Can you name two or more local charities?

January 27, 2016Becky 5 Comments

Source: gratisography.com

If you can name two or more local charities, you’re part of only 10% of the public that can – that’s according to research carried out by TSB Bank as reported by Civil Society.

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Andrew Mullaney – a great connector

November 30, 2015Lorna Prescott 5 Comments

Bright and early on a Tuesday morning at the end of last month, Eileen and I met for coffee with Andrew Mullaney, who is Dudley’s first ever Business Connector, seconded from Lloyds Bank to Business in the Community’s Business Connectors programme.

The Business in the Community website says: “Business Connectors are talented individuals seconded from business, trained by Business in the Community and placed in communities of greatest need to build partnerships that tackle local issues.”

I think we’ve struck gold here in Dudley because Andrew is not only talented, and experienced in business, but also hugely passionate about Dudley and driven by a mission to make a sustainable, lasting difference in the work that he does.

In his first five weeks in his new role Andrew had already made an astonishing number of connections and was working incredibly energetically as a network weaver (see video below), actively creating connections between people and organisations who hadn’t previously known about each other, or worked together.

In the weeks since we met him, Andrew has been just brilliant at connecting us with helpful people and organisations, and has very kindly been promoting Dudley Volunteer Centre and Dudley CVS in all sorts of things he’s been involved in. If you want to use and grow your networks to make positive change in Dudley I’d recommend arranging to meet Andrew for a coffee. Some great connections are guaranteed!

You can connect with Andrew on twitter @dudleyconnector, by email andrew.mullaney@bitcconnect.org or give him a call on 07834945827.

For more on network weaving, check out June Holley’s work, and the video below.

Celebrating our work with people, communities and organisations

October 15, 2015Becky 1 Comment

I’m really pleased to share the work I and my wonderful colleagues have done to support individuals, communities and organisations last year. The Dudley CVS Annual Report outlines how we’ve been connecting and inspiring people and organisations to achieve positive change and championing their work. It covers the year April 2014-March 2015.

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A fireside chat and five priorities

August 21, 2015August 17, 2015Lorna Prescott 3 Comments

Photo of Joel Gascoigne and Nick Holzherr in front of screen with glowing fireplace

Photo from the fireside chat shared by Laura Creaven on twitter

On Tuesday I went along to a Fireside Chat* with Joel Gascoigne, co-founder and CEO at Buffer. Buffer is a really handy software application which you can use for free to schedule posts to social media accounts in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. Joel studied in the West Midlands at the University of Warwick, and Buffer was developed and launched in 2010 while he lived in Digbeth, Birmingham. The co-founders moved to Silicon Valley in 2011 and have always been the subject of much interest and attention because of their radically open and transparent business practices.

Buffer made the salary calculations and salaries of each team member public and openly publish revenues from their paid for products. They are fully transparent with email (all team members can see all emails) and they have introduced transparent pricing so you see where every penny (or cent) goes if you subscribe to a paid plan. In Buffer one of their values is default to transparency.

I thoroughly enjoyed hearing Joel share his story and respond to questions which were submitted through twitter. And it got me thinking about what we’re sharing about Dudley CVS. Then I realised we haven’t really talked much about some priorities we’ve developed this year, and now is a great time to share them here because we have just started getting together as staff and board members to take each of them forward.

Our priorities have been shaped in response to what we heard from our sector in a survey we carried out late last year (Kate shared the findings in this post) and also give focus to key areas of activity we have been developing. Here is a run down of our 5 priorities.

Championing Dudley CVS and the sector

Our survey told us that the top request in relation to support we should offer over the next year was raising the profile of the voluntary and community sector. A group of Dudley CVS staff and trustees met last week to begin collective work around this priority, so you’ll soon be seeing a growing offer to groups and organisations around this. Do get in touch with Becky (smallgroups@dudleycvs.org.uk) if you have skills or ideas to contribute to our work around this.

Enabling and promoting innovation, transformation and sustainability

Our survey also highlighted that people want support in relation to:

identifying gaps in local provision, working with new and existing groups to address unmet needs in communities
developing groups and organisations
ways to diversity income streams
innovation and transformation
advocacy and leadership of the voluntary and community sector

While we offer support around these areas already, we think there will be some value in us offering a programme of support which people can access in different ways. A group of Dudley CVS staff and trustees met last week and discussed some initial ideas, the next step is to involve people from local groups and organisations in shaping the programme. If you’d like to make suggestions please add a comment to this post, if would like to join an informal ideas session in September please let me know (lorna@dudleycvs.org.uk).

Supporting and enabling collaboration in Dudley borough

Ranked fourth in the list of support people want us to offer is supporting and enabling networking and collaboration. And ranked third is creating the conditions for our sector to influence. A group of our staff and trustees will be reviewing pervious and current work around this and shaping what we can do in the next 12 months. I have already been sharing some examples of activity over the last few years and thinking on collaborative practices on the CoLab Dudley blog. We’ll keep you updated on the work of the group looking at this priority, our first meeting will be next month.

Collaborating and demonstrating impact (using PSIAMS)

Dudley CVS and a number of voluntary organisations in the borough are changing their approach to working with people, and using a tool called PSIAMS to help them manage relationships, communicate and collaborate within and across teams, and to measure the impact and value of their work. We already have a great team supporting the use of the approach and software (Mark Ellerby from Cloudberry, plus Dudley CVS officers James Baggot and Adam Deyes). There will also be a trustee and staff group working on ways that our sector can collaborate and demonstrate impact.

Ensuring use of our venues benefits local communities

Over the last few years Dudley Council has been working with Dudley CVS to explore ways to make the most of the council’s underused buildings and land in a challenging climate and safeguard them (or even unlock them) for community use. Asset transfer was a option for one building we looked at, a management move was an option in another. The council is continuing to develop and test new processes which involve community-based organisations taking on facilities. The initial steps with us should help to set the tone and ease this transition for other facilities and organisations.

Dudley CVS are now managing Brierley Hill Civic, and we have staff and a Lunch on the Run cafe moving in to a building on Stafford Street in Dudley Town Centre (the name of the building will be revealed shortly). It is really important to us that we both show that we can make a financial success of such ventures, and that we can do that in ways which support, connect and benefit local communities, groups, clubs and societies, as well as our sector more widely. We have a group of trustees and staff with a diversity of skills and connections who will give time to making ensuring we achieve this.

Do leave a comment or get in touch if you have any thoughts on any of our priorities, and please do share links to information about what your group or organisation is currently focusing on. We’d love to hear about it!

For anyone interested in the Buffer event, I’ve archived some useful links, tweets and pictures from the Fireside Chat here.

*Fireside Chats were a series of radio addresses given by President Franklin Roosevelt and the contemporary spin on this at the event I went to was a backdrop of a 3 hour You Tube fireplace video screened for the entire duration of the talk. It was nearly as mesmerising as a real fire!

Using digital tools to support our sector – #VCSSCamp 2015

June 9, 2015Becky 4 Comments

I’m really excited to be involved in this year’s VCSSCamp, a place for people who work in local infrastructure organisations that support the voluntary and community sector (CVSs, Volunteer Centres, Voluntary Actions, etc.), to come together and talk about the ways they use digital technology in their work.

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Missed opportunities? Demonstrating our worth online

April 1, 2015Becky 3 Comments

Photo credit: mkhmarketing / Foter / CC BY

A study published by Lloyds Bank has reported that more than half of charities lack ‘basic digital skills’, especially compared with small business. You can read the full report here.

The study particularly focuses on the lack of understanding about how a web presence can increase donations and other forms of finance, but it also chimes with one of Dudley CVS’s priorities for the forthcoming year and one of the key findings of our recent state of the sector survey – voluntary and community organisations would like some support with telling their stories online.

Being able to demonstrate your impact online, at a time when organisations cannot solely rely on grant-funding alone to survive, might expose your organisation to new sponsors, supporters, crowd-funders, investors, donors, businesses looking to fulfil their corporate social responsibility principles. But the reasons may not be purely financial. Having a web presence can be empowering for your organisation and the people you support; you can run campaigns, dispel myths, inspire people, connect, share and learn.

But what do you think? What do you think about the report? What has an online presence allowed you to do more easily? What are the barriers to getting your organisation on the web? Is it resources, skills in tech and design or anything else? How could we all support each other to grasp new opportunities that the digital world might offer?

One meeting that changed everything

January 29, 2015Lorna Prescott Leave a comment

photo of a big top with blackboards around in the shape of letters spelling COMMUNICATE

Image credit: Simon Huggins, shared through Creative Commons on Flickr

At Dudley CVS a common and constant challenge is that of effective internal communication. It’s a perennial topic of discussion at our staff away days. Over the years we’ve tried noticeboards in the hallway, staff meetings, various ideas involving email, a brief flirtation with Yammer, team leader meetings and more. We’ve never really got it to work.

Which is what made this morning so blindingly brilliant. Thanks to some sensible colleagues we’ve started 2015 with dates in for quarterly staff meetings with required attendance, and monthly staff meetings in intervening months which are optional. I wasn’t particularly supportive of this, I have found staff meetings in the past to be less than inspiring, and personally I much prefer deeper one-to-one conversations with people to find out what they are up to and thinking about.

I think we were all a bit surprised when we saw the agenda for this morning’s staff meeting (right). So after an update from our Chief Officer, Andy, on what our Board is focused on, we moved on to ‘interviews’. Andy asked someone to set a timer for 5 minutes on their phone, then he started choosing staff members at random to ask questions of, until everyone had been subjected to this!

Terry Gee from our Integrated Plus team was picked on first, he was asked by Andy:

What achievement in the last 2 months are you most proud of?
What is the biggest challenge you face in the next few months?
What was your nickname at school?
What is the biggest bit of work you are getting your teeth in to next?
What do you want to be written on your Dudley CVS epitaph?

These are great (and fun) questions, which clearly I noted down so I could begin to prepare my own responses. But as Andy moved on the the second round of questioning he changed the questions! Then Terry, who by now could relax, started to scribble questions down and slid them across the table to Andy. I loved this natural and welcome disruptive behaviour and we were also all enjoying hearing about each other’s work in a different way.

Then it got even better. Andy asked Nicki whose work she knew least about. She looked at me. He asked her what she was going to do about it. So now Nicki and I are meeting next week for coffee (in a cafe, of course) to catch up on our respective projects and work. Given we haven’t managed to arrange something as simple as this for 5 years I really welcomed the nudge.

Then it was my turn to be interviewed. I think Andy really has a sense of what his staff need at any given time, so amongst other things I was asked to identify a colleague who could be a listening ear to support me around some challenges I am struggling with. This was just brilliant. I looked around the room at these familiar faces in a completely new way, with a different pair of eyes. Suddenly they had shifted from being people who are busy and do great work that’s not much to do with me, to a hugely rich pool of skilled, experienced and supportive friends and mentors who might give a bit of time to listen to what I find difficult. And though I was asked to choose one colleague on the spot, I have already approached a second and got a time to meet next week. I hope that I will continue this, as there are so many different perspectives and ways of thinking and doing among our staff that could really help me to have insights in to my work, I would be daft not to ask for a bit of time from everyone. And yet I don’t think I’ve ever really asked before.

Lots of pairings were made through the meeting, and we even had the most constructive conversation I think we’ve ever had about creating useful and effective staff meetings, so now we have clear topics for the next two optional staff meetings. This makes them feel much more appealing and likely to be attended. Might we have nailed it?

We’d love to know:

What internal communication strategies or activities work well for your group or organisation?

And invite you to reflect on the following:

If you could have coffee (or tea) with one of your colleagues who you don’t know so well, who would it be and what’s stopping you?
Who in your organisation could be a great listening ear and source of support when you are facing challenges? What would prompt you to ask them for half an hour of their time?