If you work in the charity sector, please join our free network for charity professionals. The problems at Kids Company are not typical of the charity sector, let’s make that clear. The Understanding Charities Group has been active in this area, and the announcement yesterday of the joint initiative of Acevo and NCVO to promote the positive impact of the voluntary sector is a welcome escalation. We need better access to evidence to support our stories, and we need to work together on common agendas and responses to the media. We need stronger, more consistent stories, a more positive narrative and an increased ability to respond to misleading information about the sector. We need to reframe the debate: to reclaim the concept of charity as being about people making a difference to the problems in the world they care about and want to help solve, with charities helping them do that. F ile:NC NC. We need better, clearer communications about our impact on our beneficiaries and supporters, our role in society and the extraordinary work we do. Sector is Clear was a popular meme not only on Sithposting but also on Facebook, it involved taking a scene from the Star Wars: Battlefront 2 Trailer and making three slides. Messages about who we are, what we do, why we do it and what we achieve. Like Kids Company, charities have been accused of all sorts of wrongdoings: we waste funds, we overpay our senior staff, we campaign about the wrong things, we’re in the pocket of government, we make unethical investment decisions and we hound our donors.Īnd like Kids Company, the charity sector needs positive messages to counteract these accusations.

The same goes for the charity sector as a whole. You can try to fix MBR (execute Fix MBR command from Tools menu). The first priority for all charities has to be to examine their practices and processes, to be as sure as they can that their governance is strong, their finances sound and their administration secure.īut what Kids Company also needed today and in the past few weeks has been clear, concise communications about how it worked and – crucially – what it achieved. Either Master Boot Record (MBR) is missing or corrupted on the disk. Good communications can’t make up for a chaotically run organisation. Long waits for security clearances are a. WRITTEN BY John Wilson and Kieran Pender. Of course the issue with Kids Company wasn’t primarily about communications: it was about governance. Public Sector Informant: No easy ways to clear APS security hurdles. Even at today’s Commons public administration committee hearing, Batmanghelidjh was accused by one particularly tetchy interrogator of delivering a “ torrent of verbal ectoplasm”.

Confused messages, defensive responses, a dearth of detail – all combined to show a picture of a charity in crisis that went much deeper than problems with cashflow. The way chief executive Camilla Batmanghelidjh and chair Alan Yentob have responded to media probing has been troubling.

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