Our Three Year Strategic Plan

Our Strategy

Last year, to allow us to continue our vital work to the best of our ability, we launched our three-year strategic plan.

This strategy identified areas where we require more robust infrastructure to continue delivering the quality services that our clients deserve.

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It also laid out our goals, mission, and values - all of which were developed collaboratively through a series of facilitated conversations between staff members, Board members, leadership, and senior managers, with additional input provided by clients and volunteers.

Over the year, we have taken considerable steps to help us realise each of the goals defined in the strategy.

Goal 1

Grow To Positively Impact More Lives.

In our 2022 – 2023 Trustee’s Report, we promised to continue fundraising for potential projects which Connection Support is most passionate about and conduct a quality review across our programme delivery.

What we did:

  • Our Fundraising team generated £278,118 in charitable grants and donations in this financial year. With this income, not only have we been able to strengthen existing services and improve client support, but we have also developed new, fundraised projects, like our No Recourse to Public Funds service, which helps people experiencing homelessness who have lost, or don’t have access to, benefits and housing.
  • As a charity that believes in social justice; equality, diversity, equity and inclusion (EDEI) is incredibly important to us. Last year, we made an explicit commitment to EDEI, and vowed to be proactive in our approach. This year, we have continued to develop our EDEI strategy and continue to take forward our EDEI development plan – a living document that is worked on, added to, and reviewed quarterly. The Diversity Trust, who have been supporting us through this journey, undertook a review of our efforts and found that we actively place EDEI at our core. We developed EDEI champion roles to help steer our work, promote positive practices, and hold the organisation accountable for actions on the development plan. These will be recruited for in 2023 - 2024.
  • We employed a full-time Marketing and Communications Manager last year to lead on the development and implementation of a marketing strategy. This year, we’ve seen the benefits of investing in this post. It has allowed us to undertake a variety of activities to further our reach, including redesigning our website for a better user experience and proactively promoting our services to reach a wider audience.

Goal 2

Invest in Our Infrastructure

In our 2022 – 2023 Trustee’s Report, we promised to introduce further Office 365 features and work towards achieving Cyber Essentials Certification. We said we would consult internally to design a new client database, introduce a new contract management system and continue to monitor resourcing, filling gaps as necessary. We promised to develop a marketing and communications strategy, conduct a complete review of our website and launch a new intranet. We also said we would develop and begin to implement an Equality Diversity Equity and Inclusion strategy and employ a recruitment specialist to enable our managers to focus more on frontline work.

What we did:

  • We identified the need for an Estates team to manage our supported accommodation provision. At the end of the financial year, we recruited our Head of Estates. This development will enable Team Managers to fully focus their energy on support, leaving tenancy and property issues to this specialist team.
  • We recruited our new Head of Fundraising, as well as a Community Fundraiser, which enabled us to generate greater levels of welfare funding, fund three projects that would otherwise not exist, and enhance many services.
  • We invested in an IT team, as well as our IT systems, to help us reduce inefficiencies by working smarter. By upgrading our IT infrastructure, we’ve been able to adapt to new, integrated services which make collaborating much easier, particularly as many of our staff work remotely.
  • We completed our Cyber Essentials accreditation and began working toward Cyber Essentials Plus.
  • We began consultation on our new database system, which is an ongoing project.
  • We established a communications and marketing strategy which we have begun to implement and will be reviewing progress within the next financial year.
  • We have made amendments to our website to improve the user experience and have launched an intranet which all staff members and volunteers have access to.

Goal 3

Ensure Clients Are Directly Involved in Shaping Our Work

In our 2022 – 2023 Trustee’s Report, we promised to deliver the client involvement strategy and in particular, recruit a Board member with lived experience, develop training and support materials for clients, involve them further in recruitment, ensure staff buy-in to principles of client involvement and establish a system to evaluate the effectiveness of our efforts towards meaningful involvement.

What we did:

  • We launched our Peer Mentor Service pilot in Milton Keynes. We trained a group of individuals, all of whom were previous clients of ours, so that they could use their own lived experience to support others and directly influence our work. This was a success and we’ve continued to actively recruit more Peer Mentors.
  • We invited clients from our Oxfordshire Adult Homeless Pathway to join us at a client involvement workshop to discuss how, from their perspective, we could best establish peer mentoring in Oxfordshire. Their feedback was exceptionally insightful, and considered the types of support and training that may be needed, alongside the language used to describe the initiative.
  • We worked with two Oxford University Interns, who conducted research into ‘EDI among our volunteer workforce’ and ‘How client feedback is collected in an effective and meaningful way’. The learnings from these reports will feed directly into our work.
  • After recruiting a dedicated Client Involvement and Volunteering Manager last year, we evaluated how clients directly contribute to the shaping of our work. The learnings from this have been embedded into our client involvement and volunteering strategy.
  • We started to involve clients in senior level interviews.
  • We recruited a Board member with lived experience.
  • We have also identified the need for Client Involvement Champions – staff who will actively promote and facilitateclient involvement within teams and services across Connection Support. These will be recruited in the next financial year.

 

Goal 4

Invest in People Development

In our 2022 – 2023 Trustee’s Report, we promised to implement an enhanced employee benefits package and continue to do all we can to ease the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on our employees. We said we would introduce new employee communication processes, such as online Town Hall and Team Manager meetings, to help employees to share experiences and engage with the wider organisation. We also promised to conduct our first ever comprehensive staff survey, whilst investing in employee wellbeing and establishing a competency framework.

What we did:

  • Assessed our staffing model to better understand the success of our recruitment practice. Senior Managers discuss a quarterly report which monitors the success of our recruitment efforts, the costs associated with recruitment as well as staff turnover. It provides an opportunity to reflect on our recruitment practice and compare data to discern any patterns or trends.
  • With Board approval, we were able to announce both an annual wage and employers’ pension contribution increase, taking our pension contribution above the statutory minimum amount for the first time in our history. This comes from our commitment to always pay as generously as we can afford to.
  • We provided a one-off payment to all staff members, to assist them in coping during the worst of the cost-of-living crisis and to help them manage their utility bills throughout the winter.
  • We completed a staff questionnaire to identify which benefits our staff would value most highly, helping us launch a diverse benefits package. Through the likes of a Health Cash Plan and discounted nursery costs, staff can save money through tax benefits and discounts.
  • We worked with an external organisation to conduct an unbiased staff engagement survey. Through Best Companies, we invited staff to complete the survey to better understand how, as an organisation, we perform on topics such as wellbeing, personal growth, salary and benefits, as well as management and leadership. Based on the results, we were recognised by Best Companies us as one of the top 25 charities to work for in the UK. More crucially, the survey results will allow us to implement positive changes based on insights that have come directly from our staff.
  • We established a wellbeing working group to develop our commitment to our team’s welfare. The group reviewed the ideas that came from the staff survey, looked at current best practice to promote wellbeing and implemented changes to promote a culture of positive wellbeing. Looking ahead, this work will be taken forward by our Wellbeing Champions.

Goal 5

Develop Our Housing Management Capacity

In our 2022 – 2023 Trustee’s Report, we promised to develop a housing management strategy, with the aim of providing a greater quantity of appropriate high-quality accommodation for clients and review our office estate.

What we did:

  • We successfully secured several independent lease arrangements, increasing our capacity to house more clients, whilst reducing our reliance on our partners.
  • We invested in our Estates team to oversee our supported accommodation provision, allowing Team Managers to focus their energy on supporting clients.
Image Strategy

Refined Goals for 2024

Plans for the Future, Future Direction of the Charity and Likely Future Developments

In January 2023, we reviewed and refreshed our strategy. We refined our goals to place extra emphasis where needed to be able to deliver the strategy by the end of FY 2023 - 2024.  Our goals for next year are therefore:

  1. Growth: we will continue our track-record of successful retendering and extending contracts, further hone and target our tendering skills and improve our processes. We will deliver our marketing and fundraising strategies and identify further specific groups of clients for whom there is no existing provision and develop proposals to meet these.
  2. Infrastructure: we will develop more tools and information to enable frontline workers to deliver for clients e.g. complete Office 365 roll-out and training and achieve Cyber Essentials Plus Accreditation. We will continue to assess management/business service capacity alongside organisational growth and proactively manage risk through improved controls and procedures.
  3. People development, client involvement and volunteering: we will implement client involvement and volunteering strategies, follow up focus areas from this year’s staff survey, such as wellbeing collaboration, and plan to repeat survey in summer 2023 to track progress. We will continue to enhance our training and employee benefits, develop a competency system and make salary awards as generous as possible within budget parameters.
  4. Housing: we will invest in our housing management capability, develop an estates strategy, review our office estate, improve our compliance systems, and maintain a focus on environmental considerations.
  5. Client work: we will continue to develop our work in our current geographies and specialisms and proactively network and engage with partners to develop further opportunities to meet gaps in service provision.
  6. Collaboration: we will purposefully build robust relationships with partners and other stakeholders throughout our geographical areas.
  7. Quality and impact: we will establish a robust quality assurance process to ensure the best outcomes for clients and a means of quantifying and demonstrating the impact we have on their lives.
  8. Equality, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (EDEI): we will implement our EDEI strategy, including establishing a network of champions and training at all levels to create an inclusive environment.

During 2023-24, we will develop a new strategy and plan for 2024–27.  The consultation process will meaningfully involve staff, volunteers, clients, management, and the Board of Trustees.