Leading through financial uncertainty

Spark Somerset

Financial Leadership Programme Winter 2024

‘Organisational resilience is the ability to anticipate, prepare for, adapt and respond to sudden shock and incremental change in order to survive and prosper’

Cranfield School of Management

Programme objective 

This five part programme of support focuses on strategic finance and how to build longer term financial resilience so that we can keep delivering services over the longer term. These sessions are aimed at organisations which are established, with a staff base and managing multiple grants. However, the principles will be helpful to anyone wanting to learn how to build financial resilience over the longer term and everyone is welcome to attend.

Session 1 | Introduction to Financial Leadership

Come find your inner finance director! In this session, we introduce the concepts and principles of organisational resilience and financial resilience. We will review the need to be clear about our purpose and value, intentional about and in control of our resources and joined up in our thinking about money and mission as a team. We look at the role of finance in building a resilient charity and we review an example set of numbers to start to explore how to assess financial resilience. What questions do we need to be asking as a non finance specialist when leading a financially resilient organisations?

Session 2   Anticipating 
We all have an iceberg somewhere on our horizon. Something that threatens to take us off course if we don't set course to sail around it. In this session, we will do a deep dive into the role of forecasting to reveal the benefits of looking up and out when navigating financial uncertainties. We will model a simple finance forecast, explore the differences between forecasting cash and income and review what we need to consider when managing financial difficulties.

Session 3   Preparing
Reserves. We all need them. We all struggle to build them. In this session, we explore the role of reserves when building financial resilience and how to manage the risks of having too much and too little in reserve. We will calculate an actual and target reserve for a small organisation and review what a good reserves policy looks like.

Session 4 | Adapting
What can we do now to make our organisations more resilient in the future? In this session, we visit our business models and explore how we can marry money and mission to with good budgeting and costing. We also look at full cost recovery and its limitations of full cost recovery when building financial resilience. We will prepare a money mission matrix to analyse our business model and imagine new ways of working in the future.

Session 5 | Responding 
Financially resilient organisations are led by financially confident leaders. In this final session, we learn about - and model - a simple finance strategy to guide us through the mists of uncertainty ahead. We look at the role of financial indicators in building our own confidence and the confidence of others. We end the course by sharing our financial resilience strategy with colleagues.

What you can expect in these sessions:

·    Some slides

·    Some practical tools

·    Some breakouts to explore with peers

·    Some group discussion

·    Please come prepared to share and learn together 

These sessions are led by Liz Pepler, Director at Embrace Finance, an experienced charity finance professional with over 20 years’ experience in the sector.

Programme materials

Below you will find the slides and templates which we covered in the sessions plus some other supporting resources to guide you through some of the strategic considerations when managing the financial sustainability of a smaller social purpose organisation.

Request for feedback

If you haven't done so already please do let us know what you think about each session. It is super helpful to us and lets us know what is working and what isn't so we can adapt as we go. The feedback form is here. Thank you.

The usual caveat

Finance is very context dependent – there is never one size fits all. Please note that these sessions are not intended to replace proper professional support or advice. In all cases you will need to tailor these to your own organisation and you will need to revisit the primary guidance from the Charity Commission or Companies House or CIC Regulator to satisfy yourself that these are what you need. Generic training doesn’t and can’t replace proper professional advice.