Researching the Voluntary Sector Conference

The full papers are now online from the sixteenth annual VSSN/NCVO Researching the Voluntary Sector Conference, which Karl blogged about last week.

It was my third conference and as usual was a fantastic mix of academics, researchers and practitioners with a wide range of interesting papers and discussions (including a few late night post-dinner conversations!).

I thought I might pick out some of the papers that were a highlight for me. One of the great things about the conference is the range of subjects covered - researchers covering lots of academic disciplines with varied interests.

The five papers are mostly particular to my area of interest - the size and scope of the sector - so they only scratch the surface of what was covered there. The papers are in no particular order - this isn't a countdown!

• Gareth Morgan (PDF 115KB) - The Use of UK Charity Accounts Data for Researching the Performance of Voluntary Organisations.

A must for anyone wanting to use charity accounts in their research, Gareth's paper calmly guides you through the pitfalls of accounts-based data. We'll certainly be looking to this paper when writing the next Almanac

• Peter Backus and David Clifford - Are big charities becoming increasingly dominant? Tracking charitable income growth 1997-2008 by initial size (PDF 374KB) and Trends in the concentration of income among charities (PDF 395KB).

Peter and David slightly cheated by submitting two complementary papers to the same session (but we'll let them off). They've reconstructed historic records of charities' income back to the mid-1990s to examine claims of "tescoisation" in the sector.

They run a sharp analytical eye over this contentious issue, and their findings add much to the discussion.

• Peter Maple - Developing Marketing for South Bank Mosaics (SBM) (PDF 29KB).

The subject of Peter's paper - marketing - is not my area of expertise at all, but his presentation on the work of a South Bank Mosaics (who operate near where I live) gave a great insight into the debates and challenges surrounding social enterprise, and is a great example of action research in action.

• Peter R. Elson - A Slice of the Pie: An overview of provincial voluntary sector-government relations in Canada (PDF 903KB).

I think Karl might be blogging more about Peter's paper (the third Peter in my list!) in the next few weeks, but it was interesting to get a view from Canada on the impact that public service cuts can have on the voluntary sector.

Canada is often held up as a model for the speed of the Coalition's deficit reduction plans, so any specific lessons for the voluntary sector may be vital.