The Company
A medium sized legal/social justice charity in London
The Background Situation
The charity has been delivering a legal advice service and advocacy for over 20 years to people on low incomes and benefits. The service was being delivered in person on a first come first serve basis. It had failed to secure enough grant income to be able to maintain the same level of operations. They were struggling to retain staff and had 3 semi-independent offices following a merger where staff seemed to do what they wanted and was not always in line with the organisations strategic direction. There was a lot of duplication as each office had its own manager,
admin and advice staff.
Staff morale was low as they were worried about being made redundant as there was no official communication there was a lot of gossiping.
The Approach
The charity engaged Brandstad Consulting to review its operations and recommend solutions.
We reviewed their strategic business plan and found it was outdated and not fit for purpose in the current operating environment. We began extensive, confidential interviews of the staff and management team to gauge their views on the charity’s operations. This provided us with “new and valuable insights” critical to moving forward. As part of our SWOT analysis we held a number of consultation meetings both as a group and on a one to one. We also consulted with their existing funders to gain an insight into the quality of the work they were doing. We conduct community needs assessments of the local community they serve and how well they are reaching their target group.
We conducted a scan of the charity’s operating environment and an assessment of its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to serve as a context for planning. Next, over a two-to-three month period our consultant lead the charity’s management team and trustees through the rigorous planning process itself. We did this at a management team away day. They were able to achieve consensus on the charity’s direction and develop concrete, organisation-wide goals, strategies, initiatives, timetables and accountability structures to achieve their common vision. They were able to see areas of duplication, inefficiency and make suggestions on how to eliminate them.
The Results
The recommendations for improved efficiency was to move their in person drop in service to a telephone first service so that clients would phone first for an appointment. This improved the efficiency of the advisers who were seeing people by appointment rather than sitting around waiting for people to turn up some days and then being inundated at other days. It evened out the service. Moving to the telephone service meant we could close one of the offices saving £24,000 and reduce the duplication of staff and services. We put more people on the telephones and converted one office to a mini telephone centre. Client waiting times and complaints reduced by 70%. This also fed into their strategy of becoming more accessible to the community. We were able to increase their grant income by 20% following the redesigned service model which was used to train staff on new telephone systems and quality management systems. The strategy also moved people from being office based to working in outreach sites co-locating in library and council offices. This removed the requirement to pay for the office lease saving a further £18,000. There were a number of communication threads and consultation meetings to overcome resistance and achieve this. The COVID pandemic occurred 6 months later and all offices had to close and move to remote operations where necessary. This change management to a telephone service model was an invaluable service as it meant the charity was able to continue to help vulnerable people remotely by telephone.