaper, more flexible and a portion of risk is spread to investor.

Venture Philanthropy may offer an alternative to loan financing. Financing voluntary organisations through equity investment is still, however, complicated and largely uncharted territory.

The availability of loan finance is, however, being extended by organisations such as Investors in Society, The Local Investment Fund and the London Rebuilding Society and you can read more about sources of financial support to social enterprise in the second Help! guide here in the earning chapter.

Marketing the business

Marketing the business is an ongoing concern. Most trade is repeat business and Speaking Up! has not received a single complaint about its training package. But the organisation feels that the product could be sold more aggressively. In the early stages, Business in the Community helped to access private sector marketing expertise and a key development was the appointment in 1997 of a Finance and Administration Manager. They were able to put clear systems in place, which has enabled the business to consolidate ready for future expansion.

The story of Speaking Up! is one of gradual development and continuous improvement. It's not a success that's happened overnight or without vast amounts of hard work. But from the very the organisation has been acutely aware of its assets, exploring how these can be turned not only to income-generating effect but equally to advance mission. We think it's an inspiring tale.