A wider reach
Ten years on from the NSPCC’s high-profile Full Stop campaign, Nicola Alderson shares how the charity developed a new strategy to reach more children
Editor’s note: The NSPCC underwent a root and branch review of its activities shortly after the arrival of Andrew Flanagan, who replaced Dame Mary Marsh
as chief executive officer in 2009. The change management programme precipitated a flurry of headlines in early 2010.1 Now the new structure
is firmly embedded, Caritas asked the NSPCC to share the main points of its evolution. The additional notation at the end of the article has been supplied by the editor and is not part of Nicola Alderson’s article.
KEY POINTS
- Significant growth over last ten years
- New strategy to widen the reach
- Focus was on impact
- Root and branch reorganisation
The NSPCC’s vision is to end cruelty to children in the UK. It’s a big ambition but child cruelty is preventable. We believe we can make the best progress by inspiring and challenging everyone to play their part in protecting children.
In 2009, we were ten years on from the launch of the Full Stop campaign. A changing political and economic landscape offered a timely opportunity to develop a new strategy for the organisation. During the decade, the NSPCC had grown significantly and we had increased the range and breadth of our services for children and families.2
At the same time, we had upped our campaigning and lobbying work to influence child protection policies and practices, improve legislation and change public attitudes and behaviours.
Much was achieved during this time. Over the past ten years, our lobbying work, among many things, helped to create the new offence of ’causing or allowing the death of a child‘.3 And we succeeded in making courts less intimidating for children giving evidence in abuse trials.
In 2008 we made a significant contribution to Lord Laming’s review of the child protection system, following the death of baby Peter Connelly. Thirty-nine of the 58 recommend-ations in his report reflected points that we had made.4
ChildLine joined the NSPCC in 2006, and in 2009 we launched an online counselling service for children through ChildLine.org.uk. The website continued to grow into a vibrant community where children could help each other on message boards, and get information and advice. Last year the website had over 100,000 registered users and almost one million visitors.
Yet despite all these successes, some of the most sickening and extreme cases of child abuse remained all too frequent and the task we faced of ending cruelty to children was still enormous.
Clarifying our vision
In spring 2009 the NSPCC executive board met to start thinking about what a new strategy for the charity could look like. Everyone was prepared to ask challenging questions about what the NSPCC needed to do to achieve its long-term vision of ending cruelty to children.
We began with the financial bottom line. In 2009, the NSPCC had around £120m annual net expenditure, once fundraising costs were removed.5 To put this in context, the government and the third sector, at the time, were spending around £6.6bn a year on child protection.
Although we are a large charity, the NSPCC could not be everywhere. Our local services could only ever reach a relatively small number of children and families. The importance of child protection had become much more recognised within society but despite this progress, children were still suffering on a massive scale.
The NSPCC had set out a bold ambition of ending cruelty to all children in the UK. Clearly, to achieve this ambition, we need to find new ways of tackling child maltreatment in the 21st century. It was clear to us that we could not do this on our own and needed to leverage wider changes in society. We needed to share our knowledge and expertise with other organisations and encourage everyone to play their part in ending cruelty to children. This would provide a better knowledge base to develop our influencing and campaigning.
Finding our focus
With the pro bono assistance of a leading UK management consultancy, we set about reviewing every area of our operations. We also put together a team of key internal stakeholders to help shape the new strategy.
Firstly, we designed a new operating modelto anchor all our future work in a cycle of research, testing and learning. The latter was geared to influencing government policy, and improving other organisation’s policies and practices, to bring about wider societal change. See Figure 1.
We wanted to focus our services on specific types of abuse and particularly vulnerable children where we could make maximum impact. We selected seven priority areas:
1) neglect;
2) physical abuse in high-risk families;
3) sexual abuse;
4) babies under one;
5) looked-after children;
6) disabled children; and
7) children from certain black and ethnic minority communities.
We then planned to create specialist teams in these priority areas, reshape our services to be more innovative, and capture knowledge and learning about what works best.
Our new strategy would therefore be a combined approach to ending cruelty to children and our services would maximise the immediate benefit to children and families; we would amplify what we had learned through our influencing and campaigning work.
Once we had demonstrated the benefits of our new services, we would share our learning so other organisations could deliver programmes to protect more children.
Launching the new strategy
The culmination of all this work was a strategy for the NSPCC up to 2016, agreed at the board of trustees meeting in September 2009. The following month, the new strategy was launched to all of our staff across the UK on the same day.6 A steady flow of ongoing internal communication continued after that, including more detailed staff briefings and forums on the NSPCC intranet.
We also created dedicated channels for both internal and external stakeholders to raise questions with the senior managers and the executive board.
Preparing for change
The task was now to turn the new strategy into something that the NSPCC would live and breathe every day.
At the start of 2010 we set up an internal strategy implementation team, to project manage and support new workstreams across the organisation. This programme of change was led by our chief executive Andrew Flanagan and the NSPCC’s executive board.
This provided a programme management structure to monitor the various workstreams and ensure we were delivering against agreed plans. We reported progress to the trustees at every board meeting to ensure that the strategy was on track.
From spring 2010, we began gathering a large body of knowledge to find the most innovative, pioneering ways to tackle child cruelty.
We examined the latest research and evidence about what had proved successful including looking at what was happening in other countries, with a view to testing these techniques. We drew on this to begin developing a range of new programmes and services for children and families.
During the year, NSPCC directors met with senior management teams to get their feedback on the changes and challenges ahead. Part of this work involved looking at how our existing services would need to be reshaped.
For example, we knew that devising new services could require staff to develop additional skills or change their working patterns. So we planned to invest heavily in supporting them through this period of change.
Extending reachWe also wanted to be more focused about where our services were based. Rather than having a large number of offices in many locations, we needed to shift to a smaller number of larger service centers in strategically placed towns and cities.These changes would enable us to increase the number of children we helped directly. They would also help ensure we made a significantly bigger impact beyond the reach of a particular service.
In 2010 year we rolled out two new programmes that help children overcome the trauma of domestic violence. These were:
1) The Caring Dads: Safer Children programme which began working with previously violent fathers to prevent further violence and improve their parenting.
2) The Domestic Abuse: Recovering Together programme which began working with young children and their mothers to help them recover from domestic violence and improve their relationships.
As well as restructuring our services for children and families, we created a dedicated ChildLine division to provide advice, information and help to children across the UK, and began to develop a new primary schools service aimed at reaching younger children. We set up a service division providing advice and information to adults, including our child protection helpline.
Our strategy also sought to challenge individuals and organisations to do everything in their power to protect children. To lead this work we created a new child protection consultancy division to work in partnership with organisations to improve child protection policies and practices.
Overall, throughout 2010 we undertook a root and branch reorganisation of the NSPCC’s management and divisional structures.7 And we evolved our financial model so the organisation could grow to support the strategy.
Looking ahead
One year on from all this, 2011 is a turning point – the first year since we agreed the strategy in which we move from transition to delivery. By April 2012 we will have completed the process of rolling out 28 new programmes – all created as a result of the research into our priority types of abuse and vulnerable children. Where these involve a new service for children and families we will locate them in areas with large populations and high deprivation, where we can reach as many vulnerable children as possible.
This year we also launched a landmark study into child abuse. The study revealed that almost one million secondary school children have been seriously physically or sexually abused or neglected during childhood.
Its finding that most abused children are not getting the vital help and support they need has given our strategy a new impetus.
We are already sharing our experience and expertise, helping other organisations, groups and individuals develop policies and practices to protect the millions of children they work with.
In addition, we are working with local authorities, the police and other experts to tackle the most serious kinds of child abuse.As our strategy progresses to 2016 we will continue the cycle of testing, learning, and sharing knowledge.
Additional services and campaigns to prevent cruelty, protect children and help them recover from abuse are also being developed. The NSPCC’s strategy needs to remain relevant in an uncertain world that is changing rapidly. This means being ready to adapt our strategic direction or respond quickly to emerging child protection issues.
Our strategy lays out a new direction of travel for the NSPCC. Its success will lie in the impact it makes on ending cruelty to children.
1. www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/feb/ 14/nspcc-closures-redundancies-restructuring
2. CharityFinancials.com tracks income rising from £91.791m to £152.21m, expenditure from £82.529m to £157.404m and headcount from 1,580 employees to 1,871 in the periods March 2001 to March 2010.
3. An amendment to the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004
4. www.nspcc.org.uk/Inform/policyand publicaffairs/Consultations/2008/Lamingresponse_wdf62413.pdf
5. Further detail of how this has grown and what the funds were spent on is set out in the latest annual report: www.nspccannualreview.org.uk/pdfs/NSPCC_Annual_Report_2010.pdf
6. A full version of this document can be found at:www.evaluation.org.uk/resources/ocuments/NSPCCStrategy.pdf
7. According to CharityFinancials.com, headcount dropped from 2089 employees in the year ending March 2009 to 1871 employees by the year ending March 2010.
Author: Nicola Alderson
Nicola Alderson is the director of corporate planning and performance at the NSPCC.
She joined the charity in 2008 having previously been head of planning and performance at Shelter.
Alderson has an extensive background in strategic planning and performance measurement and has worked for a number of large and medium-sized charities during the past 15 years.
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