Kirsten Hogg on a new tool to help organisations plan for the future
As a voluntary sector leader, planning for the future can be incredibly tough. How do you predict how much money you’ll have? Will you need to recruit staff or volunteers? Will you be able to keep the ones you’ve got? What opportunities are out there and is there another shock looming over the horizon?
We know that CEOs, senior leadership teams and trustees will be wrestling with those questions now, as they look ahead to 2025/26, and we want to help.
One of the great privileges of working at SCVO is having an overview of the state of the voluntary sector, and the different issues that are impacting right now, or might start to impact in coming months. We are often invited to conferences and events to talk about this, and while we love to get out and meet different groups, we know that we can’t reach everyone that way.
So we’ve pulled all of that information together and made it available on our website. We’ve called it Shifting Sands, to represent the fact that things will continue to change over the coming year, and that for many voluntary organisations that makes the future feel pretty uncertain. We provide the information that we have about how the coming year might look, alongside some prompts for discussion.
Shifting Sands is structured around six sets of factors that make up the voluntary sector’s operating environment: politics, the economy, society, technology, the law and the environment:
- Politics: we encourage voluntary organisations to think about their relationships with local, Scottish and UK governments, and the impact of elections on their organisation or the causes they champion.
- The economy: we reflect on some of the funding challenges that are likely to impact Scotland’s voluntary sector in 2025/26, like increasing costs, public spending challenges, and many independent funders being heavily oversubscribed. We encourage voluntary organisations to ask themselves some hard questions about financial plans and sustainability, so that they are as prepared as they can be to manage any difficulties that might arise over the year.
- Society: we highlight societal changes like the shape of the workforce and a decrease in volunteer numbers which will impact directly on voluntary organisations, but we also encourage organisations to reflect on wider changes, like societal attitudes to diversity or an international rise in populism, and whether those might also require attention.
- Technology: we encourage voluntary organisations to think about the implications of an increase in use of AI, the continuing trend to move a range of services online, and the increase in hybrid or home working.
- The law: we highlight forthcoming changes to charity law, employment law, and safeguarding, and encourage voluntary organisations to start planning for those
- The environment: we encourage organisations to reflect on possible implications of climate change for the communities they work with, and to take steps this year to work on their own environmental footprint.
There is lots more detail in the document. Not all of the things we cover will impact on your organisation, and because of the diversity of issues that our sector works on we won’t cover everything that will, but we hope that our list will provide food for thought, and help you think more about what the coming year will bring, and how you might respond to that. There are more concrete suggestions online about how you might use it in your planning.
We know that all of this can feel daunting, so throughout the report we signpost you to sources of further information and support – we’ll be by your side whatever the new year brings. For those who haven’t booked all of their Gathering sessions yet, we also flag the events there that might help you most with any issues you identify.
So please take a moment to check out Shifting Sands on our website. This is the first time we’ve published this sort of tool, and we’d really welcome your feedback. Please do get in touch with me if you’ve got suggestions of how we could make next year’s even better. We hope this is a tool that the sector will value, and we anticipate that it’s one that will be needed for years to come – while we don’t know what the future will look like, we do know that change is inevitable, and that SCVO has a key role in helping voluntary organisations to navigate and prepare for that.
Kirsten Hogg is SCVO’s head of policy and research.
