Just a brief posting today, methinks.
Treasurers - who'd be one? Especially in organisations without admin or finance staff like our local faith communities. I had the role for three years and got myself into all sorts of knots - the end of the financial year was an interesting time as it kind of went like this ... £1,500 too much, then £200 too little, then £80 too much and then something like £4.21 too little - eventually I would get the discrepancy between bank figures and cashbook to zero but it hurt to get there. Now I am a woman who loves figures but I don't love accountancy and book-keeping.
Treasurers are often accused of being mean because many don't appear to like spending money. However the buck stops with them if there were ever an audit of how money had been spent. Treasurers should have an overview in their heads as to how the organisation is doing. What is being spent, what is coming in, what is on the horizon (both expenditure and incoming) and what the community would dearly love to do?
The Charity Commission is quite clear that money in should equal money out. We are after all charities and money should be used for our charitable purposes - having money sitting in a bank is not a charitable purpose. But charities can carry reserves and capital funds. Reserves are to keep the charity going should income reduce (as with a stock market downturn) or should expenditure increase (if the water charging policy is implemented) and for planned maintenance and as a buffer for say emergency repairs. A charity may also save money for a large project say retiling a roof or making the building accessible.
However if you carry any kind of extra money other than to cover usual expenses then you must have a reserves policy. This must say how much you have or intend to have and for what purposes. It is a useful exercise to write a reserves policy as it enshrines to some extent your community's thinking about risk, your knowledge of future financial issues and your aspirations for the future. I will post an example of a reserves policy within the week.
Now I must away to drive to Yorkshire and trust it isn't raining there as it is here.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Trustees - officer roles
The Charity Commission only dictates that charities have a chair and a treasurer. Company law used to require an incorporated charity to have a Company Secretary but that changed in 2008. You may of course have a secretary and a vice chair and any other number of named officers - vice or deputy -treasurer, minute secretary, membership secretary, lettings secretary and welfare secretary and suchlike.
Whether these people are formally appointed (either elected or selected) as trustees or not it does not really matter - if you act like a trustee i.e. you are involved in the strategic decision making (not just the discussions) then you will be treated as a trustee by the Charity Commission. You can't have the power without the responsibility - whatever your governing document says!
The chair and the treasurer are both key roles. The treasurer's is easier to describe. In organisations with a finance director then the role is often called the honorary treasurer and this person monitors the finance director's work and therefore the financial stability of the organisation ensuring that all procedures are followed and that no only is the organisation viable now but will be for some years to come. NCVO say that these are the overall roles of a treasurer
I believe that the chair's role is pivotal to the success of any charity. However I have known charities with good staff and a poor chair who have done well. Whatever your view it is best to get this agreed between all the trustees. NCVO says this of the chair's role.
In my experience it is through the chair that the board communicates with the chief officer/staff. If supervision is provided to staff then it is usual for the chair to both supervise the chief officer and to give line-management support. If there are staff then the relationship between the senior staff and the chair can make (or break) an organisation.
Here is a good discussion document from the Scottish CVO about the relationship between the chair and the chief officer.
When the relationship is between minister and trustees (who are also the ministered to) there are different considerations which I admit I understand from a personal point of view i.e. how we do it in Newcastle-under-Lyme but I am not sure that this can be systematised. So I will have a long hard think about this.
Whether these people are formally appointed (either elected or selected) as trustees or not it does not really matter - if you act like a trustee i.e. you are involved in the strategic decision making (not just the discussions) then you will be treated as a trustee by the Charity Commission. You can't have the power without the responsibility - whatever your governing document says!
The chair and the treasurer are both key roles. The treasurer's is easier to describe. In organisations with a finance director then the role is often called the honorary treasurer and this person monitors the finance director's work and therefore the financial stability of the organisation ensuring that all procedures are followed and that no only is the organisation viable now but will be for some years to come. NCVO say that these are the overall roles of a treasurer
- Maintain an overview of the organisation's affairs
- Ensuring its financial viability
- Ensuring that proper financial records and procedures are maintained.
I believe that the chair's role is pivotal to the success of any charity. However I have known charities with good staff and a poor chair who have done well. Whatever your view it is best to get this agreed between all the trustees. NCVO says this of the chair's role.
The chair is a trustee with a specific role on the board. The chair is elected or appointed to this role as set out in the charity’s governing document.
The role of the chair is to chair meetings of the trustee board.
In addition, some chairs take on a number of additional roles. The chair can only take on these additional roles if they have been authorised to do so. This authorisation might be set out in the governing document or related procedure, or agreed by the other trustees in a role description or some other document.
Additional roles of the chair sometimes include:
- Supporting and supervising the head of staff or chief executive and acting as a channel of communication between board and staff
- Acting as a figurehead for the charity (for example, representing it at functions, meetings or in the press).
- Leading on the development of the board and ensuring its decisions are implemented.
- Taking urgent action (but not decision making unless authorised) between board meetings when it isn’t possible or practical to hold a meeting.
The roles above are not exclusively roles of the chair. For example, in some charities the development of the board might be led by another trustee; in others, the charity’s press spokesperson might be a member of staff.
Here is a good discussion document from the Scottish CVO about the relationship between the chair and the chief officer.
When the relationship is between minister and trustees (who are also the ministered to) there are different considerations which I admit I understand from a personal point of view i.e. how we do it in Newcastle-under-Lyme but I am not sure that this can be systematised. So I will have a long hard think about this.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
The Nonprofit Social Media Decision Guide
This guide which covers things like Twitter,Facebook and blogging can be downloaded for free from here. You will need to sign up with your name and contatct email address.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Resources
I am setting up a Google site to hold resources about governance and signposting to good resources. I hope to have this done in a week. I have started but have been busy so only got half way there.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
'We're not a business'
I have heard this from fellow Unitarians and from people who work and volunteer for other charities and community groups.
There are clearly rules for charities including our faith communities. We must follow these and then there is good practice - which we can choose to follow or not. But there are insights to be gained from for example understanding how businesses behave just as there are insights to be gained from psychology as to how individuals behave. We do not become psychologists by learning from psychology so we don't become business people by learning from business methods.
Whilst some of the information available comes from business sources, much comes from a more general study of organisations whatever those organisations do. The question to ask is always, 'how helpful might this be?' and not, 'where does it come from?'.
I also have a very big bee in my bonnet about efficiency. Efficiency is not about rigid structures (indeed some of the most efficient organisations have very few formal structures), it is not about the bottom line (i.e. money) and it is not about emotionless process. Efficiency is about getting something done with the least effort without sacrificing quality. Efficiency also means that things get done rather than not done, and they get done the right number of times.
Just simple examples - flower rotas, milk rotas and cleaning rotas - ensure that the thing gets done (always have a contingency plan like some dried flowers, some long-life milk and an eye that misses the dust) and they get done the right number of times. For example they avoid - two people bringing the flowers, having three bottles of milk when you only need one, or people polishing the hymnbooks because everything else has been cleaned three times. These examples are reflective of broader issues of efficiency with for example finances, meetings or developing the organisation.
Some people are fantastic at developing processes and procedures and some aren't - if you have someone who is then cherish them and set them to work helping you (that is working with others and not for them) to make the most of what you have. Less time spent on inefficient activity means more time to do something else.
As I have written a few times, efficiency is a spiritual imperative - our time, our skills and our resources are finite and I believe that we are bound to make the best of what we have been given.
There are clearly rules for charities including our faith communities. We must follow these and then there is good practice - which we can choose to follow or not. But there are insights to be gained from for example understanding how businesses behave just as there are insights to be gained from psychology as to how individuals behave. We do not become psychologists by learning from psychology so we don't become business people by learning from business methods.
Whilst some of the information available comes from business sources, much comes from a more general study of organisations whatever those organisations do. The question to ask is always, 'how helpful might this be?' and not, 'where does it come from?'.
I also have a very big bee in my bonnet about efficiency. Efficiency is not about rigid structures (indeed some of the most efficient organisations have very few formal structures), it is not about the bottom line (i.e. money) and it is not about emotionless process. Efficiency is about getting something done with the least effort without sacrificing quality. Efficiency also means that things get done rather than not done, and they get done the right number of times.
Just simple examples - flower rotas, milk rotas and cleaning rotas - ensure that the thing gets done (always have a contingency plan like some dried flowers, some long-life milk and an eye that misses the dust) and they get done the right number of times. For example they avoid - two people bringing the flowers, having three bottles of milk when you only need one, or people polishing the hymnbooks because everything else has been cleaned three times. These examples are reflective of broader issues of efficiency with for example finances, meetings or developing the organisation.
Some people are fantastic at developing processes and procedures and some aren't - if you have someone who is then cherish them and set them to work helping you (that is working with others and not for them) to make the most of what you have. Less time spent on inefficient activity means more time to do something else.
As I have written a few times, efficiency is a spiritual imperative - our time, our skills and our resources are finite and I believe that we are bound to make the best of what we have been given.
Leadership and management
Someone has asked me about leadership and management saying about the seeming conflict with leadership being about vision and boldness and management being about caution and detail.
First I guess the theory might be helpful. The webpage is quite helpful.
Leadership - which is the role of any board but which is a role which can be partly delegated or at least shared - is about vision and direction. Where are we going? We know that life and organisations change without any intervention - so maintaining the status quo also requires effort - if we do nothing we and our organisations die. Do we want the status quo or would we rather aim for something else, something more? As faith communities I think that we are duty bound to say that we want something more - I don't think anyone has the right to say that what we have is enough. This is not in terms of us as individuals but in terms of what we offer to the world - we need to be striving to be greater than we are.
In faith communities if we have a minister or lay-leader then we have an appointed spiritual leader - how that person chooses to realise that leadership is for them to decide - I would hope that they decide this with the community that they lead. Can this leadership be extricated from the leadership that the congregational committee (board) provide? Probably not and it is often this that creates tensions within our faith communities. The General Assembly has guidelines for developing the partnership between congregation and minister and they can be found here.
It would be great to be able to write that this is how it should be done and this is what works - but as ever our communities are much too varied and interesting for that. In some cases it is the opposite - there is a feeling that there is no leadership and people are either not willing or not able to recognise that leadership (individual or collective) is essential.
With leadership you get direction and with management you get a sense of both planning and implementing. Planning means saying how something will be done and for example what resources will be needed and implementing is then doing it. Management is about overseeing these stages - management does not have to be one person and more often than not in our communities many people have a role to manage a bit of the work.
So for example - one of our visions is to ensure that people are informed of what we are doing to encourage them to become more involved. I manage that bit of what we do by ensuring that we have newsletters, calendars, running a Facebook group, CDs and DVDs and by emailing/ringing people when required. This is not to say that I do it all - but it is my job to make sure it gets done. The 'making sure' bit is the management bit.
So leadership is indeed about vision and direction and management is about ensuring that that vision is followed by travelling in the desired direction. The two complement each other and are necessary for a successful organisation. Whilst we do not need to overformalise things we do need to ensure that we are efficient - because inefficiency hurts people by wasting their time and their energy and sometimes their money. To get the most from the least effort we need to act efficiently.
First I guess the theory might be helpful. The webpage is quite helpful.
Leadership - which is the role of any board but which is a role which can be partly delegated or at least shared - is about vision and direction. Where are we going? We know that life and organisations change without any intervention - so maintaining the status quo also requires effort - if we do nothing we and our organisations die. Do we want the status quo or would we rather aim for something else, something more? As faith communities I think that we are duty bound to say that we want something more - I don't think anyone has the right to say that what we have is enough. This is not in terms of us as individuals but in terms of what we offer to the world - we need to be striving to be greater than we are.
In faith communities if we have a minister or lay-leader then we have an appointed spiritual leader - how that person chooses to realise that leadership is for them to decide - I would hope that they decide this with the community that they lead. Can this leadership be extricated from the leadership that the congregational committee (board) provide? Probably not and it is often this that creates tensions within our faith communities. The General Assembly has guidelines for developing the partnership between congregation and minister and they can be found here.
It would be great to be able to write that this is how it should be done and this is what works - but as ever our communities are much too varied and interesting for that. In some cases it is the opposite - there is a feeling that there is no leadership and people are either not willing or not able to recognise that leadership (individual or collective) is essential.
With leadership you get direction and with management you get a sense of both planning and implementing. Planning means saying how something will be done and for example what resources will be needed and implementing is then doing it. Management is about overseeing these stages - management does not have to be one person and more often than not in our communities many people have a role to manage a bit of the work.
So for example - one of our visions is to ensure that people are informed of what we are doing to encourage them to become more involved. I manage that bit of what we do by ensuring that we have newsletters, calendars, running a Facebook group, CDs and DVDs and by emailing/ringing people when required. This is not to say that I do it all - but it is my job to make sure it gets done. The 'making sure' bit is the management bit.
So leadership is indeed about vision and direction and management is about ensuring that that vision is followed by travelling in the desired direction. The two complement each other and are necessary for a successful organisation. Whilst we do not need to overformalise things we do need to ensure that we are efficient - because inefficiency hurts people by wasting their time and their energy and sometimes their money. To get the most from the least effort we need to act efficiently.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Doing governance
I have sat on a few boards during the past 20+ years. I have chaired a couple and am chair to one currently. I have been a treasurer and a secretary and a vice-chair - this latter often means that you end up as chair which can take you by surprise as happened to me earlier in the year. I have also worked in my consulting life with many boards and many more individual trustees.
What separates the good from the bad from the downright ugly? I think that the best are those who are ambitious - not for themselves but for the organisation.
For example I came onto a board of an organisation which owned an historic building (not a Unitarian one) and the board met twice a year and spent an hour at each meeting discussing the building. The organisation gave out its profits to local charities and it seemed that many trustees thought that this was much nicer than discussing building issues. When I suggested that we should meet more often and focus more on the building some of the trustees told me of their personal commitments - I respectfully said that this was not about them but about the organisation and we should do what we could to ensure that the organisation flourished.
(If people do not have the time to commit to doing it properly they should not be on a board - if you have a good person who cannot commit time to board meetings then use them as a special advisor to be called on when needed.)
Back to the example, needless to say many trustees left, although some stayed and have shown enormous commitment to the changes. We also have some enthusiastic new blood with skills needed to manage and improve a building. We have had to spend tens of thousands of pounds just to get the building safe let alone improved but at least we can sleep safe and sound in the knowledge that we are unlikely to be sued for negligence. However we still maintained our grant giving and improved the process now giving grants four times rather than twice a year.
We achieved this by splitting the work down so that we had specialists looking after the building, specialists looking after the business planning and specialists looking after the grant-giving. All three have been given equal weight.
We progressed from being a board which just wanted to let things tick over whilst feeling warm and fuzzy about our generosity as we gave out grants, to one which aspired to be something more than we were - in everything that we did. We focused on the building as the most important asset that we owned but we have also built up our profile by focusing on our other assets - the people on the board, our trustees - we have held our fist open AGM and have been working in real partnership with other organisations locally. We have used our skills and our networks to make progress.
So - what makes a good board? One that has aspirations for the organisation wanting it to be better, and it does this by focusing on its assets. In our communities this can mean a focus on a building, often on the maintenance side. However our assets are not just bricks and mortar - what do people involved in your faith community bring to the table in terms of skills and the contacts and networks that they belong to?
Or perhaps more importantly what are the human qualities that they bring - for example love, kindness, generosity of spirit, laughter, tears, a listening ear and a speaking mouth, busy hands and supportive arms?
What separates the good from the bad from the downright ugly? I think that the best are those who are ambitious - not for themselves but for the organisation.
For example I came onto a board of an organisation which owned an historic building (not a Unitarian one) and the board met twice a year and spent an hour at each meeting discussing the building. The organisation gave out its profits to local charities and it seemed that many trustees thought that this was much nicer than discussing building issues. When I suggested that we should meet more often and focus more on the building some of the trustees told me of their personal commitments - I respectfully said that this was not about them but about the organisation and we should do what we could to ensure that the organisation flourished.
(If people do not have the time to commit to doing it properly they should not be on a board - if you have a good person who cannot commit time to board meetings then use them as a special advisor to be called on when needed.)
Back to the example, needless to say many trustees left, although some stayed and have shown enormous commitment to the changes. We also have some enthusiastic new blood with skills needed to manage and improve a building. We have had to spend tens of thousands of pounds just to get the building safe let alone improved but at least we can sleep safe and sound in the knowledge that we are unlikely to be sued for negligence. However we still maintained our grant giving and improved the process now giving grants four times rather than twice a year.
We achieved this by splitting the work down so that we had specialists looking after the building, specialists looking after the business planning and specialists looking after the grant-giving. All three have been given equal weight.
We progressed from being a board which just wanted to let things tick over whilst feeling warm and fuzzy about our generosity as we gave out grants, to one which aspired to be something more than we were - in everything that we did. We focused on the building as the most important asset that we owned but we have also built up our profile by focusing on our other assets - the people on the board, our trustees - we have held our fist open AGM and have been working in real partnership with other organisations locally. We have used our skills and our networks to make progress.
So - what makes a good board? One that has aspirations for the organisation wanting it to be better, and it does this by focusing on its assets. In our communities this can mean a focus on a building, often on the maintenance side. However our assets are not just bricks and mortar - what do people involved in your faith community bring to the table in terms of skills and the contacts and networks that they belong to?
Or perhaps more importantly what are the human qualities that they bring - for example love, kindness, generosity of spirit, laughter, tears, a listening ear and a speaking mouth, busy hands and supportive arms?
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