Megan Griffith Gray

The most significant change in the use of the internet in recent years has been the shift from a ‘broadcast’ medium (one organisation or person pushing lots of content out to a large audience), to a ‘conversational’ medium (many different organisations and people talking to each other and engaging in debate). This is the key implication of most discussions about ‘web2.0’, ‘social media’ or ‘social networking’ (for more, see our drivers on online communities and interactive websites).

This has ...

Since 1998, NCVO Third Sector Foresight has been researching and writing about how the world is changing and what that means for the voluntary and community sector. But as we all know, the sector is incredibly diverse, which has meant that the information we provide is by necessity ‘generic’ – it attempts to talk about issues that will impact on a large number of organisations.

That is useful up to a point, but we know that often the drivers that will have the biggest impact on individual...

Plans for a Social Investment Wholesale Bank to provide loan finance to the sector are progressing. The government is now consulting on design and functions for the bank. Stuart Etherington, NCVO's CEO has responded:

The Government’s consultation into thedesign and functions for a SocialInvestment Wholesale Bank is animportant step forward. However it isalso important that discussions startaround how the bank will be financed,to make sure it is properlycapitalised. A properly designed...

On 14 July the government published a green paper on adult social care, Shaping the Future of Care Together. This followed a fairly lengthy consultation process, now followed by a consultation on the paper, which the government has called the Big Care Debate. See this summary from Community Care for an overview of the proposals. The outcome will have implications for all organisations delivering social care services to adults, or supporting those accessing these services (including...

The latest data from the Legacy Foresight’s Legacy Monitor service (which benchmarks 38 of the UK’s leading charities, who together account for 56% of the legacies market) has shown that in the mid "noughties" the legacy sector enjoyed healthy growth. Between Q1 2004 and Q1 2008, legacy income grow by one third - from £658m to £877m. However, the latest data confirm that the economic crisis is taking its toll. In the 12 months to March 2009, legacy income across the Legacy Monitor Consortium ...

Declining trust in banks and the difficulty of obtaining credit in the current recession may prove a catalyst for some already growing trends, the use of mutual finance through credit unions and ‘social lending’.

The credit union movement has seen a significant growth in recent years, the number of members growing from 224,674 in 1997 to 607,400 in 2007, according to The Association for British Credit Unions Limitied (PDF). It is expected that numbers will be boosted further by the current...

The 2009 Budget announces

“…new pilot city-region arrangements for Greater Manchester and Leeds, building on the Government’s recent economic reforms through the Sub-National Review. The pilot city-regions will benefit from the stronger integration of planning, housing, transport, regeneration, employment and skills programmes, increasing their ability to drive sustainable growth and economic development.”

Changes to tiers of government/governance always mean that new relationships have to be...

On Wednesday Alistair Darling delivered what was a fairly dramatic budget when compared to recent years. Dramatic because of the forecasts it contained about borrowing and debt, and because of how these forecasts and the response of the government to the recession have been debated by the main political parties in the days since.

As always, the budget provided updated assessments and forecasts of the economy and public finances. In a time of great uncertainty, the Chancellor’s medium term...

We would probably all agree that leading an organisation through the current recession presents significant challenges. But do these challenges require a similar method and culture of decision-making, or is a change required?

This interesting article from the US Nonprofit Quarterly argues that boards do indeed need to rethink their skills and culture in order to steer organisations effectively through financial crisis.

The article begins with a case study of an organisation that, although...

Richard Thaler, the author of Nudge, was in the UK doing the rounds of various organisations a couple of weeks ago. You can listen to the presentation he gave to Demos on nudging ourselves out of recession here, or download the presentation he gave to the government’s Strategy Unit here.

I am currently spending two days a week at the Office of the Third Sector where I am working with others on a futures analysis project. I am spending my days thinking about current trends and future implications, and I’m aware of what a luxury that is and the stark contrast to my usually hectic and meeting-filled days at NCVO Third Sector Foresight!

I’m identifying the drivers that will or could influence the future interaction between government and the sector. We are also looking at what...

And of course if you’d like to try scenario planning, getting hold of our practical guide to scenario planning, Picture This, is an excellent way to get started!

On 18 February we ran a seminar at NCVO's Annual Conference looking at the future of membership. It was chaired by Matthew Taylor of the RSA and featured presentations from The National Trust's Alex Hunt and our very own Karl Wilding.

• Karl's presentation
• Alex's presentation
• Read Matthew's reflections on the session
• Find out more about the NCVO/RSA project on the future of membership
• Read Megan's thinkpiece on drivers shaping the future of membership

I am writing this post from the Brewery which is hosting the NCVO annual conference - Civil society: building trust in uncertain times. This year you can follow all the action on twitter (not sure what twitter is? See Louise Brown's excellent piece to find out). Follow what everyone is saying about the conference here. Our own twitter feed is here, and I'll be reporting from our session afternoon on the future of membership with Matthew Taylor (RSA), Alex Hunt (National Trust) and our own...

Received this from the American Pew Internet Project this morning:

As of December 2008, 11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others. Just a few weeks earlier, in November 2008, 9% of internet users used Twitter or updated their status online and in May of 2008, 6% of internet users responded yes to a slightly different question, where users were asked if they used...

On Tuesday Clay Shirkey gave a lecture at the LSE. I was prevented from attending by the snow but fortunately the LSE have published an audio file of his talk. Worth a listen.

Would you like to help frontline organisations to be more reactive and sustainable?

We lead the Responding to Social Change workstream. As part of this we offer 2 strands of tailored training for people who work for infrastructure and umbrella organisations:

1. Making sense of your environment: training for leaders
2. Understanding the external environment: supporting the front line.

Making sense of your environment: training for leaders parts 1 &2

"Stimulating and powerful"

Structured to fit around...

I am spending today at the fantastic social media exchange. One of the highlights for me has been Nick Booth's session on the future of news. Nick was part of the excellent ICT Foresight panel, put together when I was writing the series of ICT Foresight reports.

Here’s a question for you, posed by Nick at his session: What is news?

10 years ago that would have been an easy question to answer. News was created when someone made a decision to put something on the radio or in a newspaper. But...

The pollsters Populus have been tracking public confidence in the economy, reporting:

Nearly four out of five voters (79%) expect the economy to perform badly for the country as a whole over the coming year, and net optimism/pessimism has dropped to a new low of minus 61%, according to the latest poll by Populus for The Times. This gloomy view is to be expected, given the steady flow of bad economic news and bleak forecasts. But many people continue to see the recession as affecting others,...

New technologies are changing how information is generated, distributed and consumed, with implications for some staple products of many VCOs, publications and reports

The web has become central to our lives and therefore providing web-based information is now a core part of the strategy of many voluntary and community organisations (VCOs). But the online world is developing fast, providing new opportunities to improve how we distribute information and new challenges as patterns of...

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project has released a new data memo revealing that the share of (US) adult internet users who have a profile on an online social
network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years, from 8% in 2005 to 35% now.

Overall, personal use of social networks seems to be more prevalent than professional use of networks, both in the orientation of the networks that adults choose to use as well as the reasons they give for using the...

A partnership of US organisations (CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, The Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Meyer Foundation and Idealist.org) have published a survey of nearly 6,000 emerging nonprofit leaders, Ready to Lead? Next Generation Leaders Speak Out (PDF). The headines say that “a skilled, committed, and diverse pool of next generation leaders would like to be nonprofit executive directors in the future. However, the survey also finds that there are significant barriers: work-life...

I recently came across the notion of ‘soft paternalism’, which seems relevant here. It refers to an overt process through which individuals are
encouraged to buy in to particular kinds of behaviour in order to improve their own welfare, and is described by Wikipedia as a “political philosophy that believes the state can help you make the choices you would make for yourself—if only you had the strength of will and the sharpness of mind. But unlike ‘hard’ paternalists, who ban some things and...

Update:

You have been directed to this page because it has been linked to as the key page on this website relating to membership. This page has now been superseded by the Future of Membership project homepage.

On the project homepage you can find full details about the project and links to blog posts written about the future of membership, as well as contact details and ways to get involved.

Original Page:

NCVO and the RSA are bringing together a consortium of leading charities from across...

That’s an interesting question Stephen. The ‘disintermediation’ question came up many times when we were working on the ICT Foresight project. In relation to giving we concluded that intermediaries would not necessarily be cut out, but that new kinds of intermediaries would be required. Here is the relevant extract from ICT Foresight: charitable giving and fundraising in a digital world (download PDF)

Future organisational models

This report has explored how the internet can facilitate...

Karl has been working hard to gather evidence about what happens to the sector in a recession. You can now read a summary of his findings in this news post.

On Monday NCVO hosted an economic summit to discuss the best ways to support the sector in the likelihood of a recession in the months to come. In preparation for the summit, Karl looked for available evidence about what happens to the voluntary and community sector in economic downturns, including both historical and contemporary evidence from the UK and abroad. It was an interesting and challenging task, as Karl explains:

Evidence about what happens to the sector in a downturn is limited...

Since 2004, the ChangeUp programme has increased funding to infrastructure organisations, together with the heavily oversubscribed Big Lottery Fund BASIS fund. The future of infrastructure funding after the current spending round is highly uncertain and will depend on a number of factors including how well the sector and Capacitybuilders can make a case for continued support of the sector’s infrastructure, the state of central government finances, and which political party is in power. In...

Last week we were up in Doncaster with 12 chief officers and chairs of local infrastructure organisation. One of the discussions revolved around the implications and strategic actions that could flow from consideration of this driver (and the related drivers of increasing role of the sector in service delivery, procurement practice and polarisation of the sector.

Read the participants’ ideas about implications and potential actions.

Last night we were up in Doncaster with 12 chief officers and chairs of local infrastructure organisation. One of the discussions revolved around the implications and strategic actions that could flow from consideration of one key driver. The one that we discussed was described as “commissioning and procurement” (see drivers on this website on bringing markets into public services, increasing role of the sector in service delivery and procurement practice) and the related driver of

Hi all
I’ve created this new forum as a space to debate the drivers that particularly impact on infrastructure organisations. We are now working with many infrastructure organisations through the Improving Support programme (funded by Capacitybuilders) so we’ll also be sharing insights from our training workshops and other conversations.
Megan

In the past six months, the Conservative lead in the polls has increased to what would now constitute a considerable majority in Parliament. However, further volatility in the polls is still possible in the lead up to the next General Election (up to two years ahead). The party conference season is always an interesting time to look at polls, so what are the pollsters saying right now? This is Populus’s take:

Each party gained some bounce in the polls from its own party conference, but as the...

Today the Third Sector Foresight website is a year old! I’ve steered the website’s journey from when it was just a glimmer in Karl Wilding’s eye in 2004, through to today where we see almost 1000 individuals using the site to help them understand change and make better strategic decisions. So, I would like to share with you some of my highlights of the last 12 months…

My top ten posts and discussions:

1. This summary of the seminar we held on the economic downturn includes links to presentations...

First Northern Rock, now Bradford and Bingley. And then there are Ebh Bank in Denmark, Hypo Real Estate in Germany, Glitnir in Iceland and more… As the credit crunch tightens, many governments are being forced into bailing out or supporting failing institutions.  This will have an impact on the Government's level of borrowing and the associated costs of servicing this borrowing. Combined with the expected decrease in taxation receipts as a result of a slowing economy it seems inevitable that ...

“A trend is a trend is a trend, until it bends”

Ged Davis from Shell famously said. His comment encapsulates one of the difficulties of strategic analysis, which is the way in which individual drivers relate to each other. A trend can seem to be progressing in a fairly predictable fashion, until a shock or a counter-trend knocks it off course. This is usually what is behind those predictions that were so famously wrong.

I was reminded of this today as I updated our driver on ethical...

This short blog post from Henley Centre Headlight Vision reveals an interesting snapshot of some research they’ve done into public attitudes about sharing data with government. Michelle Singer writes: “citizens’ first reaction is one of extreme wariness – no doubt exacerbated by recent media stories about data that has gone ‘missing in action’. However, when requests for personal information are sweetened by the promise of “better service”, the picture changes dramatically. Over two thirds...

Third Sector Foresight is providing new and dedicated support to umbrella and infrastructure organisations as part of Improving Support, funded by Capacity Builders. We are working with the Centre for Charity Effectiveness at Cass Business School and Yorkshire and Humber Regional Forum.

To sign-up to receive dedicated information about our support for umbrella and infrastructure organisations, join the website and tell us that you work for an infrastructure or umbrella organisation when...

I recently read an interesting article about individual responses to environmental change.  The main thrust of the piece centred on the fact that steps taken by one person can lead others to do the same.  The author termed it ‘viral social change’ and it seems to me that this is probably the biggest influencer of people’s behaviour in all manner of things.  It’s the modern version of ‘lead by example’ but this current change relies more on peer leadership than anything else.  This is quite...

Today NCVO has published the second round of its new Charity Forecast report which reveals the confidence levels and plans of sector leaders. As future change is partly based on present intentions, the report provides valuable information to inform strategic plans; revealing trends in collaboration and competition and how VCOs are feeling about the funding environment and the economy.

Headline findings

• Charity leaders’ confidence has fallen 5% in the last quarter, but still shows a net...

I am currently thinking about the relationship between organisations and users for one of the chapters of the strategic analysis. One of the key drivers is that users are more assertive and less deferential. An interesting project from Demos has been looking at how this is impacting on the conversations that health professionals have with their patients, finding that they are learning to talk and listen to increasingly assertive patients and letting go of some old assumptions about...

Natalie, Veronique and I are currently deep into writing the next edition of the Voluntary Sector Strategic Analysis, our annual analysis of the drivers shaping the future of the sector. This year’s edition will focus on the following five themes:

• National politics – clearly a period of greater uncertainty than at any time since 1997 election (or perhaps even 1992)?
• The economy – higher on most people’s agenda than it has been for many years and (again) a time of uncertainty (this will also be...

I'm still reading Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. In describing how the internet has disrupted the world of journalism and publishing, Shirky uses the example of the invention of movable type in the 15^th century, and the impact that this had on scribes. The point he is trying to get across is the relationship between technological change and social change.

When researching the ICT Foresight reports I often found myself in discussions with our expert panel about technological determinism...

Calling all membership organisations!

We are currently developing a programme of work to explore the future of membership with colleagues at the RSA, Ruralnet and David Wilcox. We expect this to include both research (including asking both individuals and organisations what membership means to them) and practical services and products to help membership organisations to plan for the future. We would like your help in shaping this programme of work, and have three questions that we would like...

I wrote this think piece as the basis of a presentation on the drivers shaping the future of membership, for the NCVO membership schemes conference on the 22 April 2008. It draws on lots of our previous work, including on public attitudes in the 2007/08 Voluntary Sector Strategic Analysis, the ICT Foresight work and our Future Focus guides on social attitudes and volunteering. It will inform our project on the future of membership which we are developing with colleagues at the RSA and ten...

Who is to blame, if anyone, for the apparent decline in levels of trust in institutions? An interesting speech given by the BBC Director-General in January explores the relationship between the media and the public sphere. The speech was given after Tony Blair’s memorable speech blaming the media for low trust in politicians, as well as the scandals that damaged trust in the BBC (the faked Blue Peter phone-in and manipulation of footage of the Queen for example).

Thompson explores whether...

I am reading the new book by Clay Shirky, Here comes everybody – the power of organizing without organizations. In the book Clay explores how social media is changing organised activity. The two chapters I've read so far have unpicked the power of networks and lower barriers to publishing, and the shifts that mean that loosely affiliated groups can often now be more effective than hierarchical institutions. It's an excellent read and I'd recommend it to all in our sector. Why? I'll let Clay...

Yesterday nine National Support Services (NSS) were launched. These services, which are funded by Capacity Builders, aim to improve the support available to VCOs by working with support providers – those organisations that provide support to the frontline (sometimes described as infrastructure organisations, umbrella bodies, or second tier organisations).

We are delighted to be leading the NSS on responding to social change. We will be working with support providers to provide frontline...

Hi Susan
Instinctively I think you must be right about the power of ‘preferred futures’. I think that most organisations in our sector have no problem communicating about what they would like the future to look like – that’s the essence of the vision and mission of organisations, and it usually permeates right through an organisation. However, for many organisation in our sector the desired future of ‘the vision’ is often a long long way from the present reality (hence why so many in our...

A very interesting post Natalie. I agree that creating scenario axes is very difficult. I’m feeling inspired by a conversation I just had with Caroline Copeman about how to think about the ‘so what?’ question (what impact will this driver have on my organisation?) and think that it has some relevance to the problem you talk about. Caroline was talking about a model which encourages organisations to think about how something external to the organisation impacts on the resources available to...

The fourth in our series of ICT Foresight reports is now available. As a taster, here is the summary of the report (with thanks to David Wilcox who wrote the summary for me!)

This report presents a challenging picture of the future for voluntary and community organisations (VCOs) aiming to deliver public services in new ways, using ICT. On the one hand users will have increasingly high expectations of how information and services should be available online, based in part on their retail...

Karl and I just finished running a session at the NCVO Publishers Forum conference based on this think-piece. Some very interested thoughts emerged about how publishing in the VCS has changed and how it will change in the next 5 years. I’ve captured those thoughts and posted the powerpoint slides over in the events forum.

Karl and I just finished running a session at NCVO’s Publishers Forum Conference on new models for income generation (Karl did all the talking and I looked after the flip chart!)

The presentation was based on Karl’s piece about what the VCS can learn from the music industry.

You can have a look at the slides here.

We had a discussion with the participants about how publishing has changed over the last 5 years, and how they thought it would change in the next 5 years. Here’s what we discussed.

How...

Yes I did! Hoping for time to read it next week…

Last week I attended a Tomorrow Project event on their new book, Going Global: key questions for the 21^st century. It was an interesting session, particularly Jan-Aart Scholte's response to the book. Whilst full of academic jargon (see the title of this post!), Jan-Aart talked compellingly about the different challenges ('value sets') presented by globalisation and the different political responses ('policy paradigms').

So, first the value sets through which people view the challenges of...

Thanks Catherine – I like that!

Hi Stephen
We were considering a facebook group for a while but I wanted to find some time to think through what the benefits would be and how to make sure that it didn’t lie dormant (and haven’t yet!) Do you think a linked-in group would be good? What benefits would it bring?
Thanks
Megan

Here’s an interesting piece in the Guardian about how Norway has managed to enforce a law that 40% of company directors must be female. What’s particularly interesting is the supportive public and media attitudes to such affirmative action.

Yesterday NCVO launched its first Charity Forecast report which reveals the confidence levels and plans of sector leaders. As future change is partly based on present intentions, the report provides valuable information to inform strategic plans; revealing trends in collaboration and competition and how VCOs are feeling about the funding environment and the economy.

A positive outlook

62 per cent of respondents to the survey expected their organisation’s general situation to improve over the...

We are currently looking for two people to join our team as Third Sector Foresight Officers. The advert went into the Society Guardian today:

Explore the trends shaping the future of civil society, managing projects which focus on a range of specific subsectors. You’ll communicate your findings through reports, short guides, events, and the Internet. You’ll also develop tools, including training sessions and capacity building workshops, to increase understanding of social change.

With superb...

2007 was a big year for 'social networking': facebook and similar sites were rarely out of the news. I spent an enormous amount of time thinking about it, as I was also writing the second of our ICT Foresight reports - 'how online communities can make the net work for the VCS' and from anecdotal evidence it appears that the sector is beginning to get to grips with the potential of online communities, both 'bounded' groups (eg forums that people log-in to join) and the more flexible networks...

Yesterday we hosted an afternoon seminar at the NCVO annual conference. An excellent panel of speakers debated the ‘burning issues’ of climate change, bridging communities and the ways in which young people are associating.

The session began with a presentation from Lenka Setkova, who took us through the findings of the Carnegie UK Trust’s Inquiry into the future of civil society in the UK and Ireland. Stuart Etherington (NCVO’s Chief Executive, who chaired the session) then invited the 90...

Further to my comment above, today an ICM poll for the Guardian painted a slightly different picture, with 51% ‘not confident’ about ‘the economy, your financial situation, and ability to keep up with the cost of living’. The slightly different stats are most likely due to the different wording of the questions, and shows the limitations of polls, but either way confidence does appear to be falling. An interesting aspect of the Guardian poll is the difference in confidence between ‘the...

According to a recent populus poll for the times, 94% of the public are confident that they will be able to keep up with their rent or their mortgage in 2008, while four out of five say they will be able to reduce their non-mortgage debt in 2008. Populus report that this confidence chimes with recently released repossession data which showed that there were actually 10% fewer repossessions than predicted in 2007.

My Tuesday morning was spent in the Westminster village at a meeting of the FAN Club, otherwise known as the Future Analysts Network. The participants were largely civil servants but the discussions on how to think about the future were very relevant.

Annabel Turpie from the Strategy Unit took us through the findings of Realising Britain's Potential: Future Strategic Challenges for Britain, which was published last week. This provides a wealth of useful data for considering drivers and their...

Since 2005 we have been thinking about the impact of new technologies on the sector under the umbrella of a project called ICT Foresight (funded initially by the Vodafone UK Foundation and more recently by the ICT Hub). In doing so we've had lots of fantastic discussions with forward thinking people from inside and out of our sector, published 3 reports (with one more on the way) and ran a fascinating seminar.

But ICT Foresight is coming to an end, so a few weeks ago Karl and I went to...

It’s great to see a good discussion going here! There’s also a lot of discussion on the RSA Networks site here that you may like to join. We had an excellent meeting last week with David Wilcox, Simon Berry and colleagues from the RSA and the project really has some momentum behind it now – I’ll keep you posted!

Venture philanthropy is attracting increased attention from all those interested in voluntary sector funding and the practice appears to be growing (the European Venture Philanthropy Association has nearly doubled since 2006 to more than 65 members from 15 countries). Venture philanthropy combines growth capital with hands-on advice and takes its name from the practice of venture capital in the private sector. I find it helpful to think of it as an extreme form of engaged funding.

This paper...

In a discussion about ICT and public services, Tony Molloy raised concerns about privacy:

I’ve been considering how we might use social networks but I have concerns about some of their terms of service which effectively seem to assign to them any and all rights to do whatever they like with any content that is uploaded, which I am a little wary of in regard of our information and how it might be represented in other ways and also what might develop should a service provider be taken over by...

Shortly before Christmas, Capacity Builders announced that we had been successful in our bid to lead the 'National Support Service' on 'Responding to Social Change' from April 2008. This represents an extremely exciting step for NCVO Third Sector Foresight. Through this programme we will be working with support providers (eg local infrastructure organisations, specialist infrastructure organisations, consultants and all others who support front line organisations) to help the sector to...

What are the drivers affecting why people want or choose to join organisations as members? This is a question that has interested us for some time. We've discussed how social networking technologies are impacting on membership in our second ICT Foresight report (see pages 23-4 in particular) and at our recent seminar (see the section on membership), but what other drivers are at play? After thinking about a foresight membership project for some time, I'm delighted that things seem to be...

Today we're launching the third in our series of ICT Foresight reports, each of which looks at a different aspect of how ICT is changing how the sector works, and particularly the relationship between organisations and their stakeholders.

The report is free to download as a pdf (or you can request a hard copy by emailing Catherine Morgan). The summary for those with less time is below.

But first, third sector this week reported a new site called My Charity Page, which will launch in January....

New stats released today by NCVO and CAF reveal that charitable giving by the public fell 3% in the last year. The total amount given in 2006/07 was £9.5bn, 3% down from 2005/06 when accounting for inflation. The proportion of the UK population that made a donation also dropped by 3% to 54%. Is this the first indication that an economic downturn is impacting on charitable giving? Rising debt and insecurity following the credit crunch have certainly dented consumer confidence (last week

Pete alerted me to this post from Peter Franklin on the Conservative Home blog which talks about the blogs that influence those in Westminster. The oldest and most influential bloggers are still independent individuals (he cites Guido Fawkes, Iain Dale and Conservative Home). However, he sees the mainstream press reasserting its previous dominance as many journalists get the hang of writing good blogs, which are becoming increasingly influential (eg Comment Central from Danny Finkelstein and ...

One of the key strategic questions for an organisation is whether to grow, and if so, how? A recent report from the Young Foundation, In and out of sync: the challenge of growing social innovations details 11 case studies of social innovations which highlight four necessary conditions for growing innovative products, services and models:
1) ‘Pull’ in the form of effective demand
2) ‘Push’ in the form of effective supply
3) Effective strategies that connect ‘pull’ to ‘push’
4) Learning and...

How will changing notions and behaviours of citizenship affect your organisation and how should you respond?

This will be the topic of the next in our popular series of NCVO Third Sector Foresight seminars.  Read on to book your free place at the seminar on 17 January, from 2.30 to 5pm in London.

What is happening?

The ways in which people are engaging with both the state and with each other are changing as ideas about what it means to be a 'citizen' shift. This will have implications for the...

After discussing the (potentially?) changing role of VCOs in the political sphere, the panel at NCVO's political conference last week moved on to address a question about the place of the VCS within the different political parties' visions for society. Or to use the turn of phrase of the questioner: 'Is the government/VCS love-in just a trend or is it here to stay?'

Shaun's view was that VCOs are becoming an arm of government and are too cowardly to resist this. As to whether this would...

Last week I chaired a session on new media at the NCVO political conference. I stayed around to listen to the final Q&A session, a question time-style panel debate with Shaun Bailey, Rushanara Ali, Peter Oborne, and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

My ears pricked up as the chair opened with a particularly interesting future-focussed question: As we reach the end of a particularly turbulent political period, what's next?

Consensus amongst the panel was that we are not at the end of anything; it could in...

Thanks for sharing this Helena. I really like your idea of using PESTLE and SWOT together like this as a way of getting people to focus on implications. Do you think this is easier because they are both familiar tools that your organisation feels comfortable using already? Also, by giving the ‘homework’ (as Jake calls it) after the exercise rather than before, I imagine that this helps to keep the conversation going after the meeting, rather than have it end once the table is filled in.

Ah yes, I use the open rights group as an example of the long tail working, and pledgebank as a type of new online organisation dedicated to bringing together these new groups/communities of interest. It’s true that their natural supporter base is likely to be experimenting with the new sites, but presumably it will broaden out over time.

NCVO Third Sector Foresight is hosting a seminar at the next NCVO Annual Conference on 20 February 2008.

The seminar will explore a number of burning issues facing VCOs in the medium to long term future, looking out to 2025, drawing on the Carnegie UK Trust's Inquiry into the future of civil society in the UK and Ireland. As we develop our thoughts on which burning issues we will be exploring I'll be posting them here. Anyone who was at last night's excellent Tomorrow Project event on the...

This article from the US onPhilanthropy newsletter lists ten trends in philanthropy in the UK:

1. The return of philanthropy
2. Growth in the UK economy
3. Accumulation of private wealth
4. Growth of private philanthropy: mega gifts
5. Rise of the 'committed giver'
6. Emergence of philanthropy 'think tanks'
7. Professionalism of the fundraising sector
8. Emergence of capital campaigns
9. Tax incentives to encourage private philanthropy
10. Government incentives to leverage private philanthropy

Some of the implications of these...

Thanks Tony, I’ll take a look. I wonder if we need a driver on the site about privacy issues, either specifically to do with social networking, or more broadly (eg ID cards?)

Responding to a news post on ICT and public services, Tony from Bolton Citizens Advice Bureau, made the following comment

“We’re looking into how we could use tools like podcasts as a vehicle for information and limited advice delivery and we have some examples on our website.
I’ve been considering how we might use social networks but I have concerns about some of their terms of service which effectively seem to assign to them any and all rights to do whatever they like with any content that...

Public service reform is high on the political agenda and the role of the VCS in this process has been increasingly recognised.  At the heart of the debate around transforming public services, is the need to engage better with citizens, and to ensure that they have both choice and voice.  ICT can provide those commissioning and delivering services with useful tools to improve public services and can enable much better user engagement, by not just allowing citizens to easily access...

The political strategist Mark Penn (adviser to Tony Blair in the 2005 election, legendary number-cruncher to Bill Clinton and now chief strategist to Hilary Clinton) is publicising a new book, Microtrends: the Small Forces Behind Today’s Big Changes, as discussed in this interesting Spectator article.

Penn argues that the days when macro-trends shaped the world is over; society is now shaped by microtrends.  At the heart of this is the ease with which individuals can find like-minded people...

'By 2050 60% of men and 40% of women could be clinically obese. Without action, obesity-related diseases will cost an extra £45.5 billion per year'

The recent report on obesity from the Government's Foresight Programme has attracted a lot of press coverage. This four page summary (PDF) is an interesting read, with some interesting new perspectives backed up by some weighty research.  The key messages for me were the concept of 'passive obesity' – the idea that Britons are getting...

Members may also like to know that we will be holding a seminar at NCVO’s annual conference in February 2008 which will follow on from the Futures for civil society conference. We will be exploring some of the ‘hot topics’ identified by phase 2 of the Carnegie Inquiry into the future of civil society in the UK and Ireland. We will send out further information nearer the time.

I think it is Natalie. I think its also becoming more accepted/prominent as a way of people taking action. This prompts a question about how VCOs can convert these individual consumer actions into a collective, as Stella Creasy discussed at the recent NCVO research conference

I am beginning to scope out a piece of work on the future of membership. If anyone is interested in getting involved or finding out more, please contact me.

You mention corporate citizenship, which sounds interesting but I’m not sure what you mean. Could you explain some more?