Pro bono consulting

Over the last decade, we have provided strategic advice and business planning support to over 30 charities, working closely with Impetus PEF to support organisations dealing with a range of matters from youth conflict resolution to rehabilitation of prisoners and ex-offenders, and helping those suffering from eating disorders.

We are proud to now be strategic partners to the Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) and the NSPCC UK.  Over the course of the coming years, we will work closely with our social impact partners to use our commercial skills, expertise, and resources, to help deliver real impact to their communities, through a combination of strategic support, training, mentoring and fundraising.

The Youth Endowment Fund was founded with a ten-year government investment of £200m and a mission that matters. They work to prevent children and young people from getting drawn into crime and violence. They do it by funding and evaluating projects, listening to young people and using data and evidence to find out what works. They also work together with partners to build a movement committed to putting that knowledge into practice.

Registered charity numbers 216401 and SC037717.

The NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children)is the UK’s leading child protection charity. It provides services across the UK to help children who’ve been abused, protect children at risk and find the best ways to prevent child abuse from ever happening. They aim to transform society for every childhood.

Below you can find out a bit more about some of our recent Pro Bono work from the last couple of years:

Registered charity numbers 216401 and SC037717.

After defining the charity’s strategy around the safety of children in online spaces last year, this project saw us translate the results into actionable implementation plans to deliver maximum impact with limited resources.

Kate Edwards, Associate Head of Child Safety Online for NSPCC, said:

‘Keeping children safe online makes up a third of our overall strategy. We’re hugely appreciative of the support and expertise OC&C have brought to helping us operationalise our ambitions. They have taken the time to get to know our new strategic approach and operations to make considered recommendations to inform our planning for the first 3 years.’

We have been working with WRAP,  a climate action NGO aiming to tackle the causes of the climate crisis across multiple industries. Their ‘Textiles 2030’ initiative is part of their work to promote the reduction of GHG emissions and water usage in the textiles industry; this is a space which has a notoriously complex supply chain and is therefore difficult for retailers to accurately understand, track and reduce their footprint. As part of this initiative, WRAP has developed a proprietary tool to collect data and provide signatories with initiatives and tactical strategies to help them reduce their footprint.

We have  worked with WRAP to help them understand how textile players use the tool today in the context of a market with a broad range of alternative solutions. We then helped them to subsequently think about how best to deploy their internal resources to improve and expand this tool, to ensure it continues to help and remain relevant for as broad a range of fashion and textile players as possible going forwards, with the ultimately aim of helping them reach their goal of reducing the carbon and water impact of the textiles industry in the UK and internationally.

The WRAP team said: “The OC&C team were super responsive and great to work with. The team had a very thorough and detailed approach which took the heavy lifting out of this strategy piece for the WRAP team. We were presented with a number of options and routes forward which were widely consulted on, bringing together findings from a number of internal and external stakeholders. It helped us better understand our position in the market and possible paths forward which we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to flesh out.”

The question: How can YEF turn growing awareness of its evidence resources into deeper, more meaningful engagement – ensuring the organisations it supports can more easily find, understand and use YEF evidence in practice?

How we helped: OC&C helped YEF diagnose where audiences were dropping off and why, bringing together audience insight, engagement data and sector perspectives to identify the key barriers to use. We then developed a practical roadmap of recommendations to improve how YEF targets, positions and delivers its resources across digital and in-person channels.
Emma Jenkins, Director of Change at YEF:

“When we came to you last month we knew our evidence wasn’t landing the way it needed to, but were a bit lost on why. You’ve given us so much more than a diagnosis – the end of project report is a real roadmap to fix it. The depth of thinking, audience insight and practical recommendations to help us going forward is brilliant. We are now excited to put the recommendations into practice!! We can’t thank you all enough.”

“Working on a pro-bono project for a charity which delivers tuition to children from disadvantaged backgrounds was one of the most rewarding experiences I have had at OC&C to date. We helped the organisation devise a strategy to reach as many pupils as possible, in a financially viable and sustainable way. I realised during this project that whilst charities do incredible work, they often lack the resources needed to really optimise their approach. As a result, the benefit we can bring as an external advisor is invaluable. I really felt that we had helped to shape their thinking and together devised a path to maximising their impact within their means,” Lucy, Consultant

“Being able to work with the NSPCC has been an incredibly rewarding experience. The NSPCC does some incredible work in primary schools, and we worked with them to help design an offer that extends and builds on their current work to help children in secondary schools. The project involved speaking to schools, local authorities and central government across the UK which really helped shed a light on how valuable the work the NSPCC does today is, but also on what some of the critical challenges in safeguarding are today. The NSPCC is a very large and complex organisation which relies heavily on fundraising and volunteers. As such they can really benefit from external support from organisations like OC&C who can apply their strategic thinking to quickly draw insights and make recommendations that can help make a real impact.” Dan, Associate Consultant

The NSPCC is the leading UK children’s charity, helping make children safer from abuse for the last 130 years.

We spoke to one of our Consultants, who told us about his latest project work with the charity.

Q: What was your role on the project and how did it progress?

The question centred around whether the NSPCC should  be looking into entering the retail market, given the context of growing retail sales. I was tasked with owning the historic performance of charity retail section and managing an intern to help me with this. I was given the opportunity to present in both the interim and final meeting.

Q: What was the most rewarding part of your project and why?

It was nice to know and see that our advice was really valued, and of course it’s highly rewarding knowing that all the work we’re doing is trying to help a charity improve their performance so that they can better serve children in need.

Q: How did the NSPCC support you or your team during the project?

Frequent email communications, they gave us access to internal data and interviews with key stakeholders

Q: Will your pro bono experiences have any impact on your day job? Why or why not?

Definitely will positively impact my day job. The slightly slower pace of the project gave me more time to think about the key questions and was also a stretch role, which has essentially given me some great experience at doing the job beyond my tenure which I can take forward with me – really enjoyed it!

Find out more about The NSPCC.

City Gateway is a charity that provides training for disadvantaged young people in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and other boroughs of Greater London.

We spoke to one of our Consultants, who told us about his latest project work with the charity.

Q: Charity you worked with:

A: City Gateway

Q: What was your role on the project and how did it progress?

A: City Gateway is a charity based in Tower Hamlets providing training for disadvantaged young people. Through running traineeship and apprentice schemes, training courses, and youth work City Gateway helps its students to bridge the gap to gaining further employment, education or training. Often families don’t know where to turn and job opportunities for young people and women can be hard to access – in stark contrast with the affluence of Canary Wharf visible from the borough City Gateway works the most in.

Q: Did anything about the experience surprise you, and, if so, what?

A: I focused on two core areas: understanding the ‘internals’ of the charity, and interviewing external partners such as corporates and charity partners. Our aim here was to undertake a thorough diagnostic prior to developing strategic recommendations: Where are the charity’s strengths? Where could they do better? What do corporate partners (who provide placements for apprentices and can be a major source of funds) want? As the project progressed, we synthesised these findings in to clear recommendations moving forwards, with the ultimate aim to create a more effective channel to help more students’ progress.

Q: What was the most rewarding part of your project and why?

A: The most rewarding part was the general feeling that we could add a huge amount of value in a short time frame and really change the future direction of the charity. And that the value we were creating wasn’t shareholder, or financial – it was social impact. How can we help the maximum number of target students in the most effective, lasting way? At OC&C, a lot of our clients are already successful private or public businesses and have been for a number of years. City Gateway was facing some real, significant problems, caused by a number of factors out of their control. Providing a diagnostic and concrete recommendations felt like together we created a successful path out of the recent difficulties and outlined a roadmap to increase future successes.

Q: How did Impetus-PEF support you or your team during the project?

A: Impetus-PEF helped us through providing examples of best practice from their portfolio of charities and putting us in touch with the right people at them. Realising the synergies – of swapping best practice between charities – is an underlooked but very useful way to quickly create value.

Q: Will your pro bono experiences have any impact on your day job? Why or why not?

A: The experience has made me think of the wider, social impact of what I do (both inside and out of work). On a day-to-day basis, it was a great learning opportunity for me and I was able to learn new skills that I use; including interviewing key stakeholders and wading through some fragmented internal data sets!

Find out more about City Gateway.