Recruiting trustees is an ongoing challenge for charities. The latest statistics suggest there are more than 100,000  unfilled charity trustee vacancies in the UK, with 74% of charities reporting difficulties hiring the trustees they need in 2018. It’s not only recruiting trustees that is challenging, it’s recruiting trustees with the right skills. Many charities face serious skills gaps, for instance many lack relevant legal, digital and marketing skills at board level. Increasingly, trustee boards are recognising the need to recruit trustees with more diverse skills, from a variety of different professional backgrounds to improve their effectiveness. The Charity Commission’s Taken on Trust report found that out of 700,000 trustees, two-thirds were male, the average age is 55-64 and 92% are white. The report highlighted there is a “danger that charity boards might become myopic in their views and in their decision-making”.  So how can charities ensure they have a diverse board with a broad range of skills and experience and that this is maintained? Here are some tips for recruiting Trustees in 2019: Conduct a skills audit Carry out a skills audit to check what skills the board already has and where the gaps may lie. Also check when the term of office is over for current trustees, so you can plan accordingly and ensure good succession planning. Think about your charitable objectives What is your mission? Does the board reflect the community you are serving? For instance, if you are a youth charity, can you appoint some younger trustees on the board that understand the issues younger people face today. If this is the case, you may need to change things to accommodate them. Younger trustees might not be able to take time out of their working day to attend meetings, so you may need to hold evening meetings instead.   Clear role description Conduct an audit of the competencies, knowledge and experience needed for the role and recruit in line with that brief. Make sure you have a clear vision of what your ideal new trustee will be like. Think about why someone would be interested in coming to volunteer for you. Robust recruitment process Plan the recruitment process properly scheduling in all activities and making sure those involved in the process are fully briefed. Recruiting a new trustee can take several weeks, so make sure you allow the time to do it well. Communication channels To attract the best talent, charities need to look outside their immediate networks. This may mean using communication channels such as social media. Think about where the people you would like to attract would be likely to see your advert – whether it's a local venue, specialist press, a volunteering website or elsewhere. Advertise the role Write a punchy advertising post it on your website and link to this via your social media networks. If you produce a newsletter, make sure you include the advert. Also use your current networks and engage the whole board in the process. Make sure everyone knows there is a trustee vacancy available. Use a specialist recruitment firm Consider using a professional recruitment firm with a track record of recruiting trustees. A recruitment firm will have a huge database of professionals seeking trustee roles and will able to match candidates to your exact requirements. Many companies offer a cost-effective service based on the size of the organisation. Be clear about the decision making process This needs to be clear upfront to avoid surprises later. Have a clear process for informal meetings, tours of services and interviews and who will conduct these. Interviews should be evidence based to test motivation as well as skills and experience. Make sure you always take verbal references at interview stage. Engaging new trustees A great induction can make all the difference to engage new trustees. It can also be useful for charities to assign a buddy to mentor and support new trustees. We find this can help new recruits get up to speed quickly and learn some historical details about the work of the trustees, which will help them feel more able to participate from the start at board meetings. Remember, trustees are custodians of the whole organisation, so recruiting the right people who will fit culturally with the organisation is crucial. Recruitment is an opportunity to talk about what the charity does and spread the word about the great work you are doing. The process itself can help to induct new trustees making them feel part of the organisation by the time they’re formally appointed. Sophie Livingstone is Managing Director of Trustees Unlimited. She is also Chair of early years charity Little Village and a trustee of the Royal Voluntary Service and of youth social action charity Generation Change, which she co-founded in 2013. Sophie also provides leadership to our burgeoning Step on Board programme which is transforming senior level employee volunteering.    

Senior managers and trustees of charities and social enterprises face a myriad of challenges. Managing a business is difficult enough. Running a social enterprise or a charity, which obliges you to search for innovative funding opportunities, deal with budgetary pressures caused by Government policies, put together engaging fundraising campaigns (often on shoe-string budgets), help clients who are suffering from complex issues and a complete a cornucopia of other tasks; can put enormous strain on your personal life, relationships, and mental well-being. Here are a few tips on how to reduce this strain and make your team happier and more productive. Train Your Team To Prepare For All Eventualities No organisation wants a stressed member of their team to slip and break their leg while contributing to an outreach programme. Your team could lose that colleague for months while they recover. In the same way, these organisations should ensure that the emotional challenges experienced by their workers and volunteers every day, by cases involving complex issues like drug addiction and violence, do not leave them feeling forced to withdraw from their roles due to mental ill-health because of these experiences. By training your senior management to give staff the tools to manage stress effectively and recover emotionally from traumatic experiences, you can reduce the risk of losing valuable staff for long periods due to sick leave caused by mental ill-health. Turn Your Work Team Into A Sports Team Exercise provides a fantastic opportunity to reduce stress. The positive endorphins released by the brain whenever you engage in physical activity will help you to put everything into perspective and approach the issue at hand from a different perspective. It’s difficult to stress about Monday’s emails while you’re trying not to get hit in the face by a squash ball. Plus, sports can foster a fantastic team spirit among your staff. What’s not to love? Eat And Sleep Well Being tired and hungry is hardly going to make you feel less stressed. Healthy diets and sleep patterns are essential for your colleagues’ mental well-being. Write Down How You Feel Sometimes you just need to let everything out. Particularly if you have had to deal with eight gruelling hours of difficult situations. Your notepad provides a brilliant outlet for these feelings. Writing can also let you detail the brighter aspects of your role. Writing and reading out funny stories about your job will help everyone to feel less stressed.   How We Can Help At Altruist Enterprises, we can sit down with you and create strategies to help your team manage the stresses involved in their day-to-day responsibilities, so that minor issues do not develop into emotionally draining crises. We have helped organisations across the country to increase their staff’s mental well-being and consequently, their motivation to boost that organisation’s growth. For more information on how we can help your team to eliminate stress, please click here.   Katie Buckingham is the Founder and Director of Altruist Enterprises; a passionate and caring provider of Resilience, Stress Management and Mental Health at Work training to organisations nationally. Find out more here www.altruistuk.com   

No matter what sector you’re working in and what social issue you’re working to address, every small charity shares the same challenge. Everyone is spending substantial time fundraising - whether it’s from the government, corporates or individuals. In this hugely competitive landscape charities are increasingly finding their offering pressed, having to either compromise their quality of service in order to be competitive or dedicating valuable resource to endless bid writing and event organisation. We’ve been looking at this for a long time; how do you create a sustainable income stream, and how can you make this fit with your overall mission? We’re a charity, not a social enterprise A registered charity can still be a social enterprise. If you’re already running a shop or selling items to raise money to reinvest into the activities that make a difference to people - just like Mums in need in Sheffield - you’re already halfway there. Of course, running a shop isn’t for everyone, it’s still time and labour intensive - and you need to have premises, volunteers and budget for overheads.   Developing a meaningful concept First and foremost in creating a sustainable income stream is coming up with an idea. You need to identify something which fits into your overall mission, preferably which has a social impact, whilst raising funds at the same time. Wristbands, lapel pins and even giant daffodils are great for awareness and brand building, but if you want to create something which is truly impactful on a social level you need something that tells your story. Knightsof.media is a good example of this. Investment Think about the cost of development time and resource, but also where are you going to get the funds to get your idea off the ground? Do you believe the concept is strong enough to warrant investing time in it? Can you allocate a proportion of your budget to it or do you need to look externally for funding? Crowd Funding You have your idea and believe it’s strong enough to invest time in, but you don’t have funds. Crowdfunding sites are great platforms to use, but you only get the money committed to the project if you reach your full goal. In our case, our crowdfunding campaign didn’t reach our target, but it generated awareness and ultimately a single donor who believed enough in our idea to give us the full financial backing we needed. Timing Bear in mind that for any new enterprise it can take up to three years for an idea to start generating a profit for you. A sustainable income stream is not an overnight solution to short-term cash flow. Together Equal - Our Solution Our aim as a not-for-profit is to support small, independent charities working towards equality by helping to develop a sustainable income stream through these conversation cards. We really believe that by driving conversations around key talking points we’re building awareness, consideration and ultimately deeper understanding of the challenges arising from the lack of equality in our society. Our roots are in working within the VAWG (Violence Against Women and Girls) charity sector so this first set of conversation cards has been developed in association with our charity partners -  specifically The Dash Charity. Together Equal drafted an initial list of questions which we then refined with Dash, replacing some with questions that came from their education team so we ended up with a deck that we are all really happy with. How it works Our charity partners take the cards from us at cost, enabling them to retain all profits for themselves. We use the money returned to produce further sets of cards. We ourselves raised our first round of funding indirectly via Kickstarter. Whilst our current cards address issues around gender we’re keen to support charities focusing on equality across all aspects of society. If you’re reading this and think it could work for you, please get in touch! Sarah is co-founder at Together Equal, specialising in producing conversation cards which raise money for charities while having a social impact by creating conversations which challenge social stereotypes. Follow Sarah and Together Equal @betogetherequal @sarahairdmash.  

The Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park are doing an appeal with a target of £5000 to get the Burdick family monument repaired. The FoTHCP is the charity looking after the beautiful, atmospheric cemetery park, which opened in 1841 and closed for burials in 1966. It has been a public park ever since, a quiet escape for humans and nature, conservation volunteering, dog walking, and a children's nature club.   In February 2019 a storm blew over one of the first trees planted about 175 years ago, the only silver lime we had.. It hit the Burdick family monument, an Egyptian-style obelisk. The monument broke into seven big, heavy pieces, and it’s going to cost £5,000 to put it together again permanently and safely.   Our biggest challenge is to repair the monument as soon as possible, because if it gets below freezing this winter, frost can break cracks in the stone and make the repair even more expensive.       The monument is the family vault of James & Amy Burdick. They aren't buried here, but two of their sons are. James and Amy had 6 children. James Henry, William, Charles all died before their parents, but Alfred, Lydie and Ethel survived.   The Burdicks were part of the Burdick & Cook merchant shipping company in Poplar. Sadly the company was as lucky with their ships as James and Amy were with their sons. There was a ship with Lydie's name, but it was torpedoed in 1918 by a German submarine. The SS Buresk and SS Burbridge were also sank during WWI.   James Henry drowned aged 21 and was buried in Sebastopol in the Crimean peninsula on the Black Sea, likely on company business. William died when he was 20 years old, and Charles was only 7. We're not sure yet what happened to Alfred and Ethel, but Lydie married a baronet and became Lady Greenaway.   If you'd like to see the Burdick monument for yourself, the cemetery park is open every day.

Hi, I’m Alex from Localgiving's Development Team. I’m delighted to announce a series of major updates and improvements to our fundraising product. Sometimes you need more than just a new lick of paint. This is why we’ve looked at our current fundraising pages and thought hard how we could make these pages more feature rich, easier to use and more pleasing to look at from various devices, desktop to mobile. We hope that this will help local charities and their fundraisers to better engage donors - bringing in more funding for local causes across the UK. These changes will provide a better user experience both for fundraisers and their supporters - improving both functionality, design and putting more control in the hands of fundraisers. This marks a significant upgrade to Localgiving’s core product and helps us stand out as a forward looking, value for money fundraising platform. Here are just some of the improvements we’ve made to the fundraising pages, hope you’ll like them: Fresh, friendly and accessible design Quick sign up process where you can save and come back to finish it at any time Tips at each stage to help you maximise the impact of your fundraising page Integrated social media buttons to improve communication with supporters Intuitive user interface and fundraiser page layout Ability to upload videos and up to 8 images Ability to send updates to your supporters through images and videos Optimised for smartphones and tablets Ability to choose from a range of set events or input your own activity   We hope that these improvements not only provide our valued fundraisers with a more enjoyable experience, but ultimately help them bring in even more donations for our groups. We look forward to hearing your feedback soon!

Social media is vital for the growth of every charity, and is a powerful tool to deepen relationships with your beneficiaries, donors and supporters. Having engaging conversations and interacting with your audience will help you to build trust and relationships online, which in turn can lead to increased donations, traffic and awareness. However, it’s not always easy to engage and grow your charity’s online presence – it takes time, and should be done carefully and thoughtfully. I’ve had the pleasure of working with a range of amazing local charities recently. It has become apparent that working in a small charity often means that there is a lack of resource and time to focus on growing social media. With this in mind, I have compiled a list of seven recommendations on easy ways to help your online presence: 1) Use analytics to inform your content All social media platforms have their own analytics and insights, which show a range of data, including demographic breakdown of your audience, top interests and engagement metrics. By checking these insights on a regular basis across your different social media platforms, you can discover exactly who your audience is (rather than assuming you already know), and tailor content to ensure that it resonates with your audience. For example, on Twitter you can take a deep-dive into your audience’s interests. If the majority of your audience is interested in food and cooking, you could encourage them to carry out a bake sale fundraising at their work, raising money for your charity. 2) Source content from a variety of places (and ensure it’s relevant) (Photo credit: Georgia de Lotz) If all your content is from one source, the level of growth on your social media will quickly stagnate. Ensuring that content is a mix of own publications (blogs) and external publications will keep your audience engaged. If you find it difficult to source content from different places, invest time in creating Google alerts with relevant key words, making a list of publications that post interesting industry news, following thought leaders on LinkedIn, and creating Twitter lists. All of these methods will help keep your content varied, and keep your audience engaged. Remember to keep your target audience in mind – will they find this interesting or useful? What actions will this inspire them to take?   3) Make content visual, with a particular focus on video Research shows that video drives better results. For example, Facebook video posts have the highest average engagement and, on average, will produce twice the level of engagement of other post types. With more and more brands investing in video, charities could benefit from creating their own visual content. Information is more engaging if you see your favourite brand post a funny video or GIF, or explain a process through a helpful infographic. This is also the case for your charity; you can use a variety of content types to grow your audience, using humorous or compelling, interesting content to appeal to your audience. 4) Adapt content for different platforms (Photo credit: William Iven) According to GlobalWebIndex’s flagship report on the latest trends in social media, internet users around the world actively use an average of 7.6 social media channels. Using this data, it is safe to assume that your audience will be active on several different channels, and might even be following you on multiple accounts. As a social media consumer, their expectations of what they will see on each platform will vary. Avoid using the same content in the same format, across different platforms. For example, use fun and colloquial language on Facebook, post opinions on Twitter, and industry news and opportunities on LinkedIn. In addition, make sure image sizes and description lengths are optimised for each channel – always think of the user experience. There are various tools online that can help you to achieve this, for example you can use Canva for free, allowing you to amend images to optimal sizes for each social media platform. 5) Have a process for dealing with negative comments It’s not always sunshine and rainbows in the social media world, and there are often occasions where your charity will have to deal with negative responses online. Having a process in place will allow you to deal with these types of comments in a swift and professional manner. Our simple but effective online harassment infographic will help you navigate the process, with advice on when to comment, when to ignore and when to block. 6) Know what best practice looks like on each platform The layout, functions and purpose of each social media platform are different, therefore what works well on Facebook may not work well on Instagram. By knowing the fundamental basics and best practices of each platform, it will allow you to maximise your charity’s reach and engagement with your audience. If this is an element of your social media strategy that is challenging, then check out our sister company Lightful’s best practice guides for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to help you. 7) Don’t use social media just to promote your organisation and services If you simply promote your own campaigns, you can guarantee that people will soon stop engaging with your platforms and your audience will slowly decrease in size. Social media should be about having a conversation and building relationships, posting a mix of stories about your audience, industry news and thought-leadership articles. This way, people will use your social media as a hub for information, where they can also discover more about exciting campaigns, news and your services. I hope you find this article useful; if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to find us on our Facebook, Twitter or Instagram! Angharad Francis is a Community Manager at Social Misfits Media, who work exclusively with charities, foundations, social enterprises and non-profits to help better use social media to reach their goals.