Supporting organisations - Journey to Excellence©
Journey to Excellence (J2E) is our unique, tailor-made assessment framework designed to evaluate the progress of the charities we support.
The J2E framework measures progress in four essential management areas: leadership and strategic direction, financial management and sustainability, people management and performance and impact and helps to identify strengths and areas for development. Each charity starts its development journey at a different point and consultancy projects focus on a main area for development. We work with a broad range of charities, not just selecting those with high potential for growth and development, we want to support all our client charities to address their particular issues.
The J2E assessment is carried out with the charity by the Cranfield Trust Regional Manager ahead of the consultancy project, and many charities use the pre-project assessment as the basis for development discussions with their Boards and teams, as well as using it to frame their work with Cranfield Trust. Completing the J2E after the project has concluded allows each charity to celebrate its successes and consider the next steps in its development. Charities give us very positive feedback on J2E, they find it valuable in assessing their development needs over time, and in action-oriented discussions with Cranfield Trust Regional Managers.
J2E is particularly useful for individual charities, but we also aggregate information across all our consultancy projects, either in particular sectors, or covering all areas of support. This provides useful insight for the Trust which can also be shared with partners to see the impact of programmes they have funded in a specific sub-sector, benchmarked against the wider sector.
Aggregated results provide interesting discussion points, but J2E ratings are subjective and individual to each charity, so grouped results are indicative, rather than statistically robust.
In the 2023-24 year, we completed 153 J2Es. Overall, our clients improved their performance by an average of 17% as a result of the support they received through our consultancy services, up from 15% last year. 82% of the completed J2Es related to consultancy projects in the leadership and strategic direction area. Average project duration is 11 months.
“This was essentially an MOT for our charity. We were asked to assess where we were and where we got to. Through the process, areas for continued and further improvement were highlighted, but we also got the opportunity to sit back and appreciate the distance travelled and that we were doing a lot of things well.”
Tim Pare, Tea Leaf Trust
Journey to Excellence results by main consultancy project area only
The following graph shows the results of all 153 completed J2Es for the main area and focus of the consultancy project only. Projects tend to affect all areas of a charity’s management, but this shows the impact on the main focus area of each project. The blue shows the project ratings before our pro bono consultancy support, the orange lines show the post-consultancy project ratings.
Journey to Excellence results across all four management areas measured
The following graph shows the results of all 153 completed J2Es, showing the change achieved as a result of our support across all four management areas, regardless of the main area of the project focus. The blue shows the project ratings before our pro bono consultancy support, the orange line shows the post-consultancy project ratings.
Find out more
Discover more about our unique tool for measuring change, progress, and success in the charities we help on our Journey to Excellence page
Journey to Excellence in action
Read our Journey to Excellence case study about our project with charity Building Circles
