Charity Business Plan Template

Executive Summary

Short summary of the main points of the plan.

Framework of overall purpose, values, assumptions:

History of the organisation;
Key principles guiding organisation;
Main service provided by the organisation;
How the organisation helps the community.

Aims for the long term

What is your mission statement?

Can you briefly describe what change the charity wants to achieve in society and very roughly how it will go about it?

Are there any concrete long-term goals you can specify as well?

Legal and management information

Key personnel
Organisational Structure (charity, company number)
Plan of staffing structure including volunteers

Analysis

This is one of the key areas of the business plan where the charity shows it has assessed the risks it faces and the potential for growth. It is the key place to put information about why you are planning to develop the services you go onto mention and how you will run the organisation. There are different types of analysis you could use but most are a way of describing the internal and external environment. This can be done purely descriptively or based around certain themes such as:

1. SWOT – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threat

A way of looking at the issues that face your charity divided under those headings. Generally Strengths and Weaknesses refer to your organisation while Opportunities and Threats refer to things outside your organisation.

Examples of Strengths are:

a) Commitment of volunteers

b) Skill of staff c) good reputation etc.

Examples of weaknesses are:

a) Funding not confirmed,

b) Poor financial management etc

Examples of Opportunities are:

a) no other charity working on the same field,

b) government is keen to fund the work

c) lots of possible clients etc

Examples of Threats are:

a) lots of rival organisations

b) bad relationship with funders etc

2. STEP – Social, Technical, Economic and Political analysis

These four themes could form a description of the environment in which the group operates. Sometimes with a SWOT analysis an issue can be seen as both a strength/weakness and opportunity/threat. A STEP assessment is less divisive and allows you to concentrate on the issue and then discuss both good and bad points.

3. Service analysis

This is a comparison of your different services. As with any analysis you are examining various issues from a certain perspective. A rigorous analysis is one that includes several perspectives or which includes a critical challenge of itself and is able to address criticisms. A lazy analysis takes simply one view and does not challenge it.

Objectives: What you will do to ensure your organisation’s aims are achieved

For this you should tease out the information from the plan you have drawn up, but be less specific. Objectives can be roughly divided into business, marketing and financial. For example each of the activity titles can be considered to be an objective.

Priorities

What is most important to the charity and also what things need to be done now?

Promotional strategies

Who is going to use your service as well as who will fund you and how will you reach them?

Research – what conditions will you operate in, who are your real and potential clients, who are your competitors?
Strategy – how will you reach your target users and what mix of people will you expect?
Forecast – What are your assumptions about the use of your service?

This feeds back to the analysis and may just involve drawing conclusions from the information presented in the analysis.

Proposed activities

What will you actually be doing?

Here you can describe your actual services – what are the workshops and bands, what do they achieve in relation to the objects – what activities do you hope to develop.

Resources needed

Volunteers
Accommodation
Equipment
Staff
Other

Financial Analysis

Budgets
Cash Flow forecasts
Working Capital needed
Assumptions

Risk assessment

Again this comes from the analysis. What risks does the organisation face and how does it deal with them? The charity commission has produced a list of possible risks in its booklet (CC61) and a method of assessing them (plot likelihood versus damage risk could cause). The plan should then summarise what steps are taken to reduce serious risks some of this may be covered as an objective.

Example:
Being sued: the charity runs courses at which it is very possible that someone may fall and hurt themselves.

Solutions: All events are insured; workers conduct risk assessments on all sites before use to ensure they are safe and on all activities in the planning stages to ensure possible dangers are identified. One of the criteria for selecting partner and host organisations and hire venues will be their ability to provide safe and secure facilities.

Monitoring and evaluation strategy

Outline your strategy for monitoring your progress towards objectives.

Examples:

All staff to have yearly job plans that fit with charity’s business plan. Staff to receive regular supervision and annual appraisal to check progress in line with the job plan.
All clients to have access to feedback and evaluation services. The Charity regularly reviews feedback forms and trustees assess feedback totals quarterly.

Detailed targets, timetable, responsibilities

Here is where you would put your action plan to ensure it follows on from the objectives.