What makes working with the third sector different?

Whilst every organisation has stakeholders, charities and not-for-profit organisations including membership bodies face particular challenges. They often have a large number of stakeholders, many of whom have strong views on what should be done. This leads to challenges such as:

• The pressure to demonstrate tangible positive outcomes
• Difficulty in uniting people with disparate visions of success to achieve a single aim
• Making tough decisions on what can and can’t be achieved
• The necessity of achieving results with a limited budget
• Managing volunteers as well as paid staff

How can performance management help?

Bringing people together to discuss what success looks like and the best way to measure it so you know you’re achieving it helps to unite both volunteers and paid employees. When people are involved in creating a picture of success and can see this visibly achieved through KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), they are more likely to be committed to achieving them.

What’s more, the discussion will help to show what can reasonably be done with the resources available, and what can’t. Whilst this can be a difficult discussion, focusing on performance and outcomes helps to clarify thinking and demonstrate why a decision has been made.

The Performance Prism

The Prism model is particularly helpful in organisations with a wide variety of stakeholders such as volunteers, regulators and donors.

When combined with stakeholder mapping, it’s a useful tool to help you examine the role of your stakeholders and what they want and need from you. It helps you to plan processes and identify the capabilities you will need in order to achieve your aims, then identify appropriate measures of performance to achieve these.

What we can do to help you?

Support can include a range of activities from:

• Reviewing your current processes
• Assessing what is working and what isn’t and suggesting improvements
• Facilitating workshops to agree what is of key importance
• Examining wants and needs of your stakeholders
• Producing a strategy map (sometimes called a “success” map) to help establish what needs to be done and plan out how to achieve it
• Helping you to set KPIs
• Showing how you can learn from the results.