Our Impact

We are truly concerned that many charities – and their vital services – are at risk, and we have seen a number of charities close in the last 12 months. We ask charities about their main concerns and challenges, and of our 1,665 responses in the year, 49% of respondents said that generating income/fundraising was their most pressing issue, far ahead of the next concerns which were ability to meet demand (15%) and recruitment of staff and volunteers (14%).

Cranfield Trust exists to support welfare charities, and we focus on the small to medium size organisations which provide critical services on a local or regional basis. They have limited management resources, and little opportunity to invest in organisation and personal development, but are experts in the services they provide. They inspire us every day by their commitment, expertise and resourcefulness.

Over the last year we have received excellent feedback on all our services, with mentoring and peer group support helping to build personal resilience for leaders and managers, and consultancy helping to address organisation challenges and to bring direction and focus through strategic projects. Telephone advice, webinars and information resources have all offered lighter touch support, addressing particular issues or bringing new ideas and approaches to participants.

A notable feature of the year has been the high proportion of organisations which have returned to us for further support after working with us previously. 46% of our new consultancy and mentoring activities in the last year were with returning clients. While we seek to maintain a balance between reaching new organisations and continuing support for previous clients, we have felt it necessary to step up support for existing clients at such a challenging time.

We are delighted to help these charities continue their development ‘journeys’ or to offer mentoring support to individual leaders and managers after providing organisation-focused consultancy. Celebrating our 35th anniversary in 2023-24, the Trust has provided more support than ever before. We started 527 new consultancy projects and mentoring assignments in the year, and had an extraordinary 919 projects active in the year in total. In challenging times, frontline welfare charities have needed support, and our volunteers and team have responded to their needs.

In the year, we have continued to develop Journey to Excellence©, our impact framework, and have started to use the data we draw from it in more depth, to enable individual charities to benchmark their management capabilities against our whole sample, or to explore different sectors. We launched a Journey to Excellence© Recognition Badge for charities who have worked with us, using the framework, to acknowledge their commitment to organisation development. We are proud to have awarded the badge to 48 charities in the year, and report on Journey to Excellence on page 18.

We are deeply grateful to our volunteers, and to our funders and donors, all of whose generous support makes our services possible. We are committed to the small to medium size charities we support, and which we believe are a vital national asset, making an enormous contribution to our society.

It is our pleasure to present our Impact Report for Cranfield Trust’s 35th anniversary year, and to share the stories of some of the great activities we have worked on, and great charities we have worked with, during the year.