Is Pro Bono a No No?

I’ve had a very interesting week and met many wonderful and inspiring people, young and old who are trying to achieve great things with social enterprise. I’m also about to go to a ‘dragons den’ style meeting where we’ve secured some business pro bono support for local social enterprise who are going to pitch for what they need, so this post may come as a bit of a side ball, but hey it’s time to reflect.

Although it’s been an interesting week It has also been a week that has made me question a few things, particularly what seems to be exploitation of young people. When I say exploitation I’m not talking about the extremes, but the fact that young people need experience in order to get on. This need has seen a pro bono group of students offering their services out to charities and social enterprises to help with their business development, all good you may say, and on the face of things I might agree, but not when you delve a little.

For example I met a young student this week who had been linked (by the wider student pro bono support group) with a social enterprise to help with their business and growth development plans. This is the same group that recently asked me to mentor a number of their students to support the pro bono work they are doing I.e. asking me to provide free support to enable their students to learn and provide free support to others.

Now I’m all for helping students (many of you will know of my past work supporting unemployed people gain paid work experience, which supported over 250 young people a year achieve) and we (development in social enterprise) offer an amount of free support to start up’s which is where we decide to invest our profit for social good, but his is something different.

The student I met was clearly struggling with the task that the social enterprise had asked them to get on with and needed some advice from me. All good you may say, but then (in order to help properly) I asked about the organisation and what it was trying to achieve and was told of the enormous task that the student had been given.

I then did a bit of checking into the organisation (which shall remain nameless) and found that it’s quite a well established social enterprise that quite frankly should be paying for business advice and guidance and at the very least should be offering students paid internship rather than trying to get high level work done for nothing.

Now this leads me to my point really. I understand the strains and pressures on charities and social enterprises now that the glory days of endless free business support programmes have all but gone. But those of you who were lucky recipients of that free business support should also realise that it’s those people providing that service (like ourselves and many others) who have struggled and worked to get that resource to provide you with the free support in the first place!

So now that we are in a position where we can’t find all that support resource for you, should you be trying to find free support from elsewhere or, should you be considering business support (when needed) as an essential element to your business growth?

When preparing our budgets for the next year or so, none of us think twice about putting in a few grand for our accountant and auditing fees, the health and safety consultant, HR consultant, solicitor etc… Is it not time we considered our business development needs for the year in this way too and make provision in our budgets, whether that’s to pay a student intern or a higher level business consultant, or appropriate training for our staff etc.

Now don’t get me wrong I’m all for maximising resources and getting what you can at a good price (after all that’s business) and will continue to work hard to secure resources to provide social enterprises with quality free (at point of use ) support. But if ‘we’ are a reasonably successful organisation and need support with our business development and growth,  we shouldn’t expect it for nothing, should we?

Charitable Incorporated Organisation – update

Just a quick post to update you all on the Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO) legal structure. Interestingly I was discussing this as an option with a client the other day, but advised him to ‘not hold his breath’, as it had been talked about for years and seemed to be at a standstill.

However, Anthony Collins Solicitors, have recently updated us and noted that two key pieces of legislation have been passed in October which suggest that the CIO structure may be accepting its first applications ‘by the end of  this year’.

If you would like to find out a little more then Anthony Collins have an update here

“Forget the Grants”

“Forget government grants” that was the message from the Minister for Civil Society, Nick Hurd at the Social Finance Fair at the beginning of the week..

The fair was organised by Social Enterprise West Midlands (SEWM), the regional network for social enterprises, supporters and entrepreneurs in the midlands.

Over 200 people from across the sector attended to listen to the Key Note from Nick Hurd MP and to hear from social enterprises that had achieved success in social investment, including the midlands own My Time CIC, a social enterprise providing counselling and other support services for those with poor mental health.

Delegates were fed and watered by many of the midlands catering social enterprises who put on a fabulous variety of food that was simply delicious.

Other social enterprises including Development in Social Enterprise took part in a social enterprise exhibition demonstrating the wide ranging businesses and services that are provided by the social enterprise sector in the West Midlands there were:
Catering businesses
Business support
Textiles
Website development
Social media
Wifi and telecommunications providers
Bakers and Macaroon makers

So perhaps it is time to forget the grants and consider how your business (and by business I mean any not for personal profit organisation) can contract, attract investment, consider crowd source, or even loans to grow and sustain your enterprises. Whatever you do it’s sound advice to ensure you consider your funding mix, as one thing is for sure, the cuts are going to continue for a few more years yet, so even if you’ve managed to hold onto a grant for now, the chances of it going or being reduced in the near future is a “clear and present danger”

If you need help to review your business strategy call us 0121 667 6810 or visit us www.disecic.org

Face the Change

Just a short post to highlight a good article in BVSC’s recent edition of ‘Update’.

The article features the Disability Resource Centre [www.disability.co.uk], a medium-sized charity I’ve been working with helping them negotiate the changes, including:

• Loss of 30% of its funding
• Unexpected need to move from council premises
• Development of new trading activities

Read the BVSC article [here] and then check out our case study [here] to see how they went about facing the challenges and emerging a stronger organisation.

Is it time to get behind the @SE_Mark ?

Flicking through Twitter I noticed that the CIC Association are continuing a debate about whether there should be another quality mark, that differentiates CIC’s which have a stricter criteria than the SE Mark currently has.

As a Founder and Managing Director of Development in Social Enterprise CIC and a proud holder of the Social Enterprise Mark I can understand the points made, but think it may be time to stop debating and get behind the Mark to promote the wider concept of social enterprise to the masses.

Now I understand that the Mark criteria [at the moment] is weaker than I [and perhaps the CIC Association] would like, as it only requires organisations to demonstrate that 50% of profits are re-invested in the social or environmental purpose.

The CIC structure has a much stronger ‘asset lock’ and dividends are capped meaning 70% of profit needs to be re-invested in the social or environmental purpose.

I would like personally to see social enterprises re-investing 100% of their profits, as Development in Social Enterprise does, but again recognise that not all will or indeed can.

However, with the current public and media scrutiny on businesses that waste public money [we wont mention any names here] and the introduction of the Social Value Bill and the confusion as to what social enterprise is

• businesses that have a social or environmental purpose [mission] that primarily trade [rather than rely on grants] and re-invest their profits [or most of them] into their social or environmental purposes’ i.e. do ‘good business’

it may therefore be time to get behind the mark and strengthen it for the good of all social enterprises, because, let’s face it, there are many legal structures that social enterprises can adopt and the CIC is just that, a legal structure.

Many enterprises out there who are using the social enterprise term are not able to demonstrate that they are a social enterprise, at least the Mark creates a benchmark which can be easily communicated and encompasses any organisation trading for social good no matter what legal structure it is.

Now here’s a suggestion on a possible way forward.

• Get behind the Mark and build on it for the benefit of ‘bona fide’ social enterprises
• Consider strengthening the Mark to easily distinguish different strengths and trading models of social enterprises for example:
• Bronze meet the basic mark criteria as is now
• Silver meet the more stringent CIC criteria
• Gold meet the CIC criteria, but demonstrate 100% of profit being re-invested and perhaps
• Platinum 100% profit and social impact proved through SROI or something

Now I know some work would have to be done to sort this out, but to the wider world and general public such a move may help to clarify and build confidence whilst strengthening the social enterprise movement, rather than cause even more confusion and division?

One final point on cost. Now I don’t like paying for ‘badges’, but we need to recognise that organisations that are working to assess organisations can’t do it for nothing, all of us need to charge for what we do, or we wouldn’t eat and indeed we would have no profit to put to our social causes.

The Mark in comparison to say Investors In People [IIP] for example is tremendously good value and just think how much better this value would be if we get behind it and the mark holders’ increase to a significant number, because then it’ll gain some more clout and I say this noting that the National Offender Management Service and some private companies e.g. WATES find the mark a useful reference when considering contract and purchasing from social enterprises [respectively].

And let’s just imagine if the Mark gets enough people behind it perhaps – economies of scale come in and the mark company starts reducing costs [putting profits back in]! Now there’s a thought [or two]!

From Grant Reliance to Trading

Had a very interesting day today at the #fairsharetrustawayday where I presented on social enterprise and ran a short workshop for those who are looking toward trading as a route to independance and sustainability, which made me think it was worth sharing some recent case studies of our work with voluntary and community organisations and charities.

The first one click here looks at business planning, project management, in-house consultancy and training with the Disability Resource Centre

The second click here looks at market analysis, business planning, community enterprise and income generation

I hope that some of you find them useful.