By Helen Greig, director, Trust Impact.
If you only had 10 apples, who would you give them to?
This is the question Trust Impact posed recently to a food poverty charity we were working with. The concept is pretty simple – resources are extremely stretched; they were stretched even before inflation spiralled. So, as a leader, who do you prioritise for your services?
There is a strong desire within the not-for-profit sector to do more – to reach more people or achieve more breakthroughs in research or save more lives, animals or people. Whatever the goal, we are united by the passion to do more. It’s an incredibly powerful motivator, intoxicating in its reach and energy, and a magnet for many people.
But I would like to pose this question to you – does more mean better?
Trust Impact has worked with more than 100 different not-for-profits, and one of the things we see again and again is organic growth that has led to a distance from the original core purpose of what that organisation was set up to do. Now, purpose can change over time, and that is sometimes essential for survival and growth. However, if you are clear about the purpose of your organisation, the very reason you exist, then growth should always follow that roadmap.
Yet time and again we see well-intended diversification leading to fractured delivery, confused interpretation of why the charity exists and ultimately, reduced quality of services for beneficiaries. Undoubtedly unintended consequences, but entirely preventable. When resources are tight – and they always are, whether your turnover is £80K or £80m – who should be your priority?
At Trust Impact, we use different analogies with our clients to talk about this problem. If you’ve only got ten apples, who do you give them to? If you’ve got 100 hours of time, how do you split it across your services? If you can only deliver in three locations, where do you go? Whether we like it or not, we cannot feed, or provide our services to, or be present for, everyone we would like to. That is the brutal, honest truth of it. We should always aspire to do more, but we also need to be pragmatic because if the process of trying breaks us, then we can feed, or provide services to, or be present for no one.
A few questions that might help:
- When you consider the purpose statement you have for your organisation, is it clear and specific?
- Does it help you prioritise? Or does it veer into comfortable-but-vague words and phrases like ‘support’, ‘help’ or ‘give back’?
- Does it resemble a purpose paragraph – or even chapter – more than a statement, or include all things for all people and thus result in being nothing for anyone? If it does, you will get tangled up.
If you feel uncomfortable with the answers to those questions, be assured that you are not alone. Getting back on track doesn’t have to be like turning the proverbial oil tanker. However, it does require strong leadership because invariably there are as many conflicting requirements as people in your team. They will not all get what they want from a clear purpose statement. The best CEOs we have worked with are the ones who have listened to the competing voices, understood what the charity exists to do, and then made a firm decision and led with it.
One of our core principles at Trust Impact is to keep it simple, and that applies very nicely in this case – understand what you’re trying to achieve and the impact you want to have; identify who your target is; track what you need to put in place to achieve that impact then clearly work through what that looks like for you in terms of your services and operations.
Adding new service users can fit within that process. Sometimes, it’s essential to do something different to generate income. But the gradual creep into new areas of work or groups based on good intentions rather than intentional, purpose-driven strategy could ultimately detract from the reason you exist – having a real impact.
