He said that councils knew they must work more efficiently to “maintain services and places that local people need and want to live in”. He added that this commitment would “drive them into partnership with voluntary groups”.

He added that councils needed to offer more work to the voluntary sector.

Meanwhile the minister for Civil Society, Nick Hurd, has said that there are going to be major opportunities for the sector to “deliver public services and to shape local priorities”. He has also said the government wants to “enable the sector to reshape and position itself to take advantage of the game-changing opportunities.”

At the start of this year, we at Voluntary Sector North West decided to use our meetings and events to undertake a snapshot survey on some key issues and to see whether government rhetoric is currently in tune with the sector. For the first quarter we decided to focus on the five principles of the Open Public Services White Paper: choice, decentralisation, diversity, fairness and accountability.

The Open Public Services White Paper effectively brings together the notions of big society and localism, and sets the overarching principles for the reforms of welfare, health and economic growth

On the whole our findings don’t make pretty reading for government, but do reflect the conversations we are regularly having with colleagues.

Principle 1: Choice – ‘wherever possible we will increase choice’
On choice, 73 per cent of respondents believe that their service users have less choice about the services they use than they did six months ago – this may be an indication that the cuts are initially leading to services being reduced or removed.

 Principle 2: Decentralisation – ‘power should be decentralised to the lowest appropriate level’
A total of 73 per cent of respondents do not believe that decisions are currently being made more locally – clearly people are not feeling the impact or desired effect of decentralisation.

Principle 3: Diversity – ‘public services should be open to a range of providers’
A total of 18 per cent of respondents believe they will increase the number of contracts they manage over the next few months whilst 26 per cent think there will be a decrease, A third of respondents reckon things will remain the same: these figures are somewhat surprising, given discussions with colleagues, and don’t read as badly as they might. It is difficult to ascertain from this whether this will impact on the diversity of providers the Government aims to attract.

Principle 4: Fairness – ‘we will ensure fair access to public services’
On fairness, 75 per cent of respondents do not believe the resources to the sector are being targeted fairly – though it might be argued that this will always attract a highly negative response.

Principle 5: Accountability – ‘public services should be accountable to users and taxpayers’
A total of 79 per cent of respondents do not feel that decision makers/services are more accountable to the community than they were six months ago – the Localism Act should provide more powers to enable this to happen. Only time will tell!

None of the above will surprise people involved in the sector in the North West. I suspect it is pretty much the same in many other parts of the country. If we are to see the Government’s vision realised, they are going to have to get smarter with their messages. As much as they may hate it, the Government may occasionally need to legislate if they really want to change behaviour – nudging will not be enough.

For some it’s a way of life – for others it’s a means of coping with guilt, or they simply want to help those in need. The charitable sector contributes an enormous amount to the National GDP and in many areas of the charitable world roles and responsibilities are being taken on which one might reasonably expect to belong to the government. Nevertheless, charities do it with pleasure and with pride.

Charities do everything that they possibly can to encourage donors to give and to give more each year.  Charities are highly skilled in how to ask for donations and also at valuing, nurturing and recognising their donors. Government plays its part to a limited extent with the facility of Gift Aid – although the benefit of Gift Aid has now been reduced.
There are many further ways in which the Government could help but chooses not to – including exemption from VAT for charities. This has not happened and it is unlikely that it ever will for the simple reason that, as stated earlier, the charitable sector contributes so much towards the economy and thereby to the coffers of the Revenue.

Yet, lo and behold, the government has now decided for reasons best known to itself to put further obstacles in the way of fundraisers and specifically for major donors.  The restrictions on the tax allowance for major donations to £50,000 is, to say the least, unhelpful. It would be bad news at any time and is particularly so in the current climate.
Regardless of any political points that the government may have been attempting to score, and regardless of their ability to ensure that everybody pays their fair share of tax, a decision has clearly been made to penalise the charitable sector.  Charities depend to a large degree on major donors, and removing incentives can only serve to make that task even more challenging. What we need from government at this point in time is more help, not less.

There is always a tendency to believe that we as charities are being taken for granted and, while wishing to minimise any form of hand-wringing and self pity, it does feel very much as if we are being treated as a soft touch. If we are to increase the proportion of people in this country that are making charitable donations – and reach the levels of giving in the United States – far more has to be done to incentivise prospective donors.

Charitable organisations are facing enough challenges at the present time without this added burden.

Leon Smith, chief executive of Nightingale Hammerson, which runs care homes

I received board approval a few months ago to establish a training arm of Jewish Women’s Aid. This falls under the remit of my role, which is to raise awareness of Jewish Women’s Aid and domestic violence in the Jewish community.

Rather than continuing only to give talks to community and synagogue groups, it became apparent that awareness-raising would have more impact if I provided training for relevant professionals. Training usually comprises a half-day course providing delegates with a tool kit and enabling them to provide better support and signposting to women and children affected by domestic violence.

The courses have been well received and have attracted teachers, counsellors, police personnel, nurses, and informal educators.

The problem, as I indicated above, was to charge or not. Discussions went back and forth. In support of charging were the arguments that delegates value training which they pay for, that it would bring in some much needed funds to the organisation and that it would cover the cost of any resources needed.

Arguments against were that charging would decrease the number of delegates because all training budgets have been slashed, that charging is generally a deterrent in this sector where free training is sometimes available and that we could probably afford to provide this service free of charge for a time.

And so it went on. In the end, we decided to charge a minimal amount, with the caveat that no delegate would be turned away from a course because they couldn’t pay. To date the charge hasn’t elicited a comment from any delegate, although one or two have asked for a reduction in the cost, which I have of course given them.  Some organisations have requested bespoke internal training, for which we’ve requested a financial contribution rather than charging at market rate.

The point, really, throughout the whole exercise, has been to keep in mind that the purpose of our courses is to raise awareness of our organisation and to ensure that women who need support are able to get it – either directly from us or from someone trained by us.

With that in mind, the courses have been a huge success – delegates have not only given  positive feedback but also gone on to provide good, solid advice and support to women affected by domestic violence.  We have had new clients referred to us, and course delegates have become ambassadors for Jewish Women’s Aid. For us, it has been well worth keeping course prices low.

Naomi Dickson is a community awareness co-ordinator at Jewish Women’s Aid

During the day-to-day battle to provide the best service possible with increasingly squeezed resources, it can be all too easy to think of providing an excellent service and fulfilling an advocacy role as mutually exclusive activities. In fact, they are closely related.

For advocacy to be effective, it must be grounded in operational reality, and informed by the evidence of what staff and volunteers see on the front line. Less obvious, however, is the reverse truth – that a charity’s operations can, and should, be shaped by its campaigning function.

Effective advocacy is based on developing an in-depth understanding of service users’ needs and this understanding can have a significant impact on operations on the ground. Beyond this, developing a campaigning profile drives awareness of a charity’s services and the higher demand that results can mean greater opportunities to refine and improve operations.

The importance of acting as a champion as well as a service provider is central to our plans at the Consumer Credit Counselling Service in 2012. We provide free debt advice to hundreds of thousands of struggling consumers each year via our telephone and online advice services – and our clients agree that the quality of our service provision is extremely high.

However, to provide the best possible service to our clients we know that we must campaign for their interests in the media and in Westminster, in addition to focusing on operational concerns. This is one of the reasons we have launched our new quarterly CCCS Consumer Debt and Money Report, which we hope will influence the wider economic debate over the issues affecting struggling households.

The danger for the sector is that service-led charities facing their own budget squeezes retreat into their core functions at precisely the time when their users need them most. For their sake, we want to work with partner organisations to ensure this does not happen.

Delroy Corinaldi, external affairs director, CCCS

•            Bidding is a time intensive activity often needing to be done in concentrated blocks of time. The greater management overhead within the public sector often provides a greater resource to achieve this

•            Match-funding is often a challenge for voluntary sector organisations as it can require multiple bids on precipitously balanced timelines. However it can often easily be justified for the public sector to use existing revenues to leverage in additional investment in an area of existing delivery and as a bonus this money is already secure

•            In my experience public sector bodies rarely attribute true overheads to projects; this can distort the true costs of a project.

What does this mean for the voluntary sector? Aside from the bidding challenge itself, the true nature of the cuts is not simply what the public sector decommissions or reduces in grant funding to the voluntary sector, but also the funding it displaces by securing grants that have traditionally gone to the sector.

There is of course a counter argument to this in that in an outcomes-focused world it doesn’t matter who the delivery agent is,  just what is achieved and how effectively and efficiently this is done. This is true, however, sadly there is often a gulf between the resources to identify, respond and secure grants, which seem to be coming with ever shorter bidding windows, and identifying the best possible initiatives.

What does this mean for the future? It seems unlikely that the grant environment is going to get any easier, however with right to challenge on the horizon, the sector perhaps also has an opportunity to draw in additional resources from previously inaccessible sources.

Jonathan Clemo is chief executive of Norfolk RCC, which supports communities in Norfolk

With the deafening silence that met my requests and the lack of headway made by any partners, I decided to take out a Freedom of Information request to look at both the Modernising Commissioning and the Supporting a Stronger Civil Society (SSCS) consultations – both of which had deadlines in early January 2011.

I asked to see a collation of responses, any subsequent reports and importantly how the responses had been aligned with subsequent strategies – the Third Sector Strategic Partners Programme, Transforming Local Infrastructure  in respect of SSCS and the Open Public Services White Paper in respect to the Modernising Commissioning Green Paper.

The response to my FoI has been interesting and somewhat disappointing for organisations like mine, who put effort into providing collective responses to consultations and work hard to ensure we reflect the views of the many groups we come into contact with.

I received three documents in response: a letter outlining how my question had been answered, a series of summaries relating to each question in the SSCS consultation, and an email chain relating to the Modernising Commissioning consultation and the release of information. Here’s a quick summary:

1) The summary of the SSCS consultation is not hugely enlightening. It highlights what certain responses said -  ‘125 organisations stressed the need to provide one to one support alongside web provision..’

Disappointingly the paper does not analyse who submitted responses,  so an organisation which consulted 30 groups before responding is the same as an individual’s response and there is no analysis or conclusion

2) There are two months’ worth of email discussions about releasing the findings of the Modernising Commissioning Green Paper, which appear to conclude they do not have the resources to collate the responses in one place. What intrigues me about this conversation is it is as late as November 2011 – January 2012 and the fact the information has not been gathered in one place makes you wonder how they could  have managed to analyse the collective responses at all

3) The most intriguing and ultimately disheartening part of the response is in the letter:

With regards to the SSCS paper the letter states: “We do not hold any information regarding the findings of the Supporting a Stronger Civil Society Consultation” and even worse “Nor do we hold information aligning the findings with the subsequent… OCS Strategic Partners Programme and the Transforming Local Infrastructure Fund provided by OCS’

So if I understand this response correctly, OCS asked the sector to take part in a consultation with specific reference to their Strategic Partners Programme and how support for civil society organisations should be organised, and it has released a total of more than £28million in these areas without analysing and aligning the spend to the consultation responses.

This makes me cross beyond reason. I am grateful for the spend, a worthwhile investment I believe, but to engage over 400 organisations in a consultation and then seemingly not utilise, analyse and digest the findings is ridiculous. I believe those of us who wasted our time are due an apology. I wouldn’t mind a refund for the time wasted on the work but I won’t hold my breath.

With regards to the Modernising Commissioning Green Paper I was given no responses. Apparently the analysis will come out in the Spring 2012. Is this a clue as  to when we might get legislation linked to the Open Public Services White Paper? However, there is no paperwork aligning outcome of the Modernising Commissioning Green Paper with the OPSWP, which means the reason for the Compact breach at the time was not justified.  Rest assured though discussions have taken place between officials (phew).

So in summary, I am disappointed to discover that the work we at VSNW and the sector at large put in to responding genuinely to consultations seems to have been summarily ignored. It is our worst fears about consultation coming to fruition.

In order to win back the trust, OCS now needs to be clear when initiating future consultations about how it will use the information, when it will report to respondents on the findings and how those findings have been used to shape subsequent policy, otherwise we will have to conclude that nobody is really listening.

Richard Caulfield, chief executive of Voluntary Sector North West

At Nightingale, the charity I run, we estimate that two mail appeals a year is sufficient. However, it is also essential to communicate updates to donors at least once a year to maintain that special relationship with the donor without an overt ask. The most efficient way of communicating that information is through the annual review – a digest of events that have taken place during the previous 12 months and details of plans and objectives for the future.

We do usually include a donation form in the review, but no reference is made to it either in the covering letter or the text. Notwithstanding this, many friends are still kind enough to send donations.

Annual reviews also imply addressing the tricky issue of how much financial detail should be provided to donors. There are few donors who are interested in or have the patience to read through full audited accounts; but if too much is a turn off, too little may also leave the interested reader feeling uninformed. Primarily the information that most supporters want is how much money is coming in, where does it come from and how much money is going out. A very simple equation – if outgoings are more than incomings, then donors are fully entitled to wonder and ask how this is going to be addressed.

A further question is to whom an annual review should be sent. We are lucky enough to have many supporters, and this makes printing, mailing and postage of a review an expensive process. Should it be sent to all donors or simply to those who made donations within the recent past? The dormant donor who may not have given for a number of years may also be the donor that has left our charity their home in their will. This is a difficult conundrum. If electronic media can be used to reach out to a lot of people it is inefficient to get in touch with key donors such as the elderly who often lack access to online information.

Ultimately we normally err on the side of safety and send our annual review to everybody on our database. There can be no definitive right or wrong answer in these issues but over a period of time one begins to form a relationship with one’s database and to understand what supporters want and what they don’t want. We usually get it right – although not 100 per cent of the time.

Leon Smith is chief executive of Nightingale, a care home in London for older Jewish people

I recently met Michael. He was a fellow speaker at an event and blew me away with his humanity, humour and ability to tell his story.

One of the members of The Adsetts Partnership is My Budget Brokerage, which helps people to manage their own support plan when they get lumbered with, as many see it, their own personal budget. I met Michael at its official launch, where he was talking about his experience of having a personal budget. It was fabulous.

Michael has ADHD, depression, OCD and Aspergers. He had failed college placements behind him and little hope when he was offered a personal budget. His belief that whoever was there to help him would just tell him what to do meant he pushed help away. But now he says ‘My life has changed so much I couldn’t ask for more.’

Two things have brought about the change. Firstly there was someone who stuck with Michael and persuaded him that a personal budget was an opportunity, not a burden. Secondly Michael has responded to the choices that personalisation laid before him. His story was full of phrases like ‘I could choose’ and ‘gave me my independence’.

It’s unfortunate that some ex-local authority support planners now working independently struggle to think outside the box they’ve always worked in. It’s a real challenge to make personalisation a genuine range of choices, not just the same old service with a different label. It takes creativity, and courage, from both planners and recipients to try out something novel.

Michael is now working and he glows with pride in his achievements. ‘My mum is my mum again and not my carer. My family are so happy for me and so proud of how far I have come since having support but most of all they’re proud of me.’ Nuff said.

Bridget Evans, director of marketing and fundraising, The Adsetts Partnership. The organisation aims to build collaboration between like-minded voluntary organisations.

The trendy workshops recently have been on social networks. They’ve helped me; I’m on LinkedIn and Twitter; but recently I went to one that stood out from the crowd. It was practical, recognising that social media can take over your whole life if you let it, with little to show except a superficial knowledge of Justin Bieber, the occupy movement and what everyone’s watching on TV. Today may just have saved me from becoming a disillusioned ex-tweeter.

Rob Wilmot, a founder of Freeserve, now works in social media and his advice was practical and direct.  The test of a good workshop isn’t how you feel as you leave but what you do when you leave (and how long the effect lasts!).  This is what I’m going to do:

• Allocate 30 minutes a day to managing my social media
• Put hashtag filters onto tweetdeck so I don’t get bombarded for the rest of the day, but just see those tweets I’m interested in
• Personalise my LinkedIn profile link and publicise it
• Make better use of our LinkedIn company page, segmenting and detailing what we offer
• Use the LinkedIn introduction tool
• Tweet not just what I’m doing but make it interesting, maybe with a link to what interests me to try and increase my followers and gain new friends
• Investigate GooglePlus

I’m not a geek: I’ve only just sussed my set-top box and my 80-year-old dad had to explain the TV pause button as one hasn’t made it into our house; but the instant digital networks world is something I must master. I plan to make it fit into my working life in a way that suits me. I might just get that special contact that leads to the donation of a lifetime.

Bridget Evans, director of marketing and fundraising, The Adsetts Partnership. The organisation aims to build collaboration between like-minded voluntary organisations.

I have questioned what the responses to this consultation said in a previous blog, and the lack of transparency here is now causing me further concern. For example, I received an email about a BIG/OCS consultation about online support services, which is taking place this month. Interestingly, the email says it is  ‘building on the Supporting a Stronger Civil Society consultation’. Really? I am glad about that, but could you tell me how I know that to be true? Or are you intent on asking us questions until we provide the answers necessary to back a strategy that exists already? And didn’t BIG invest £800k in Your Square Mile to do some of this work? And if I am right why didn’t they do the consultation before making the investment?

This only seems half the story as there appears to be a number of other things running with regards to OCS and BIG’s approach to local and specialist infrastructure services:

Transforming Local Infrastructure Fund (TLIF): An OCS grant programme delivered by BIG. Most local infrastructure organisations will have been involved in some way. The process was not ideal but, rightly people got on with it and the mantra was about rationalisation, collaboration and sustainability: making sense of local infrastructure for the future. All this is well and good, and with luck many will have strategies to implement even if they don’t receive funding. The trouble is other strategies may not facilitate that.

Building Capabilities for Impact & Legacy is the important consultation exercise that BIG are undertaking at present about their future investment in infrastructure – the £20million spend announced alongside TLIF. This is a welcome consultation, but there are some concerns and contradictions (which I can express in my response, I know).

This is, and makes no apology for it, an investment in the ‘business support’ aspect of infrastructure services: it is not about voice/campaigning/representation. I need to know if this is now off-limits, or can we expect other opportunities in these areas? The trouble is that ‘voice’ work is enhanced when aligned with providing support. It is through that joined-up nature we can spot the trends and pick up the issue. This could have a critical impact upon the sector.

It makes a big deal of an issue I love to hate – ‘choice’. There is an underlying current of ‘developing a wider market’ of infrastructure support services. If this is the way forward, how does that strategy fit with TLIF which was about rationalisation? Organisations that may just have negotiated a collaborative approach may see this and think ‘sod it – we will chance our arm in the market’. There is little jam at the moment and not, in my view, sufficient jam to create a totally market driven approach

Has the OCS consultation been shared with BIG? It should be as it would undoubtedly help.

Yes, we can learn from business. But, let’s not pretend it is a panacea – many businesses are not exactly proving sustainable either.

If we have an ‘any qualified provider’ approach to infrastructure spend from BIG, who will vet the providers, provide intelligence on the ground, direct groups to appropriate places for support? I know – infrastructure.

Finally, what about other investors? BIG are good at talking to other grant funders in the region, but on a national approach to local infrastructure where are local authorities and PCTs (or successors) in this conversation?  They are, after all, the biggest and most consistent purchasers of infrastructure services at a local level. These approaches run the risk of creating dual strategies of a national approach to what local infrastructure should look like versus the local approach. At least during the TLIF discussions it caused many local conversations to take place with key funders in a positive way. I need convincing this would not have a detrimental impact on local collaboration.

Then there is Assist Investment for National Infrastructure. This may have passed you by – it nearly did me. It is £10m over five years for national support for the development of local and specialist infrastructure from BIG that went out on the BRAVO solutions tendering portal. It is something I welcome as a whole, but I would have thought needed the sector to be able to form some sensible partnerships before PQQ. I understand this was put out on the 10 December with a deadline of 9 January, (I could make comments about needing a hard copy in London by lunch time on a Monday creating different deadlines for non-London based organisations – but I won’t). Not really a time frame to get the partnerships right, though there will be opportunities in future of course once we know who is invited to tender.

This programme does include an aim about marketisation of infrastructure (if my earlier thoughts sounded like paranoia): ‘To develop BIG’s learning about how demand-led models of national support services could work in a local context and in a more market-oriented way.’

This is a reasonable learning point, but has any consultation or indeed any past experience told us that the market-orientated way is what is wanted and what works? And it might work with organisational development/business support aspects of infrastructure,  but we need to keep asking ‘what about voice?’

So what do we do? Well, VCS, infrastructure and frontline needs to respond to the two consultations,  and quickly – and be clear on what they want. We also need to be clear about the role of infrastructure in giving the sector a voice. Most of all we need some guarantees the evidence will be shared and OCS can let us know what we did say to the original consultation. A year is a long time to wait, but it won’t stop me from asking.

Richard Caulfield, chief executive of Voluntary Sector North West