Small Charity Leaders Club is a cohort-based 6 month programme that connects “anyone who wears all the hats at their small charity”. Participants include charity founders, trustees, managers, and CEOS.
Course leader Vic Hancock Fell is founder of Fair Development, a social enterprise that provides affordable freelance support, consultancy and training for “organisations that do good stuff”.
Vic has seen first-hand how managing everything in a small charity can be lonely and challenging. She believed that an online community would be key to the success of the programme.
Vic initially looked at both Slack and Facebook but found Guild’s intuitive GDPR-compliant platform was made it more appropriate for her community. Reasons included Guild's price plans which were more cost effective than Slack and data concerns about Facebook and Facebook Groups.
Vic explained why she chose Guild to host the Small Charity Leaders Club community.
Results in brief
- Fast, easy community creation
- Easy onboarding of programme cohorts
- Added long term value to a paid-for programme
- Minimal additional cost compared to Slack
- Efficiencies in support time
- Members feel more connected to each other
- Members have become programme and community ambassadors
- Flexibility to create additional dedicated communities for future cohorts and alumni community
Tell us about the Small Charity Leaders Club and why you wanted to offer programme participants a community
“Running a small charity is a bit like being an entrepreneur. It’s easy to feel like you’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders. Everything is your responsibility. And often there’s nobody else around who understands what you’re up against.
The Small Charity Leaders Club is a 6-month course that’s designed to give people not just the skills they need to help their organisation thrive, but the support that will get them there faster.
We have live workshops, group problem-solving sessions and a bank of resources, but what ties it all together is the fact that participants get to face their highs and lows together.
We absolutely believe in the power of community! We’re all so busy these days - a cohort-based programme has to offer participants a community so that they can connect when it works for them.
We wanted to make the most of our resources and offer more value to our participants. Creating a trusted online community space where charity leaders can get support in a private, judgement-free environment, whenever they need it helps us to do that.
What do you use your community for?
"We build on our regular monthly live sessions with the opportunity to ask questions before the session and access resources afterwards.
Everyone takes something different from these sessions, and having a place to discuss them means we learn together from each other. We have the opportunity bring in our guest speakers to be part of the community.
We also have regular problem-solving sessions where people bounce ideas off each other. The Guild community means we get even more value out of our time together in person, because those inspirations and questions can be captured and expanded on daily.
Our resources and formal sessions are the backbone of the programme but the community brings it to life. Being able to share ideas, learn from each other, and make progress collaboratively adds so much value to our participants’ experience."
What do your members like about Guild?
“The structure of pinned and featured conversations makes it easy for us to signpost the template documents, workbooks and other curated materials that help our members throughout the course. It saves them - and us - so much time.
Members can help each other out too, which is great for building working relationships with each other.
In small charities you are as tight for time as you are for budget. Guild as a platform is incredibly intuitive and so it's a platform that members just don't have to learn.
They appreciate the threaded conversations and search function and the fact that conversations don't quickly disappear in a feed as they do in social media or WhatsApp. The conversations they may have missed will still be there to catch up with.
The peer support in the community invaluable - at every stage of the journey through the programme, you can get support from someone who’s either facing the same challenges, or has overcome them and is happy to share.
Being able to network and DM other members of the group is an important feature - sometimes you want to go deeper into a topic or talk about something in private, and it’s wonderful to be a part of creating these relationships that people really value.
They also tell us they love being part of the wider Guild network - there are other groups that people can join (or even create their own), and there are lots of charity professionals on Guild so people can build their own professional networks.”
How has building a community on Guild helped your organisation?
“We love Guild's flexibility - we can create new, separate communities for new cohorts and we can bring people from different groups together too in an alumni community.
As the structured parts of the course comes to an end we’ll continue to make use of the Video Room for community meetups - it’s so easy just to set something up that the whole community can drop in to.
The efficiencies we've made by hosting our community on Guild has helped us keep costs down for participants. That means we can make the programme accessible to a wider range of organisations - and that benefits everyone.”
Find out more about the Small Charity Leader Club and how to join future cohorts on https://www.fairdevelopment.co.uk/small-charity-leaders-club
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