Strategic Planning
This is a practical session in which we will consider how spending time on strategy be made valuable and useful for a voluntary organisation. In this session, a method to help an organisation develop a strategy will be explained, and practical tools that can promote discussions as well as assist in reaching agreements will be introduced.
Drawing up a Business Plan
Voluntary organisations need to deal with a number of important issues in business planning, some of which this session will address. Ways in which to put together a business plan that is useful, focused, practical, and flexible will be explained. Keeping the plan relevant and using it to obtain the support of funders is important, and how to do so will be outlined.
Leadership Training
Developing skills in leadership, team work, choosing and action planning projects and the ability to allocate individual roles and responsibilities
Trustee Duties
The role of trustees will be looked into in this session as well as various ways to establish an effective board of trustees.
Influencing Decision Makers
Influencing decision makers is essential for an organisation in today’s world. This session will outline important factors in influencing decision makers, such as how they can be persuaded, what they want that you offer, and how they can be reached.
Partnership and Collaborative Working
Partnership and collaborative working holds great potential for organisations in terms of service delivery, outsourcing and fundraising. This session will convey how developing strategic partnerships and working with others can be financially useful for an organisation.
Improving the Contribution of your Board
This session will go over the main aspects of good governance and will explore how you can get the best out of trustees in order to put an effective board together. The session will also outline a best practice framework that trustee boards can use to evaluate their practices and improve their performance.
Charities and Leadership
This session will explain how the leadership, management, and governance of non-profit organisations have developed over time, and will also outline to possible future developments in charities and leadership.
Communicate to Influence
This session will focus on how to communicate with others in a clear and effective manner. It will include potential obstacles to active listening, options to overcome these obstacles, factors lying behind other people’s choices, and ways in which you could achieve a win-win situation when you work with others.
Communication Skills
Learning how to initiate conversation, communicate to a wide range of people, in a group and through different mediums.
Getting the Best out of your People
This session will be based around the value of the people of an organisation and will consider how to get the best out of them, which would allow you to get the best out of your organisation.
How to Break Bad News
Voluntary organisations always have to deal with bad news, and this session will prove useful in finding out how to communicate negative information with others but still allow them to be positive and optimistic.
Team building
To enable volunteers to identify within a team their roles and responsibilities and develop their communication within that team.
Maintaining Staff Engagement during Change
In times of change, staff can become anxious and worried, and keeping them positive is an important part of management. This session will look at how to ensure the organisation’s staff are engaged and motivated during change.
Support & Supervising Staff
In managing an organisation, it is essential to ensure staff are supported and supervised, to make them feel secure in their working environment. This session will be based on how to improve your management skills and make your staff want to work for you.
Mentoring Training
Developing the role of the mentor and how to establish boundaries. Also exploring ways to develop active listening, communication and issues around confidentiality.
Interviewing Tips and Techniques
This session will discuss how to create an ideal interview. A wide range of tips and techniques on how to research, plan, prepare, practice, deliver, and answer questions will be covered, so that you can ensure that your interviews are fit for purpose.
Managing Redundancies
The economic downturn has made redundancy an inevitable option for many organisations, and this session will explain how it can be managed. How redundancy is defined, how to carry out a fair process to steer clear of unfair dismissal claims, considering selection criteria, and various tips to minimise legal risk will be looked at so that you can develop a practical approach to redundancy.
Managing Volunteers
Organisations need to be able to manage their volunteers. Whether an organisation has a few volunteers or many, they require the same type of management, and this session is useful in finding out how to effectively manage them and deal with certain difficult situations that can often arise.
Recruiting Trustees
In this session, strategies for attracting, recruiting and training a balanced and productive board will be looked into. This will help your organisation build a successful, diverse and skilled board that reflects good governance.
Retaining Volunteers
After recruiting volunteers, it is important for organisations to retain them. This session will explore various reasons behind volunteering, what volunteers expect from organisations and how to retain volunteers without incurring many costs.
Training Volunteers
Volunteers always need to be trained by their organisation in order to help them develop and improve their volunteering to successfully reflect the organisation’s aims. This session will explain how important volunteer training is for an organisation, and will outline the different ways that training can be done.
Developing More Sustainable Fundraising Sources
This session will address the basics of developing an individual donor base and an events portfolio, and would therefore be useful for smaller organisations with the desire to develop more sustainable fundraising sources.
Considering a Trading Arm
A voluntary organisation faces certain restrictions on its trading activities. If an organisation is considering a trading arm, this session will be useful in finding out about the advantages and disadvantages of doing so, the ideal time to do so, as well as the different structures that are available.
Introduction into fundraising
Learning how to source funding, learning funding application techniques and approach small businesses
Fundraising from the Community
In this session, the central principles of fundraising from the community will be looked at, as well as how to develop a holistic management model approach through the use of volunteer networks.
How to Write Fundraising Letters and Proposals
Fundraising letters and proposals are clearly critical in organisational fundraising. This session will be useful for those that are new at writing, since it will outline various techniques and tips that can be used to write fundraising letters and proposals that are effective in appealing to the assessor.
Developing Fundraising Relationships
Building good relationships with your organisation’s supports is essential for fundraising purposes. This session will include how to improve these relationships, such as by showing you how to build relationships on and offline and how to develop mutual trust and appreciation to keep you and your supporters happy.
Legacy Fundraising – Being Proactive
A proactive approach to legacy fundraising, which is necessary for an organisation, will be considered in this session by covering legacy funding and how it can benefit
Setting up a Social Enterprise
In this session, the focus will be on how to establish and fund a social enterprise in terms of legal forms. Setting up as a charity or a not-for-profit, a company limited by guarantee, a community interest company, or as an industrial and provident society will be covered in the session.
Budgets and Accounts
Budgets and accounts are essential in the financial management of voluntary organisations. In this, session, budgets will be introduced, and how to completely and accurately maintain accounts for the organisation will be made clear.
Finance for Non-Finance People
In this session, some basic finance concepts will be looked at, which would be useful for non-finance staff with responsibilities involving finance issues, events and activities of the organisation, and income and expenditure.
Writing a Budget
This session will be useful for those who require a brief introduction to budgets, either people new to the process or those who find budgeting difficult. Budget assumptions, identification of budget lines, and the need for and rationale of budgets will be explained, which will provide you with confidence in budgeting in the future. The session will also look at case study budgets to help you understand how budgets can be used as creative development and monitoring tools for organisations.
Presenting Financial Information
This session will consider the important aspects that need attention in presenting financial information for the board to review as well as in external reporting. In addition, the link between management and statutory accounts will be drawn and explained to help you understand how to present financial information in a positive and constructive manner.
Costs – Controlling and Reducing
Managing an organisation requires an understanding of costs, which this session can provide you with. Case studies will be included to help in analysing costs and understanding where they come from. This will not only allow you to think about cost savings tactically, but will also enable you to control costs more effectively, which will financially strengthen your organisation.
Using Organisational Literature
Organisational literature can be used in various ways to benefit the organisation and the way in which you write affects how you communicate and reach your organisation’s aims. This session will include suggestions on how to improve literature, either in print or online, through design, structure and enthusiasm. Literature such as newsletters, magazines, e-news, and annual reports will be covered.
Presenting with Impact
Presentations are always important in any kind of organisation, and this session will show you how to clearly convey the message, structure and content of a presentation, as well as how to make it unique and unusual in order to present with impact.
Promotion and Marketing using Local Media
Organisations regularly work with local media, which can often be difficult, and this session will help organisations develop their relationship with the media. Methods that can be used to write an effective and appealing press release will be outlined, which will help you give the press what they actually want and get your organisation’s story publicised. The session will also explain how to use various types of media, such as broadcast, print and new media to raise the profile of your organisation.
Project Management
Organisations often have the task of designing, planning and managing projects. In this session, a suitable approach to project management will be outlined, together with techniques for managing projects and how to manage project funding.
Project Development
Learning how to select aims/objective and outcomes, identify needed resources and learn how to action plan, etc.
Training for Trainers
Developing volunteer’s ability on how to pass on their knowledge to new volunteers.
Managing Risk
Organisations constantly face executive and operational risks, not all of which are insurable. This session will look into these risks and consider how the needs of the third sector are being adapted to by the insurance market.
Managing Time and Workload
The regular conflict between time and workload is inescapable in any organisation, and the solution to this is to change your approach to your workload to make it more manageable. This session will suggest a variety of tips and techniques that can help you manage your workload which, overall, will benefit your organisation.