A guide to third sector trading - WCVA

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It’s an idea, but is it business? A guide to third sector trading 1: Getting started 2: First steps 3: Business planning 4: Legal and governance 5: Funding and resourcing 6: Financial controls 7: Managing growth 8: Management and governance 9: Social enterprise 10: Sources of support • Are you making it too complicated? Maybe the need is simply to make existing social or charitable activities more sustainable, and the nature of the business you will run is not too important provided it generates income. That’s ‘social enterprise’ too. Putting your social objectives in writing Tips on defining community benefit objectives: When you are clear what needs you will be meeting, you can set about defining your ‘social objectives’ in a form that your steering group, potential supporters, parent organisation and community can understand and sign up to. Unless you can put it in writing there’s not much chance that you’ll be able to communicate what you are doing to others. Here are some suggestions. What to do: Aim to produce a list of each type of community benefit which applies to your venture. Why? You can’t start a charity or a Community Interest Company without specifying what you want it to achieve. It is common sense to treat social enterprise activity in the same way. When? The best time to define your social objectives is early in the life of your steering group. You can use the discussion as a team building exercise which everyone can contribute to. How? • Be systematic: Allocate time to the discussion. Take notes and circulate a summary afterwards. Discuss your conclusions briefly at the next meeting to confirm what you have agreed. • Be specific: Aim to write an easily understood list of the social and economic benefits you want to achieve. • Be realistic: Use the exercise to reach agreement on what you can realistically achieve. Make sure that individual objectives are not contradictory. • Don’t confuse objectives with ‘mission statements’: Mission statements are generalisations designed to persuade people that you have detailed objectives (even if you haven’t!) • Be comprehensive: Don’t limit yourself to saying what you will do with your profits. Many trading organisations have broad and flexible social objectives. List them all (economic, social, environmental, cultural), and the ways you will achieve them (eg through the services or goods you will sell, your employment practices, your environmental policies etc). • Prioritise: Put your objectives in order of preference if you can, to guide you later on targeting your efforts and resources. 38
It’s an idea, but is it business? A guide to third sector trading 1: Getting started 2: First steps 3: Business planning 4: Legal and governance 5: Funding and resourcing 6: Financial controls 7: Managing growth 8: Management and governance 9: Social enterprise 10: Sources of support • Set first and second division objectives: Make a clear distinction between things which you can and will achieve from the start, and other desirable objectives: eg, generating rental income from renting space in your building could perhaps start almost immediately, but aiming to make enough profit to employ a fundraising officer is a longer term goal which you may never realise. If you don’t separate objectives in this way your community business may always appear on paper to be failing. • Get consensus, not agreements written in blood: Treat the exercise as descriptive not prescriptive, as clarifying your collective purpose, not laying down policies. Small differences of opinion do not matter as long as there is general agreement on the main objectives. • Publish: Use your list of community benefit objectives to let people know what you are doing – in leaflets, reports, information you give to staff and volunteers etc. • Review: Your list of social benefit objectives should not be fixed for all time. New ideas and approaches may evolve spontaneously, especially if you are successful. Others may simply prove impractical. So just junk them. If you undertake any form of social auditing or annual review or evaluation, the process of revising your objectives should become automatic. 39
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