NAVCA Membership Survey: Building a bigger picture

NAVCA’s membership survey – Building a bigger picture – was launched earlier this week.

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The project is being undertaken by Sheffield Hallam University and involves a survey over the next six weeks, alongside interviews with a sample of individual members. The aim is to collect data that will enable us tell a well informed and effective story of the current state and contribution of VCSE infrastructure.

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The survey has six ‘modules’, each on a different theme, and we thought we’d highlight one theme each week to help our members along the way and keep up the momentum. The first module is called ‘About your organisation’. Here, we’re asking about the basics: what our members do and where, income and expenditure, and about staffing and trustees.

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The results from these questions will give us an aggregate sense of the state of local infrastructure. By way of recent historical comparison, fourteen years ago NAVCA was able to report a membership with an estimated total income of £172m (ranging from £15k to £3.67m) and employing some 6,013 staff (4,055 FTE).*

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So, what’s the position now, after the turbulence of a financial crisis, recession and austerity, four general elections and four Prime Ministers, Brexit and a global pandemic? We need as many members to complete the survey as possible to be able to generate a convincing picture of the scale, scope and contribution of local VCSE infrastructure, as well as its challenges and future. But we also hope that engaging with the survey will provide an interesting opportunity to reflect on the state of local VCSE infrastructure in 2022.

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*Escadale, W. (2009) Infrastructure for the local third sector, Sheffield, NAVCA, February 2008.