Following the press and media lately, the headline messages are still clear – Transparency and Trust is essential for the charitable sector to weather the challenges it is currently facing.
Transparency on matters related to finance, operations, and impact are important to not only staff and trustees, but also to external stakeholders, in order to win or in some cases rebuild the trust of stakeholders who want to support or work with the non-profit sector.
The role of trustees has been gaining increasing attention due to the widely publicised issues over the past year. The role of the trustees is to govern, oversee performance and support the strategic growth and sustainability of an organisation, of which they have to do on average within 20 hours a year at quarterly board meetings and an annual away day.
We appreciate the challenges this role comes with, so we work with CEO’s and their Trustees to help develop robust strategies, KPI’s, processes and Management Systems using Salesforce CRM to help make the performance monitoring and review process much quicker to adopt.
Below we have suggested some best practice that senior management boards could adopt:
Undertake an External and Internal Annual Strategic Review
As part of every annual review a competitor analysis and market sector appraisal report should be completed to help inform the trustees about what is happening in the sector to help them learn about best practice, assess risk and appreciate the challenges that the organisation is facing. The strategic review should be evaluate both internal and external challenges and focus on addressing
- financial opportunities for increasing income and reducing unnecessary costs
- human resource needs
- improving operational processes and systems
- customer service, satisfaction and impact.
These four areas lend themselves nicely to setting up a Balance Scorecard performance management system.
Adopt the Balance Scorecard Approach
The Balance Scorecard, originated by Kaplan and Norton’s is an organisational performance management tool that is globally adopted. It does not impose specific KPI’s but it does highlight the five key areas mentioned above as being fundamental to the stability and functioning of a business, and that finance isn’t the only area of concern. We would recommend that a trustee board establish their own Balance Scorecard with SMART (specific, measureable, achieveable, realistic and time-framed) Key Performance Indicators that sit against the Strategic Review and for which the charitable management team are accountable.
For an example of KPI’s and top tips – Click here to download our free Performance Management Guide for Trustees
Achieve Transparency and Accountability using a CRM Management System
We support non-profit to adopt Salesforce CRM to help manage daily activities and reporting around sales/fundraising, marketing, delivery of services, impact measurement and HR. Enabling a team to use one system that fulfils a wide variety of business functions means’ that all of the data is contained in one place and easy to report on at any point of time. CEO’s love it when we set up a Trustee Dashboard that shows all of their Balance Scorecard metrics real-time. They no longer need to spend days preparing for a Trustee meeting as all of the data is ready.
For further guidance on KPI’s and Tips – Click here to download our free Performance Management Guide for Trustees
