Buckle up: the UK charitable sector is in for a bumpy ride. You don’t need the Bank of England’s latest forecasts to realise that discretionary charitable donations—those fivers and tenners we happily hand to friends running marathons or baking cakes for good causes—are going to be harder to collect as everyone feels the squeeze from higher bills.

Our sector is one of the UK’s largest employers, with some 827,000 employees. Its financial security matters for jobs, alongside the vital work the charities perform.

The numbers of small charities may surprise you: of the 170,000 registered charities in England and Wales, half generate incomes of less than £10k a year. This means that even small falls in personal donations threaten a borderline-solvent charity’s survival.

The key is to prepare now for tougher times ahead. At Bowel Research UK, our management team and trustees have already planned for a leaner two or three years of income generation so that we can continue to fund vital ‘proof of concept’ medical research, as well as individual PhDs that others working in bowel disease research do not support. This is our niche, which is vital for continued ‘pump priming’ of larger research projects.

Although our strong balance sheet enables us to ride out the storms ahead, the measures taken in 2022 will ensure we grow our fundraising capabilities.

Over the past 12 months, we have outsourced our non-core functions such as HR, public relations, IT support, website maintenance, social media and finance.

We decided these could be done more effectively by partner suppliers, who are not only expert at what they do, but have been selected because they are strongly aligned with our values.

It may seem counterintuitive, but through outsourcing we have improved our corporate governance, giving us better segregation of roles, responsibility and supervision, and we have improved reporting and benchmarking previously achieved in-house.

Our external IT support illustrates this well. The IT partners we chose are small enough to give us personalised service but large enough to act swiftly if we have an immediate need. It also means that, should they lose a member of staff, it is—to be brutally frank—their problem, not ours. The same applies to HR, finance and the rest.

Skills in short supply

While outsourcing makes strategic sense, it also recognises that certain roles, such as that of finance director, are in short supply in a post-Covid, buoyant charity job market and we, like many other smaller charities, struggle to fill these posts at affordable salaries.

Another strand to our organisational reforms is the premium we put on automated processes. We have moved our grants handling and income management processes onto better, more flexible platforms. These demand less personal data input and also generate useful metrics that enable us to monitor KPIs more closely.

Next year, we’ll be automating other processes. For example, we will work in partnership with a professional fulfilment house to automate ordering, dispatching and delivering challenge event merchandise via our website. This will improve stock control and removes a job that—while important—is not core for efficient functioning.

Our focus is on the next generation of staff. We’ve recruited tech savvy team individuals who are happy to take fresh approaches to old problems, and for whom hybrid working and operating digitally comes as naturally as breathing.

Replacing hierarchy with flexibility

We have recruited a young team, who will have room to grow and develop in their roles. They enjoy the responsibility of breaking new ground, which they find exciting and motivating. We have purposefully avoided a typical workplace hierarchy, replacing it with interesting flexible jobs that appeal to creative, problem-solving people, whom we allow to play to their strengths.

As fundraising is our most important in-house function, next year we will be substantially increasing our engagement with corporates, private equity and VC firms, as well as high net worth individuals.

We are creating a raft of new sponsorship and donor packages that will enable funders to choose exactly where they want their money allocated. They can cherry pick the projects they want to sponsor and they will be able to get to know the researchers, follow the research and take pride in the achievements. In return for their investment, our funders will be able to share the CSR, public relations and philanthropic benefits.

Next year, the road ahead will not be smooth, yet I’m confident the restructuring we’ve carried out and the other measures we’re taking allow us to face it with optimism and confidence. We have a close and unique relationship with the Association of Coloproctology of Great Britain and Ireland. This enables us to be certain that we only fund the best medical research and that the projects we back will find the treatments and cures that save lives and give people living with chronic bowel conditions a much better quality of life.

Lynn Dunne is interim CEO of Bowel Research UK