The chief executive of the Charity Finance Group, Caron Bradshaw, said yesterday that her charity took on "too much, too quickly" when undertaking a change programme, and would perhaps do things differently if it were to do it again.
In the financial year to March 2014, CFG raided its free reserves to pay for a programme including an office move and a staff recruitment drive. Reserves fell from £249,000 to £62,000, according to its 2013/14 accounts.
Trustees later revealed that they were not aware of the financial position until two months after the year-end.
Two newly-appointed senior staff, including the director of policy and finance director, left shortly after they had joined. The deputy director of public policy also stepped down.
Bradshaw told delegates at CFG’s risk conference that she would have dealt with the changes slightly differently, but still gone for a “big-bang approach”.
She added that “assumptions” were made about communication with staff and trustees, and that if that this had been dealt with differently than “perhaps we wouldn’t have had some of the spotlight that we have had to endure”.
Ian Theodoreson, CFG’s chair, also spoke at the session, entitled Leadership and risk: managing the risks of change. He told delegates that the umbrella body was aware it had needed to make some big changes, but that until they ran the change programme they were unable to say how much money they needed to fund them.
He said that the deficit was larger than they had hoped for, but was “certainly smaller than we had planned for”.
Theodoreson said: “We missed a number of our income targets during the year as well. The outcome of that was what looked a bit grim when we came to do the accounts. The trouble with accounts is that it depends when your year-end is, and there was a moment in time when I wished our year-end was at a different place.
“Accountants generally understand that sometimes you have to clear the garbage out. And so we took the view, which was painful, that rather than easing in some of the effects of these changes that we would take them in one big hit. If you are going to have a bad year then you might as well do it for real. That was the history and some of that started playing out in the public arena,” he added.
Theodoreson went on to discuss the challenges the organisation faced in recruitment, where several newly-appointed senior members of staff stepped down throughout the year.
He said: “Recruitment did not work out as we planned, there was a false start getting in a head of policy and a head of finance. We ended up doing this stuff under the spotlight of external media gaze, which it makes it very difficult to hold your nerve.”
Theodoreson added that this year CFG has had some “fantastic half-year results”, with its overall income up by 5 per cent.
Bradshaw said: “Would I do the same thing again? I think I would do things differently but I think we did need to do the big bang. I think if we had tried to do this organically we would have lost a lot of ground and possibly have had all the bad sides but not the upside as well."
She added: “We underestimated the depth of change. It is like when you lift up stones, you expect to find things but you don’t necessarily expect every single stone that you turn over to present its own challenges and we did have a few more than we perhaps anticipated.”
CFG also revealed that a weekly email is now sent by the chief executive to the board to keep trustees up-to-date with developments.
