As much as the closure of Kids Company raises concerns about the children it supported and its governance, there is a wider fear at play: that Kids Company’s troubles will be seen as symptomatic of the charity sector as a whole.
Karl Wilding, director of public policy, at National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) argued today that Kids Company is atypical of the vast majority of charities. He said that most of the 160,000 registered UK charities are “small, local organisations reliant on donations, not government grants [which are] by and large financially salient, well governed and administratively sound.”
But, I believe the sector does have some similarities with Kids Company that is must face up to: its collective failure in communications.
The way chief executive Camilla Batmanghelidjh and chair Alan Yentob have responded to media probing has been troubling. Confused messages, defensive responses, a dearth of detail – all combined to show a picture of a charity in crisis that went much deeper than problems with cashflow. Even at today’s Commons public administration committee hearing, Batmanghelidjh was accused by one particularly tetchy interrogator of delivering a “torrent of verbal ectoplasm”.
Of course the issue with Kids Company wasn’t primarily about communications: it was about governance. Good communications can’t make up for a chaotically run organisation. The first priority for all charities has to be to examine their practices and processes, to be as sure as they can that their governance is strong, their finances sound and their administration secure.
But what Kids Company also needed today and in the past few weeks has been clear, concise communications about how it worked and – crucially – what it achieved.
The same goes for the charity sector as a whole. Like Kids Company, charities have been accused of all sorts of wrongdoings: we waste funds, we overpay our senior staff, we campaign about the wrong things, we’re in the pocket of government, we make unethical investment decisions and we hound our donors.
And like Kids Company, the charity sector needs positive messages to counteract these accusations. Messages about who we are, what we do, why we do it and what we achieve. We need better, clearer communications about our impact on our beneficiaries and supporters, our role in society and the extraordinary work we do. We need to reframe the debate: to reclaim the concept of charity as being about people making a difference to the problems in the world they care about and want to help solve, with charities helping them do that.
We need stronger, more consistent stories, a more positive narrative and an increased ability to respond to misleading information about the sector. We need better access to evidence to support our stories, and we need to work together on common agendas and responses to the media.
The Understanding Charities Group has been active in this area, and the announcement yesterday of the joint initiative of Acevo and NCVO to promote the positive impact of the voluntary sector is a welcome escalation.
The problems at Kids Company are not typical of the charity sector, let’s make that clear. But we can learn from its mistakes.
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