Case studies in the charities sector

UK Children’s charity

Deloitte recently assisted a well known Children’s charity that raises money and makes grants to other charities in order to make a positive change to disadvantaged children in the UK. The charity spends around £4m - £5m a year on administration costs. Their 'every penny' pledge, which promises the public that all money donated will be spent supporting a project that helps disadvantaged children, means that administration costs must be funded from other sources.

The primary source of these funds has been investment income. Low interest rates in recent years have significantly reduced this income stream, which has led to an increased focus on the size of the admin costs.

The Board of Trustees that governs the charity asked Deloitte to provide some independent analysis and review to help them establish whether their admin costs were at a reasonable level.

The charity’s management are using the outputs of our study as they develop their strategy for the next three years and they have asked us to continue to be involved over the next six months.

UK schools-led charity

Deloitte also assisted an organisation that aims to widen the pool of talented leaders especially for challenging secondary schools in urban areas. In order to support their rapid expansion, the charity wanted to make substantial changes to the way their IT services were delivered prior to the start of the next academic year. They had already been in discussion with a number of IT service providers but were stretched in articulating their requirements, validating the proposals put forward by the service providers, and evaluating how best to meet the needs of the organisation. Deloitte supported the charity in achieving their goal by engaging with the business to determine their strategy and needs, in order to build a formal set of requirements. These were then issued to potential service providers whilst the service and technical aspects of proposals already received were validated. Guidance was then given on the evaluation process of returned proposals and preparation required for board approval. The project delivered a set of evaluated proposals that met the security and technical requirements of the charity and provided higher quality services for lower cost.

UK charity dedicated to alleviating suffering from cancer

Recently, the charity began centralising their fundraising operation by replacing their network of telephone appeal operators by a fundraising support centre (FSC) in Wales. The aim is to increase performance, flexibility and management control of the fundraising operations while reducing unit costs. As part of establishing a FSC, the charity needed to assess opportunities to integrate additional functions in the FSC to further optimise the fundraising operation and to realise strategic benefits. However, the fundraising processes were still being defined and there was no clear scope or vision for the project.

As a result, Deloitte was asked to carry out a project review in order to highlight potential project risks and to support the client in assessing the integration of further fundraising functions in the FSC during the second phase of the project. Based on existing project documentation and a detailed risk workshop, Deloitte carried out a risk analysis and developed a list of recommendations. In two subsequent client workshops potential processes were identified that could be integrated into the fundraising support centre both on a medium term and long term basis. The outcome of both the analysis of the current project as well as the future opportunities was combined in a high-level project roadmap.

The FSC project review identified a number of risks and improvements. By providing the client with a recommendation checklist and a high-level roadmap that set the timeframe for implementing the recommendations, Deloitte enabled them to address those risk and improvements in a structured way. A detailed analysis of the candidate functions for Phase 2 helped the client understand the benefits, risk and complexity associated with the integration of the function into FSC so they could make an informed decision. Facilitating the identification of opportunities for Phase 3 enabled the client to focus on the long-term, strategic goals for fundraising.

UK charity providing services to people who are deaf or hard of hearing

The charity’s central functions are not delivered in a consistent manner across the organisation. They were concerned that this may be causing inefficiencies and reducing the effectiveness of the charity but had no framework to assess whether this was the case or not.

With this in mind the charity requested the support of Deloitte to:

• Review the central functions to understand the ‘as is’ situation and potential opportunities to become more effective/efficient
• Design a framework to aide their decision making about how these functions should be organised in the future to meet their operational and effectiveness needs; and
  
• Use the framework to make recommendations to the charity about the future state design for their support functions.
  

The project consisted of four phases:

• Planning - detailed project plan was developed and agreed at the start to ensure that objectives could be met in the short time scale
  
• ‘As-Is’ Assessment - involved mapping the current operations across 11 key support functions of the business and considered both qualitative and quantitative elements. Information was collected through responses to a standardised template sent out via email to key stakeholders. Several potential opportunities for improvement were suggested at this point.
  
• ‘To-Be’ Design - The design phase focused on creating a target operating model for them covering, at a high level, organisational design, capabilities, technology and process. Recommendations were included on which functions should be managed centrally and which should be managed locally.
  
• Roadmap Development - In the final stage, the team created a high level implementation map to demonstrate to the charity how the changes proposed in the ‘To-Be’ design could be implemented.
  

The charity are now reviewing the ‘To–Be’ operating models presented for Finance, HR and L&D and deciding whether they want to implement these.

The teams have already decided to take forward the process redesigns on five finance processes and the end to end creative services process as well as the opportunities outlined in the ‘As-Is’ phase.

London based art gallery

The gallery has 18% government funding with the rest of their revenue generated through fundraising and individual donors. It has secured the lease of a new building based on their business plan to open a new style of gallery exhibiting contemporary, multi disciplinary exhibitions, including performance, dance, light and architecture. The new gallery is expected to increase visitor turnover by approximately 60%. To effectively manage the new gallery alongside the existing one, the gallery needs to change its organisational structure. The gallery asked Deloitte to objectively assess what skills and capabilities they would need in the new structure and the likely costs per annum in order to secure board approval for new positions.

Deloitte scoped out an eight week project plan to look at the as-is status of the organisation and build a to–be model by taking the client through the first seven stages of Deloitte’s Organisation Design methodology. To start, Deloitte used the client’s strategy to develop a set of design principles against which the newly designed organisation could be tested. Following this, a capability model was developed, which outlined all the capabilities that would be required in the new organisation. These were then grouped to create roles and departments.

Deloitte delivered a to-be organisational structure along with an implementation plan, comprehensive communications and training plans, to support an effective and sustainable change to the gallery’s structure. The communication plan included proposed communication messages and methods for the upcoming year, and Deloitte committed to providing monthly two hour training sessions to the senior management team on core project and management principles.

UK arm of international charity aiming to impact poverty and its causes

Within the humanitarian NGO sector in the UK, the charity is ‘middle of the range’, both in terms of size and influence. As a result, they are currently being squeezed out by the ‘Big Players’ and the niche charities. To address this, they have set their overarching goal to grow income, influence and impact through being more innovative and engaging and have produced a five year Strategic Plan to support this. The charity needed support from Deloitte to develop the plan further by effectively managing the detailed planning of activities and financials to produce the Three Year Business Plan.

Deloitte provided analytical and technical expertise to ensure the Three Year Business Plan was based on sound analysis and provided the required detail. We engaged heavily with the Executive Board and the business in order to manage the Business Plan completion to expectations.

The charity delivered on the planning process on time and to a high standard of quality. They were also left with a greatly improved method of budgeting that can be taken forward in future business planning processes.