If you lead, fundraise and/or carry out the finances for a small charitable organisation, this session is for you. Whether you already have financial systems in place or want to know how to get started, this session will help you to reflect on how you are currently calculating your costs, key mistakes that are being made in the sector and what you can do in the immediate term to ensure you are confident to ask for what your services are worth.
Many small organisations struggle to understand their “overheads” or management costs, particularly related to staff and, in an ever-challenging time, lack the time and space to think about how they engage their board with strategic financial decision making.
At Clear Thinking Consultancy we support our partner charities through a simple process to understand the most important pieces of financial information that they will need to make the decisions that will help them secure their future.
Learning outcomes
In this session, participants will:
· Understand the full cost recovery method and key financial terms.
· Reflect on their own practices and identify clear ways in which they can avoid the most commonly made mistakes in costing out their services.
· Learn a two-step process for i) calculating service costs and then ii) presenting those externally so that funders will fund your full costs.
About our speaker
The session is delivered by Kita Ikoku, Founder and Director at Clear Thinking Consultancy (CTC).
Kita founded CTC in February 2010 as a response to the widening inequalities that she saw in her then-current role between smaller, community-based voluntary sector organisations and larger “prime” contractors who had access to more resource to promote their offer and secure funding but whose practices often excluded those on the ground and, therefore, the most excluded and vulnerable. CTC’s services focus on strategic development, impact and funding, and Kita particularly enjoys the facilitation side of her work, working with consortia and supporting organisations, and their leaders, through change.
Prior to this she was the Deputy Director of a medium sized education charity in East London. Her role included fundraising, monitoring impact and evaluation, capacity building of small partners’ organisations, quality and performance. She has previously held associate consultancy roles with several organisations including as Senior Funding Consultant for NCVO leading on all of their commissioned funding strategy work.
CTC also works with larger funders to ensure that their money reaches the places that need it the most. As such Kita has led a number of research and evaluation projects including Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Ideas and Pioneers’ Fund, a policy review of the National Lottery Heritage Fund’s Full Cost Recovery policy and research into the effects of the pandemic on the voluntary sector in the London Borough of Ealing. CTC is a named preferred supplier for several funders’ non-financial support programmes.
Outside of CTC, Kita sits on the board as a trustee of a small music development charity in Brent supporting young people at risk of offending and as trustee of YPF Trust, an umbrellla organisation for Young People’s Foundations which support children and young people’s providers on a place basis. Kita was recently invited to become an Adviser to John Lyon’s Charity.
About Clear Thinking Consultancy
Clear Thinking Consultancy was set up in 2010 to support small charities to become financially sustainable. We are an associate-based organisation with consultants of differing disciplines and expertise, all of whom have extensive experience of the VCS, being brought together on a case-by-case basis. Our diagnostic tool, which we rolled out in the London Borough of Brent in 2013-2016 and deliver to support voluntary sector leaders to understand and respond to their sustainability barriers helps us understand the sector gaps. Our support responds to these three key areas: strategic development, understanding, articulating, and evidencing impact, and funding: both fundraising and enabling the accurate costing out services to meet overheads and build up reserves.
