With the current economic climate and post COVID, there are a range of pressures, challenges and risks facing charities. Strong governance is more important than ever in tough times, yet some charities hesitate to review this as it takes up too much time, it’s too expensive, too complicated or simply, the charity doesn’t have the expertise.

Digi-Board, ACEVO’s premium partner, have the tools to help charities and social sector organisations carry out a board evaluation or governance review without a heavy price tag.

Digi-Board is the leading provider of online charity, NfP’s and third sector governance having worked with 140 organisations to date with a range of tools. These are tested and proven concepts so the board, and (where relevant) executive team, can have confidence when assessing existing practices. It is also a powerful way to engage all those involved in making governance work well.

Our tools draw on the principles of relevant governance codes, such as the Charity Governance Code, the National Housing Federation Code (NHF) and the FRC Corporate Governance Codes.  We also assess the ‘soft drivers’ of good governance such as board behaviours and culture.  Clients can tailor their questionnaires with a range of optional topics such as safeguarding, income generation, governance of committees and where relevant CQC questions.

We offer specific online tools for:-

• Large charities
• Small charities
• Not-for-Profits
• Housing providers

The results and our in-depth charity governance expertise provide insights drawn from participants’ responses.  Powerful data analytics deliver evidence based results that deliver actionable information about your organisation’s existing governance practices, strengths and focus areas for improvement.  Importantly we  pride ourselves on providing non-judgemental outputs and ensuring that participant responses are confidential and non-attributable.

As Digi-Board’s database has grown – we now uniquely offer governance benchmarking and board profiling data, so your organisation can learn how governance stacks up with those of your  peers as show in the below.

Benchmarking– how does our governance compare with others

Digi-Board offers a comprehensive and efficient way for charities to assess how good their governance is and learn about good practice at the same time.  This approach is an investment in the charity’s future.  Take the next step for a no fuss way to support you to transform your organisation’s governance.

The last time ACEVO reviewed its board performance against the Charity Governance Code, it took two trustees and two members of the senior management team three two-hour sessions to do so. The Digi-Board online platform allows all the trustees and members of the senior team to take part in the review in 45 minutes. Not only does this save us a huge amount of time, it also means everyone is included and therefore bought into the review. The Digi-Board platform goes beyond the Charity Governance Code to assess board behaviours and culture, as well as committee performance, and it lets us benchmark our results against 70 other charities. The results have provided a rich seam of data which we will mine to keep improving our governance. Digi-Board has helped us bring our exec and non-exec team members together in our ambition to champion and model good governance as an enabling force for greater impact.

Jane Ide, CEO, ACEVO