There are two very different ways of structuring and laying out the argument in reports and presentations. Most people only know one of them. You can make these documents more engaging if you understand the two approaches, and how and when to use them.

There is the traditional academic and scientific format which we get taught at school and university. This is the most common approach. Then there is the format often used by management consulting firms for advice-orientated reports.

Each of them works best in a particular context. Using the wrong format for the context makes it less likely that people will engage with the contents of the report. Your hard work and insights will be overlooked.

This article will explain these two approaches and when to use them.

Our organisations all desire to achieve a big and profitable source of income from a friendly client, funder or investment. It helps to stabilise their financial situation and creates a foundation for growth.

However, these situations all carry a hidden risk – that our organisations become too dependent on this income stream and too distracted or complacent to do anything about it. I can tell many stories of organisations blindsided by the loss of this income for a multitude of reasons. While some organisations recovered, many closed down or became a shadow of their former selves.

Organisations must therefore be mindful of the risks of having a single large contract or income stream. This risk is higher where this income accounts for a significant proportion of overall income, seems reliable, and when you must shift how your organisation operates to accommodate a client or funder.

This article will explore the advantages and disadvantages of a good single source of income. It also provides some ideas for how you might mitigate the risks associated with this favourable situation.

The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) is an excellent tool for getting a sense of a street or community in Scotland and its levels of deprivation and poverty. Other countries would benefit from creating their own versions of it.

The SIMD is used a lot by charities, foundations and policymakers. It is a combination of several poverty-related indicators drawn from official statistics.

It is also a common language for discussing the levels of deprivation in an area. I regularly use the SIMD in my work in Scotland which involves helping charities, social enterprises and community groups to improve their strategies and understand their beneficiaries.

This article introduces the SIMD, explains how it works and what I think of it.

Social innovation aims to find new and powerful ideas and approaches that can change the world. This is a worthy pursuit since we always need better ways of doing things. There are plenty of capable organisations that support social entrepreneurs to develop and refine their innovations. 

However, a social innovation is worth nothing without a capable organisation to implement it, a supportive and enabling environment, the right mix of funding, a large dose of perseverance and a measure of good luck. This is where the hard work comes in.

Here is a framework to help charities, nonprofit organisations and social enterprises to write their strategic plans. It focuses on ‘writing’ the plan rather than the strategic planning process which consists of workshops, conversations, strategic exercises and desktop research.

There is no correct format for a strategic plan. This framework sets out my thoughts on strategic plans and my preferred method of writing them. These insights stem from decades of working with such plans.

You must choose a format that works for you and your organisation. Some organisations will pick the bits that enable them to write a concise plan of under 10 pages, whereas larger and more complex organisations might choose to respond to all the prompts, and write a more comprehensive plan of 20 pages.

Treat this article like a menu and use whatever parts of this framework make sense to you. Adapt or discard the remainder. This framework is detailed so that it can offer you an array of choices.

The year is coming to an end as I write this reflection in early December 2022. It has been a year of adaptation as I worked hard to gain traction in Scotland after moving here from South Africa in 2021. I have learned many things in a short period, as one might expect when moving countries.

This year has been as turbulent as the previous and I have spent too much time following global geopolitics. I am grateful to write this reflection from within an open and healthy democracy.

There is value in sharing after-action reviews. These reviews help me to orient and reflect on how I must do things differently in the future. Although they are reflections on my own journey, you might find something useful in them.

I am satisfied with my move to Scotland. I made the right decision in coming here.

There tend to be two types of entrepreneurs that I encounter in my consulting work. There are those that strive to be in the middle of the action and build their organisations around them. Then there are those who strive to build their organisations to be separate from themselves like a piece of software.

Nowadays I think of these dichotomous archetypes as ‘heroes’ versus ‘programmers’. Framing them in a positive light makes this model more useful and easier to communicate.

This article explores these archetypes, considers when they are an asset or liability, and reflects on what we might learn from them.

There are over a million volunteers in Scotland and this is evident around me.

Over the past year, I have tried to understand this phenomenon as I have worked with several charities and social enterprises that use volunteers.

Fortunately, some of my Scottish colleagues are very experienced in designing and managing volunteer programmes. They have taught me many of the basics and improved my thinking about this topic.

Here are seven things that I have learned so far about volunteering in Scotland.

The ‘cost of living crisis’ refers to the rapid inflation of core essential goods and services that constitute a sizable proportion of household budgets in the UK. Its impact will be especially severe among low-income households who tend to rely on social grants. These households are likely to experience greater debt and poverty. The government is scrambling to limit the fallout. The cost of living crisis has afflicted the UK since late 2021 but has recently gained more media attention as its consequences become evident.

This article focuses on the likely consequences of this crisis for charities and social enterprises. It also suggests six sets of tactics that organisations might use to survive this crisis, become more resilient and increase their impact.

Here are some reflections that I wrote at a local coffee shop while contemplating the differences between Scotland and South Africa.

I moved from Cape Town in South Africa to Paisley in Scotland in November 2021. Paisley is a large town near Glasgow.

I am management consultant who helps charities (non-profit organisations) and social enterprises to improve their strategies. This is the perspective that I adopt in this article.