Look after the costing and the reserves will look after themselves

Learn how to understand and present the real costs of your services.

About this event

If you lead, fundraise and / or carry out the finances for a small charitable organisation, this session is for you. Whether you already have financial systems in place or want to know how to get started, this session will help you to reflect on how you are currently calculating your costs, key mistakes that are being made in the sector and what you can do in the immediate term to ensure you are confident to ask for what your services are worth.

Many small organisations struggle to understand their “overheads” or management costs, particularly related to staff and, in an ever-challenging time, lack the time and space to think about how they engage their board with strategic financial decision making.

At Clear Thinking Consultancy we support our partner charities through a simple process to understand the most important pieces of financial information that they will need to make the decisions that will help them secure their future.

Learning outcomes

In this session, participants will:

• Understand the full cost recovery method and key financial terms
• Reflect on their own practices and identify clear ways in which they can avoid the most commonly made mistakes in costing out their services.
• Learn our two-step process for i) calculating service costs and then ii) presenting those externally so that funders will fund your full costs!

About our speaker

The session is delivered by Kita Ikoku, Founder / Director at Clear Thinking Consultancy (CTC).

Kita founded CTC in February 2010 as a response to the widening inequalities that she saw in her then-current role between smaller, community-based voluntary sector organisations and larger “prime” contractors who had access to more resource to promote their offer and secure funding but whose practices often excluded those on the ground and, therefore, the most excluded and vulnerable.

Prior to this she was the Deputy Director of a medium sized education charity in East London. Her role included fundraising, monitoring impact and evaluation, capacity building of small partners’ organisations, quality and performance.

CTC also works with larger funders to ensure that their money reaches the places that need it the most. As such Kita has led a number of research and evaluation projects including of Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Ideas and Pioneers’ fund, a policy review of the National Lottery Heritage Fund’s Full Cost Recovery policy and research into the effects of the pandemic on the voluntary sector in the London Borough of Ealing. CTC is a named preferred supplier for several funders’ non-financial support programmes.

Outside of CTC, Kita sits on the board as a trustee of a small music development charity in Brent supporting young people at risk of offending and as trustee of YPF Trust, an umbrella organisation for Young People’s Foundations which support children and young people’s providers on a place basis. Kita was recently invited to become an Adviser to John Lyon’s Charity.

Zoom links will be sent the day before the session.

This session is delivered in collaboration with sector friends for Small Charity Week. Check out the other small charity finance sessions at www.smallcharityweek.com/events