How NCVO Consultancy can help you
The NCVO Consultancy team can offer direct support to your organisation in a range of areas. Whatever your challenges, we will work alongside you to help you find the best solution. We can help you with:
Strategic thinking and planning
Planning your ICT (information and communication technology)
Impact monitoring and reporting
Conflict and dispute resolution
Foresight scanning to spot threats and opportunities
Need something else?
If you're looking for support in other areas, you could try searching the online NCVO Directory of Approved Consultants.
Getting ready for cuts
If your organisation is facing cuts, our specially designed service Getting Ready for Cuts will help your organisation prepare for these changes. We’ll come and work directly with your team to help you identify the scenarios you’re likely to face, improve your readiness for change and develop a useful action plan.
Find out more about the easy-to-arrange, value-for-money Getting Ready for Cuts package.
Strategic thinking and planning
Stay ahead of the game
If you feel that your organisation is missing out on opportunities or is too often caught unaware, we can help you identify the key upcoming trends which are most likely to affect you. We'll explore together how to use this information to your advantage.
Get focused
You may have a sense that your organisation is drifting, or are concerned that there's no shared sense of direction within your team. We can help you get back on track.
Revitalise
Perhaps it's time for your organisation's strategic review but you want to avoid going through the same old exercises. We can bring a host of ideas to re-energise your strategic planning process to make it a more meaningful experience and ensure that your organisation really is prepared for the future.
Governance and leadership
Reviewing your governance
Do you want to review your organisation's governance arrangements? Perhaps you feel your governance is no longer fit for purpose or that your future plans will require a change in arrangements. We can work with you to review all aspects of your governance and assist you to get things into shape.
Building effective governance
If you're concerned that your board may not have all the skills, experience and knowledge it needs - for example, understanding of funding and finance options - we can help identify any gaps and fill them by developing your existing trustees or assisting with recruitment.
Where your board lacks clarity about its role and responsibilities, we'll help to ensure posts and roles are clearly defined and understood.
Are you a new board, or a board in need of cohesion? We can work with you to foster good relations between trustees, and between your board and CEO, and assist you where relationships have broken down.
You may be rethinking the size of your board or reviewing the nature of membership involvement in it. Whatever change you may be considering, we'll support you to ensure that your governance is as effective as it needs to be.
Providing leadership
Does your board or CEO need to develop their leadership skills? Effective and inspiring leaders are key to releasing the full potential of their organisations. We provide training and support to make this happen!
Sustainable funding
Developing a sustainable funding strategy
Do you know where your income will come from in the coming years? Having a sustainable income base is essential to delivering and developing the work of your organisation. We can help you navigate the challenging current climate, to identify appropriate income streams and translate these options into new funding.
For organisations facing cuts, our specially designed Getting Ready for Cuts service will help you prepare for these changes.
Putting personalisation into practice
If you are involved in public service delivery, you’ll know that personalisation is radically changing the design, delivery and funding of many services. Our tailored support will help your organisation respond effectively to this need for fast paced change.
Find out more about our sustainable funding consultancy.
People and skills
Recruiting the right people
Finding the right people to employ to enable your organisation to fulfil its purpose can often prove challenging. Whether you're looking for staff to fill vacant posts or need support to design new roles we can help you create a successful recruitment strategy or an effective organisational structure.
Developing your people
Identifying training needs and supporting your staff and volunteers to be even more effective is crucial to your organisation's success and for the individuals within it. We'll design induction courses for new team members, advise you on how to identify learning and development needs and support you in becoming a learning organisation.
With our knowledge of National Occupational Standards we can advise you on developing in-house training courses and adapting your existing training to fit the new Qualifications Credit Framework.
Managing people well
Being a good employer is a complex business and within the ever-changing world of HR and employment law there are many key elements to get right and keep up to date. We can provide you with an HR audit to assess your needs. Advice on HR policies, performance, salary structure and diversity strategy are some of the areas in which we can offer expertise.
Planning your ICT (information and communication technology)
Are you working effectively?
Do you feel your organisation is spending too much time doing things manually, such as producing reports, compiling financial information or sending out newsletters? We can support you to use ICT to become more effective and efficient.
Make the most of technology
We'll help ensure that your organisation makes the best use of technology so that your ICT is well planned, used and maintained. In this fast-paced world, we can also help you to maximise the benefits of technology, so that you can keep up to date easily with essential news.
We provide impartial information and advice, bespoke training and facilitated meetings to help you think through your use of ICT and develop your strategic ICT plan. We'll help you get the most from your investment so that you can do more with your time and money.
Impact monitoring and reporting
Producing an impact report?
We can help create resources that will:
- make your audiences appreciate just how much you have achieved
- help you to attract more support, from donations and funding, to volunteers and new champions for your cause
- enable you to build on past experiences to make even more of a difference.
Need to measure your outcomes?
If you want to know more about how effective your organisation really is, our Consultancy team can work with you to set up or revise the processes which will be able to tell you. We can help you to design or develop your systems for tracking progress and we can offer pointers on how to judge your success and how to use your findings to create even more of an impact.
Research
Do you need to improve your evidence base? Would you like better information about your users and their needs, or the causes of the problem you are addressing? Perhaps you want to investigate your operating environment, or better understand the impact of your work.
Research can help inform your decision-making, make a case to secure new funding, and support advocacy work. We can help you generate the evidence you need, select the best methods, and ensure your analysis is appropriate, robust and targeted enough to provide first-class findings.
Getting the most out of your survey
Surveys can be very powerful, but often they are badly designed and fail to provide the right information or accurate results. We can help you to ensure:
- your sample is chosen correctly
- you get maximum response rates
- your responses are unbiased
- your results mean what they say.
Successful focus groups and in-depth interviews
We can help you set up and conduct your focus groups or in-depth interviews correctly, to provide the information your organisation needs.
Making the most of your data
Many organisations spend a lot of money on research, then don't make full use of the information. Our Consultants can work with you to exploit your results to their maximum potential and draw conclusions that will help your organisation to develop its work effectively.
Collaborative working
Considering working with others?
Collaborative working can take many forms and bring huge benefits but it isn't right in all cases. It can be all too easy to overlook the potential pitfalls. If your organisation is considering working with others, we can help you identify the barriers and decide whether to proceed.
Undertaking joint work
If you're embarking on a collaborative project, whether sharing resources or working jointly on a 'frontline' project, we can offer independent guidance to help you navigate the obstacles and maximise the chances of success.
Our dedicated support involves providing impartial information and advice, and bespoke training workshops. We can facilitate meetings between potential partners, advise on structures and other arrangements, and support you in developing written joint working agreements.
Conflict and dispute resolution
Overcoming obstacles, working with partners
With more organisations working together on projects and entering into complicated relationships to deliver programmes of work, areas of dispute can easily arise. If your organisation is experiencing difficulties in the way that it is working with others, or has specific areas of conflict with another organisation, we can help.
We will help you to resolve the difficulties that you have through mediation, identifying mutually agreed ways of working, and strategies of resolution. We can also help with conflicts with public bodies.
Involving users
Giving your users a real voice
Do you feel that you are just going through the motions when it comes to involving users in your organisation's activities? If you want to give your users a real voice, we can help you to achieve this.
Choosing the right approach
Whether you are a membership body or have a wide range of client groups, we can help you to explore a range of options for involving your users, from consultations and advisory panels, to involvement in your governance processes. We'll make sure that you are able to choose the best solution, both for your own needs and to respond to your users' expectations. Whether building on what you already do or developing new options, we'll help you deliver even better opportunities for participation and ultimately, use the insights you gain to create better services and greater impact.
Campaigning
Whether you are campaigning to save a local community centre from closing, or lobbying government, we can help you to ensure that your campaigns work creates real change and makes a positive impact on people's lives.
Creating campaigns?
We can support you to make best use of limited capacity and resources by helping you to develop an effective strategy for your campaigning work and to create realistic, winnable plans for individual campaigns. We'll work with you to ensure you can maintain your focus and momentum, and achieve your campaign's change objectives. We can also bring our own campaigning experiences to the table to offer advice on the best ways to actually deliver your campaign.
Evaluate your campaign
We can deliver individual assessments of your campaigns, helping you to judge whether you are really making a difference. Our evaluations will draw out lessons and recommendations to build into future campaigns, enhancing your effectiveness in influencing change.
Tailored campaigns training
We offer specialist campaigns training, tailored to your organisation's needs. Our courses can help to build the capacity of your organisation to influence people in the most effective way and to create real and lasting change through your campaigns work.
Find out how our service works and meet the team.
