Your role in your charity’s business success

Managing commissioned services can be means for charities to achieve their mission, remain financially stable and grow their influence and impact. But chances are, if you are reading this as someone working in the charity sector, you are not a business development professional – our kind are scarce. But what you are doing is contributing to the success and potential of your charity as a public sector provider.

Brilliant as we are (and we are brilliant), business development cannot create a winning bid in a vacuum. Creating an effective case for your organization to lead public services is based on the collective efforts of the whole organization, both at present and into the future.

For a glimpse of this, the slide below represents both my weak PowerPoint skills, and also what commissioners need to be confident that organisations practice in order to trust them with their services. Can you see your work on there?

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There’s a good chance that you are doing at least one of the above. Therefore, even if you know nothing about bidding, you are contributing to your charity’s ability to bid successfully for service contracts. Congratulations!

But a caveat – doing all of the above is not quite enough. To make your organization competitive you need to be doing the above in a way that is:

· Consistent

Ultimately, commissioners are only interested in value if it can be replicated. No doubt you have some fantastic case studies of your impact on those you support, but unless you can point to how you can make sure the next person will get the same great result, it will count for less. It’s a vital difference: doing good work is fantastic – embedding, resourcing, and assuring your good work is essential.

· Developing

What you do works now – great. But is there a mechanism that checks if it will keep working? Are you able to track and anticipate change that will impact it? What are you testing success on, and are you acting on change where change is needed?

Having these core mechanisms in place and working effectively is the difference between your service being great now, and making a commissioner confident that your service will be great in three years time, or when your staff team changes, or when the needs of those you support has changed.

· Evidenced

You know that your work makes a difference – but can you prove it? You know that you go over and above, but can you say where and how much by?

If you are doing any of the above (spoiler alert, you are!), can you give clear examples that demonstrate how effective it has been, preferably in the terms that matter to commissioners? This might simply be the difference between knowing that referrals to a service increased as a result of your partnership working, and being able to actually point to the amount they increased by. And it could be the difference between winning and losing.

And if you are already doing this, please take this as a reminder that those dreary data entry moments are in fact essential for setting your organisation up to thrive.

Once you recognise the value of your own work and the standards that it needs to reach, your charity can harness its collective power for greater success.