Impact Report SPREADS 121223 - Flipbook - Page 18
Consultancy impact
Journey to Excellence (J2E) is our
unique and tailor-made assessment
framework. It is designed to evaluate
the progress of charities the Trust
supports with pro bono management
consultancy.
The top 昀椀ve bene昀椀ts of Journey
to Excellence for our charity clients
The pre and post project review process made me
pause and think holistically about our organisation
Useful to think about the organisation
in this structured way
Helped to consider next steps
towards continued improvement
The J2E framework measures progress in four essential
management areas: leadership and strategic direction,
昀椀nancial management and sustainability, people
management and performance and impact and helps to
identify strengths and areas for development.
Each charity starts its development journey at a different
point and consultancy projects focus on a main area for
development. We work with a broad range of charities,
not just selecting those with high potential for growth
and development, we want to support all our client
charities to address their particular issues.
The J2E assessment is carried out with the charity
by the Cran昀椀eld Trust Regional Manager ahead of
the consultancy project, and many charities use the
pre-project assessment as the basis for development
discussions with their Boards and teams, as well as using
it to frame their work with Cran昀椀eld Trust. Completing
the J2E after the project has concluded allows each
charity to celebrate its successes and consider the next
steps in its development. Charities give us very positive
feedback on J2E, they 昀椀nd it valuable in assessing their
development needs over time, and in action-oriented
discussions with Cran昀椀eld Trust Regional Managers.
J2E is particularly useful for individual charities, but we
also aggregate information across all our consultancy
projects, either in particular sectors, or covering all
areas of support. This provides useful insight for the
Trust which can also be shared with partners to see the
impact of programmes they have funded in a speci昀椀c
sub-sector, benchmarked against the wider sector.
Aggregated results provide interesting discussion points,
but J2E ratings are subjective and individual to each
charity, so grouped results are indicative, rather than
statistically robust.
In the 2023-24 year, we completed 153 J2Es. Overall,
our clients improved their performance by an average
of 17% as a result of the support they received through
our consultancy services, up from 15% last year.
82% of the completed J2Es related to consultancy
projects in the leadership and strategic direction area.
Interesting and rewarding to
quantify how far we have travelled
I plan to use my 昀椀nal report with others,
such as the Board and funders
“This was essentially an MOT for our
charity. We were asked to assess where
we were and where we got to. Through
the process, areas for continued and
further improvement were highlighted,
but we also got the opportunity to sit back
and appreciate the distance travelled
and that we were doing a lot of things well.”
Tim Pare, Tea Leaf Trust
153
J2Es completed
17%
On average, the charities moved 17% closer
to excellence in their main project area
11
Average project duration (months)
35
Longest project duration (months)
Average project duration is 11 months.
82%
48
18
Percentage of our J2E projects
in Leadership and Strategic Direction
Number of charities awarded
our new J2E recognition badge
