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Shaping a new strategic plan as a new trustee
Being a trustee is about more than checks and balances. As we discover in our third daily blog for Trustees' Week, it’s a chance for PR professionals to get involved in shaping the future of a community.
Trustees’ Week falls just over a year after my first induction session as a trustee of a community benefit organisation in East Oxford called Flo’s – The Place in the Park. Flo’s is a community hub, focused on improving the lives of local people through serving the community, improving equity, and protecting the planet. My own focus as a trustee is on fundraising and comms, a new and exciting challenge for me as I’ve worked in communications for 10 years but never in the third sector, so this year has been as much about learning as it has been about offering my own expertise.
As I joined, Flo’s was reaching a pivotal moment: a new director had recently joined, the board of trustees had a new chair, and a number of trustees were joining the ranks. In our first few meetings, I came to understand a bit more about what this meant, both for the organisation and for the role we had to play in ensuring it was managed sustainably and responsibly. As a self-confessed strategy geek and lover of big picture thinking, my ears pricked up. I was beginning to see that the role before me was more than checks and balances, but a much broader one helping to define the future of this much-needed community hub.
The next step
Flo’s began life as a children’s centre, rescued from closure by a group of incredible local people who poured their time and energy into making sure the community didn’t lose this asset. Over the following few years, buffeted by the pandemic and cost of living crisis, Flo’s grew, became the home for community projects supporting food security and inclusive access to maternity and early years care, as well as a nursery, café, and refill shop. The question we now needed to answer was, what next?
A sub-group of the board of trustees and management team began work on a new strategy and brought it back to the wider group at a trustee away day. I hadn’t realised that away days would be part of being a trustee and it was a real treat. It was the first time that many of us had had chance to see and understand the proposed strategic direction and a chance to get to know the management team better. After a small distraction when a rogue sheep went walkabout – the away day took place at the local city farm – we had the chance to really interrogate the new proposals. The conversation was challenging and complex in places but, it was a chance to make sure we’d considered all our audience groups and the value we wanted to offer to each of them.
Bringing strategy to life
The moment of truth came at the AGM where the new strategy went before members for the first time. Once the formalities of the meeting had concluded, members and attendees were able to read through a poster-style display of the new strategy, leaving comments and queries on post-it notes as they went. Since then, we’ve had the chance to start to see the strategy come to life as each area of the organisation begins to define its own future plans. As a trustee, the strategy has given me a reference point to help to ask the right questions to ensure these plans are truly aligned and deliver on the wider long-term goals.
All credit goes to the chair of trustees and the director of Flo’s. They truly steered this process and guided the trustees, staff, and members through it but I’ll conclude with some thoughts on how my comms experience helped me to contribute:
Stakeholders, stakeholders, and more stakeholders
As communications professionals, our working lives are defined by stakeholder conversations so, when I’m reading through strategy presentations or listening to discussions, it’s always through the prism of one of our stakeholder groups. And the real value we can bring is in being able to shift perspectives and consider multiple groups and how they interact with one another.
Asking clarifying questions
We’re rarely in the detail enough to have the answers but, boy, do we have the questions! Our day jobs require us to clarify plans and messaging to the nth degree and that is helpful here. We can take a broad enough viewpoint to ask questions that span multiple areas or ask for a fresh level clarity and in doing so, we help to make sure there is joint understanding across the group.
And unpicking the answers
And while it’s critical to look to the experts — in my case, the wonderful charity leadership team — for the answers, another core skill we possess is in helping to tease out those answers, making sure we and others understand them completely and can honestly feel we’re representing the best interests of the charity.
I’m very grateful to the team at Flo’s for trusting me and allowing me to bring my best strategy geekery to our conversations. If you’re thinking about a new way to expand and apply those skills, I can’t recommend becoming a trustee highly enough!
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- Sitting on a global board - how does it work?
- How to become a charity trustee
- Five of the best trustee-run event and community spaces to hire
Ella Percival is head of corporate affairs at Oxford University Press and a trustee for Flo’s – The Place in the Park, with a focus on comms and fundraising.