The Management Works
Third sector organisations are required to work to sound business principles and be transparent and accountable to the communities they work in. The challenge of ‘continuous improvement’ means that third sector organisations need to embody both the standards of the public sector and the efficiency of the private. The products below can help you achieve this objective.
- Training & Capacity Building for Staff and Management Committee Members
- Practical Business Planning for Existing and New Organisations
- Event Management and Project Launches
- Baseline Surveys and Mapping Exercises
- Marketing and Promotion
- Outreach and Recruitment
- Project Delivery Plans and Project Management
- Conflict Resolution
- Closure Consultancy, Preparing for the worst possible case
Training & Capacity Building for Staff and Management Committee Members
Voluntary sector, community and charity organisations are under unceasing pressure to improve their management skills; we can help your organisation resolve and integrate these complex issues into your day-to-day operations. J-go can help you to motivate your team and focus energy and commitment more effectively to achieve your organisation’s targets by arranging and facilitating Training and/or Away Days to provide conflict resolution, team building and in-group dynamics.
‘Continuous improvement’ is a concept that voluntary and community organisations are being increasingly pressured to adopt. Keeping up-to-date with the latest legislation and policy initiatives from central and local Government is essential to maintain your organisation’s profile. We can show you how to invent a ‘quality circle’ and ‘thematic focus groups’, linked to Local Strategic Plans to ensure that your organisation is kept abreast of the latest thinking and has the edge in service delivery and partnership working.
Practical Business Planning for Existing and New Organisations
All organisations have to produce a Business Plan these days; it is regarded as an essential requirement of an effective organisation and is usually required when making major funding applications. But a Business Plan is not just for show - developing a Business Plan can have all kinds of advantages for your organisation. It can identify what you do well, and force you to confront what can be improved. It can help to bring your staff together with management committee members, resolve underlying conflicts and help individuals within the organisation realise how they can make the best contribution to the team effort.
The old tailor’s adage ‘measure three times and cut once’ is a good starting principle for considering business and organisational development plans. J-go can help you create a practical, bespoke three or five-year Business Plan for your organisation, from draft to finished product. J-go ensures that by the time the Plan is formally adopted by your organisation, your staff and Management Committee members will consider themselves the originators and owners of your organisation’s future strategy and direction.
Event Management and Project Launches
Planning large or small events is a special skill needing previous experience to ensure that your event goes well. An appropriate event, targeting prominent individuals and held at the right time can really put your organisation on the map. J-go is able to bring imagination, creative skills, extensive practical experience and our far-reaching network of useful contacts to the planning and delivery process.
We can help your staff team to organise and run the event, or simply hand the whole event over to us and our event team of up to 15 experienced staff will provide all services for the day, including reception, press management, speaker preparation, presentation, catering, security, PR representation and press conference organisation, venue management and cleaning.
Baseline Surveys and Mapping Exercises
For successful business planning, organisations need to prove ‘the need’ (or market) for their services and products, and identifying and defining this is a vital part of their development. For funders considering grant applications, a well carried out ‘baseline needs survey’ is a critical part of the justification for funding.
J-go’s team includes 6 multi-lingual experienced canvassers, with specific experience of working with ‘hard to reach’ beneficiary groups including; young people Not in Education Employment and/or Training (NEET), members of new and emerging communities and elderly housebound people. Our extensive knowledge of the Thames Gateway area and honed research skills can help your organisation identify and develop new operational directions that meet emerging local, regional and national policy requirements.
Marketing and Promotion
Grant funders often need to be convinced that an organisation can effectively market the service it is being grant funded for. Marketing is an underestimated discipline. Community organisations can often find that they are in competition with other CVS members to market what is effectively the same service, in the same area.
J-go can offer you a creative, original marketing service, which will not only market your products and services, but also promote and capacity build your organisation and help identify your Unique Selling Points (USP), and discover developing markets to help you expand into new areas of business. J-go is expert at utilising cheap, effective viral marketing methods, and we have links with the emerging on-demand digital networks to help your organisation take advantage of developing technologies. We can help with a training day arranged at your premises to help your staff creatively identify and promote your core values and service offers.
Outreach and Recruitment
One of the most challenging aspects of starting any new initiative is to recruit the right people as the project beneficiaries. In the grant application, you will have detailed the type and circumstances of the beneficiaries you have designed the project specifically for. But the day before the project is scheduled to start; you will typically find that you are unable to fill all the places on the project successfully. What then?
J-go has considerable experience of recruiting hard-to-reach communities, and brings a supportive, sympathetic and determined approach to working with these challenging client groups. We offer a marketing service that is designed to target hard-to-reach beneficiaries, including young people not in education, employment and training, elderly housebound people, refugees and asylum seekers and women from the BAME communities. We can show you how encourage and support your potential beneficiaries to overcome any barriers they may face, to help them engage more effectively with your organisation and realise the potential that your project could have for their own personal and professional development.
Project Delivery Plans and Project Management
Now you have got the funding – you need a Delivery Plan, - fast! A properly thought-out ‘Delivery Plan’ is a very practical document, which acts as a day-to-day instruction manual, and will include all resources, staff, premises, materials, transport and administration planning. J-go can show you how your staff members can feel more confident that their views have been fully incorporated into any new service direction, and demonstrate that any plans are based on achievable delivery timescales and sensible cost estimates, ensuring that all planned outcomes can be easily delivered with existing skills sets. J-go can help your organisation produce an effective, costed delivery plan that will impress new funders and create the opportunity for future funding.
We offer a one to three day consultancy service to help you create an effective delivery plan, which will unite your staff, delivery partners and stakeholders in a focused and co-ordinated effort. Call to discuss your requirements; delivery plans written to incorporate best practice and standard business planning techniques.
Conflict Resolution
The CVS can be a stressful environment to work within. The commitment and dedication of individuals is often what makes the Third Sector work, but this brings with it the problem that, when people disagree about the best way forward, those views are often vehemently held. The Third Sector also brings with it a formal division of roles, that of the Management Committee members, Trustees and the staff members. This can often create misunderstanding and conflict in organisations under pressure to deliver in a difficult agenda. Partnership working can also be occasionally fraught with problems as organisations overlap in provision or are dependent upon the performance of each other.
J-go can help get everyone working together. Our extensive experience, knowledge of good practice, precedent and determined practicality can help to resolve problems and conflicts using a constructive and inclusive approach. J-go can organise and chair a conflict resolution meeting or conference of any scale, providing a neutral venue to resolve, internal and external partnership issues, including group-related conflict.
The key to our service quality is the ability and experience of our Director, Jonathan Hems, who acts as the Chair of these conflict resolution forums. Jonathan’s pragmatic, inclusive and focused approach clears through ‘issue clutter’ to lay bare the underlying issues and helps participants to reconnect to their fundamental commonalities.
J-go can offer this service in a variety of formats; as a morning, afternoon or evening session for up to 25 people, as a one-day conference, or even as a week-end away in our rural Residential Training Centre based just 40 minutes from London.
Closure Consultancy, Preparing for the worst possible case
CVS organisations can go bust. In most circumstances there will be a management committee, board of trustees or board of directors, legally responsible for their actions and the circumstances of the organisation in liquidation, who can each be individually held criminally accountable under the Company Directors Disqualification Act.
To ensure this doesn’t happen to you, J-go can help you research, present and answer the Liquidator’s questions and enquires to justify and prove your good intentions and probity. We work with an experienced and respected Insolvency Practitioner, based in the South East, so we can help you curtail any liquidation costs, deal properly with your creditors and help to protect and explain the actions of directors and/or trustees to the Liquidator.