Strategic help and advice from charity advisors

About our charity advisory services

We work with charity leaders and trustees to help their organisations become sustainable and resilient. We offer a broad range of expertise drawn from CAF's work with charities, companies, major donors and our research into charitable giving and philanthropy.

Our work with charities is focused predominantly in the following areas:

Funding and income generation strategies.
Strategic planning: including organisational reviews and futurology.
Board development and governance.

Our principles

We enjoy working with charities and the grantees of foundations, government agencies, grantmakers, corporates, major donors and philanthropists. Our work is based around core principles that help to deliver the maximum impact to our clients. They are:

Holistic – we don't simply look at one issue in isolation.
Over time – we balance momentum with the time that's needed for an organisation to reflect.
Relationships – we work in a balanced and collaborative way with the people we support.
Connecting and networking – we play to our strengths and make the most of CAF's position in the sector to bring people together.
Influencing – we take what we learn through our work with charities and use it to help funders understand their impact.

Get in touch with the charity advisory team

Clients and projects

In recent years, we've carried out a wide range of charity advisory projects, including:

Advising a number of grantees of Lloyds Bank Foundation on how to develop their strategic plans and major donor, legacy and corporate fundraising plans.

Supporting grantees of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation on strategic plans including reviewing their case for support, benchmarking and developing new income diversification plans.

Working with four Catchment Partnerships (CPs) funded by the Environment Agency. This work focused on helping the CPs become more independent, self-sustaining and resilient, with a particular focus on income diversification. It also addressed other important organisation aspects of their governance, strategy and impact.

Being funded by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to support six place-based giving schemes.

Supporting the resilience of ten small charities through our CAF Resilience programme, which is funded by major donors. The advisory support we provide includes advising them on trustee recruitment, brand development, developing their ask for major donor, individual, legacy or corporate fundraising.

Our charity advisory work

We’ve worked with charities of every shape and size. While each relationship is different, they’re all based on collaboration, honesty and support. Take a look at some examples of our work.

Venture Trust

We were put in touch with Venture Trust by Impetus, an organisation that funds charities who work with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Following our work with the charity, they've introduced a more strategic approach to attracting corporate partners that's helped change the culture of the organisation.

Read more

Lawrence Weston Community Farm

Through our partnership with Lloyd's Bank Foundation we worked with the community farm on ways they could attract more corporate support.

One of our suggestions was to expand their volunteering opportunities for corporate groups. They've since introduced a new range of corporate activities that are generating new sources of income.

Read more

Wild Young Parents

Wild Young Parents were one of the ten charities on our CAF Resilience programme.

Before the programme, their biggest worries were a lack of forward planning, no clear vision for the future and outdated systems. They've now introduced new processes for stakeholder mapping, impact reporting and community engagement.

Read more

Insight from our work with charities, grantmakers and donors

Blogs, articles and insights from the charity advisory team.

Six characteristics of a resilient charity
What does a resilient charity look like? The CAF Resilience programme has noticed six characteristics that show an organisation has the potential to be resilient.
Critical lessons for trustees
Beth Clarke, CAF Resilience Programme Manager, talks about her experience as a trustee of a charity that closed down. Read about her experience and her lessons for other trustees and boards.
Income diversification: five things charity leaders need to consider
In this blog, Steph Taylor shares the key things charity boards should consider if they want to explore ways of diversifying their organisation's sources of income.