Purpose, governance and engagement – why third sector organisations must face the big questions

March 30, 2009 by · 7 Comments
Filed under: The RSA 

(A short blog today as it’s already late, it’s Monday and I had some really good comments over the weekend so have already spent an hour on my site!)

We had an interesting session here this morning with a range of people from third sector organisations discussing issues around legitimacy, accountability and public value. The discussion deserves a fuller report but I’ll leave that to Katherine Hudson (who has promised to comment on this post).

Having listened to a wide ranging presentation from Indy Johar of Architecture00 and Joost Beunderman from Demos, and to the case study outlined by Dick Penny who runs the Bristol Watershed Media Centre I suggested that – in thinking about their public value – third sector organisations need to examine three distinct issues:

• Purpose and methods – what are we for and how do we work?
• Governance – how, and to whom, are we accountable?
• Engagement – how do we connect to the people we are supposed to serve?

When organisations are first created the three questions have one answer but through a process of organisational entropy the answers start to diverge. In many organisations (and I have to admit the RSA is sometimes one) the long standing formal structures of accountability can actually impede wider engagement. Other organisations may have gone through major changes in their aims and methods without being sure what this means for how they are governed or how they engage (this is Watershed’s issue).    
   
As I said in a recent blog about membership organisations, many new charities are being set up with minimalist governance structures (akin to a private company). This doesn’t mean they don’t want to consult, engage or be answerable – just that they don’t see this being assisted by a cumbersome or quasi democratic internal governance.

But if a charity or social enterprise is having an impact, if it is receiving public money or acting with a public mandate, isn’t it important that it has robust governance? If an organisation has a long history where do today’s managers and Trustees get the authority to reform that mission?

These are tough questions. They lie behind some of the governance reforms we are putting in place here at the RSA. For too many organisations reforming, and seeking to align governance, purpose and engagement, feels like too much hard and distracting work. But a failure to examine, to modernise and to align will sooner or later undermine any organisation.

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Coming clean about membership

February 19, 2009 by · 32 Comments
Filed under: The RSA 

Yesterday afternoon saw me in the City leading an NCVO seminar on the future of membership organisations. (I arrived late and, given the name of the venue and the use of blogging and twittering in the seminar, was open to the accusation ‘Taylor couldn’t organise a mash up in The Brewery’.)
 
From what was a lively session – part of an NCVO/RSA project on membership – three points particularly struck me:
 
1)      Organisations find it very hard to be honest about the task of managing and engaging with their membership. It was only after I was very open about how challenging this is at the RSA that other delegates started to open up. It turns out that the issues are very similar in many different types of organisations. Change involves simultaneously confronting barriers (such as activist capture, cumbersome governance and stuffy inward looking cultures), building capacity (finding new ways – particularly on-line – of engaging people) and developing new content propositions (what are we asking members to do and how can we make this an attractive and rewarding proposition).
2)      Creating a new culture and set of expectations among members and in the relationship between the centre and localities can be a major, time consuming and resource intensive change management process. Many organisations lack the confidence or resources to confront the issues, so they are continually brushed under the carpet.
3)      Very few new charities are creating democratic or quasi democratic membership structures. New philanthropists and social entrepreneurs have seen the hassle that can be involved and tend to plump for much leaner and more centralised forms of governance.
 
I have written in the past about the need for what I called ‘a new collectivism’. More than ever we need organisations that engage people not just in signing petitions or raising money but in shaping the way the organisation works and what it tries to achieve; this is practical citizenship. But the cultures of too many membership organisations are unsuited to modern expectations and challenges and can be off-putting to, for example, younger people. That’s why this NCVO/RSA project is important not just for the organisations directly involved but for the health of wider civil society.

For more information about the NCVO/RSA project, please contact either Katherine Hudson (katherine.hudson@rsa.org.uk) or Megan Griffith Gray (Megan.Griffith@ncvo-vol.org.uk).

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