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Freelancers turn to fundraising
25.11.2009

While budgets are uncertain and cost-cutting an imperative, charities are turning to interims to give them better value for money. Liz Ford reports

* Liz Ford * The Guardian, Wednesday 25 November 2009 * Article history

Karl Demian is nervous. Currently contracted as an interim manager at two social-care charities, Demian, who has been working as an interim manager for almost a year and a half, admits that he is getting mixed signals about the state of the market. "Over the past 15 months I've felt very positive because my experience so far has been very good," he says. "But I think I am nervous about how easy it will be to secure assignments over the coming months because of the recession and issues around money. I've been getting mixed messages from [recruitment] agencies. Some are saying the market is quite buoyant; others that it's quite tight."

Demian's unease is understandable. A survey of charity interim managers conducted in the summer by specialist recruitment agency Russam GMS and Cass Business School found that 72% of UK charities had experienced falling incomes, 64% had put recruitment and IT projects on hold and 25% had cut jobs in the past six months. However, despite the gloom, the survey also showed that charities were still taking on interims, although the nature of the jobs they were contracted to do was changing.

Strategic recruitment

UK charities are recruiting interims more strategically to help raise money, reduce costs and improve efficiency, the survey found. For some charities this has meant putting their energies into retaining existing donors instead of attracting new ones, or employing an interim to help ease the charity through a period of restructuring. According to the Russam research, 69% of interims said they had worked on change management projects, 58% on contract negotiation and funding bids, 38% in financial planning and 34% in fundraising and marketing. Perhaps surprisingly, despite the difficult economic climate, rates of pay had risen by 8% between December 2008 and June, and more than half of the interims interviewed were confident the outlook for charities would be brighter in the next six months.

Matthew Johnson, HR manager at the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), says the recession had "brought everything into focus" on a financial level. His organisation called in interims when it realised that it had to make some difficult decisions in the past year, including making staff redundant. "We knew our financial situation was not particularly great and we would have to make staff posts redundant, but we were not sure what posts would go and what our restructuring would look like, so we hired interims to minimise the impact of that."

Betsy Osborne, head of HR at World Vision, says the non-government organisation continued to use interim managers with specific skills needed for a particular short-term role, or to give the organisation breathing space while it considered recruiting a permanent member of staff or restructuring a department.

While this thinking had not really changed because of the recession, Osborne admits that some interim roles have been influenced by the current economic climate. Its loyalty and retention team, for example, has taken on an interim to help consider why and when supporters cancel their child sponsorship donations and what can be done to retain interest. "In another financial situation that team may well have been focused on how to increase giving, looking at socio-economic data to find more ways of engaging with that group, rather than looking at how can we stem the number of people potentially not being able to support sponsorship," she adds.

Stephen Bubb, head of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations, agreed with Osborne that the use of interim managers gave charities "plenty of time" to recruit staff into top positions and that the recession had not changed charities' thinking in the use of interims. "The sector has always made use of people who come in to fill positions," he says.

However, Stephen Brooker, chairman of the charities practice at Russam, says he has noticed a change in the way charities have been using interims over the past two years, with less emphasis on fundraising and more on internal restructuring. "It appears to be that the immediate priority is to make sure that they get the cost side right."

Brooker believes a looming general election and the prospect of a Conservative government may have some hand in this change of mood. Charities, many of which derive at least some of their income from government grants, are unsure how a change at No 10 will affect their income streams and, at the moment, are unable to do much about it, says Brooker.

Chief executives are, instead, focusing on what they are able to control. "Most boards of trustees are thinking there could be a lot of change, but we'll know more clearly next year, so why concentrate on the difficult things? The obvious and easier thing is ensuring what you are doing is cost effective," he says.

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