As we kick off a new year, Dorothy Dalton reminds trustees of the importance of treating all the charity's stakeholders with respect.

I was recently talking to a former investment banker. He and his family trust give away significant sums of money to charities each year. When discussing a large household-name charity, he explained that a few years ago, he had sent it a very significant donation. His gift and generosity were never acknowledged and as a result he has decided never to support that charity again.

From time to time, I hear of people contacting charities offering to volunteer or responding to an appeal for volunteers, who never hear from the charity. Some who are taken on as volunteers complain that in spite of volunteering regularly to help the charity to deliver a local authority contract, the charity very rarely, if ever, expresses any appreciation of their gift of time, skills and/ or experience.

In a small number of charities, employees fare no better with announcements of a large number of redundancies sent as impersonal group emails to everyone whose job might be at risk.

The most distressing is when service users complain that they are ‘done to’ as if they were widgets on a production line and that the charity doesn’t have time to listen to and find out what the service user really needs and feels.

Fortunately the vast majority of charities ensure good two-way communication with their various key stakeholders and treat everyone with respect and as individuals who have feelings (even former investment bankers have feelings).

As trustees, we need to ensure there are processes to allow us to understand the different perspectives of our key stakeholders and to treat them with respect. This means listening, not just being listened to; finding time to articulate appreciation when it is merited, and remembering that each individual has feelings no matter how tough they appear (this is particularly important when imparting bad news or dealing with disciplinary matters). We need to ensure that our charity and we as trustees have emotional intelligence as well as the ability to make hard decisions when necessary in the interests of our charity.