SUSTAINABLE MODELS OF SUPPORT SERVICES: CASE STUDY

Voluntary Impact Buckinghamshire (VIB)

Collaboration keeps
support services local
When their local authorities
pooled funding to tender
for infrastructure support
Voluntary Impact Bucks built on a history of
informal collaboration between infrastructure
organisations in Buckinghamshire, bringing
together Councils for Voluntary Service (CVSs)
and Volunteer Centres into a new consortium

services, providers across to tender for a local authority contract.

Securing this funding for five years has not
Buckinghamshire formed only kept these local organisations in business,
but collaboration has brought efficiencies and
a consortium to tender greater quality to support services.

successfully for the contract

What Capacitybuilders funding was
received?
Buckinghamshire ChangeUp consortium is currently in
receipt of £78,000 from the Consortium Development
Fund 2008-11. It also benefited from Consortium
Development Fund 2006-8, and project funding
for infrastructure and communication projects. This
included developing a single point of access for frontline
organisations, a database of frontline organisations and
a new website.
In addition, £314,000 funding was received from the
Consortium Modernisation Fund 2008-11 for the
Additional Support Programme. This outreach project
is designed to work with Black and Minority Ethnic,
Roma, Gypsy and Traveller, Refugee/Asylum seekers
and Faith communities to ensure that they can access
training and support provision. £11,000 of Resilience
Funding was awarded in February 2009 and has been
used for a range of activities including handling the
increase in enquiries from potential volunteers, training
development workers to meet new needs related to the
recession and delivering events.
What drove collaboration around
infrastructure support in Buckinghamshire?
Buckinghamshire is a two-tier authority, with a
county council and four district councils. By the mid
nineteen-nineties there were three CVSs and Volunteer
Centres covering the county. There were also several
infrastructure organisations serving communities of
interest, such as rural and faith groups, that worked
county-wide.
In response to this plurality of providers, BIG (the
Buckinghamshire Infrastructure Group) was formed. A
relatively informal group, BIG provided opportunities
for infrastructure organisations to network and share
information. It also led on the development of the
local Compact. Increasingly, however, the members
recognised that with core funding fragmented
(coming through the different district councils) and
different support organisations delivering, support was
inconsistent across the county and there was some
duplication of activity. This prompted organisations
to start looking at how they could collaborate further
around service delivery.
“Increasingly we could see that it didn’t make sense to
do things differently across the county… that it wasn’t
efficient to set up different projects. So it was best for
service delivery to work together.”
Chief Officer, VIB partner organisation
When ChangeUp was introduced, BIG received funding
to develop an Infrastructure Development Plan (IDP),
setting out a vision and strategy for developing support
services across the county. A ‘stakeholder group’ was
set up to guide this, which included support providers,
frontline representation and, crucially county and
district council officers and other statutory partners.
The stakeholder group was later formalised into the
Buckinghamshire ChangeUp consortium.
Relationships between the organisations were therefore
quite well established by 2006-7, but it was a move
by the County and District Councils to jointly tender
for infrastructure support that provided the catalyst
for much closer collaboration. The three CVSs and
Volunteer Centres formed a consortium - Voluntary
Impact Bucks (VIB) - to bid for the contract. They were
later joined by Buckinghamshire Community Action, the
rural community council.
Other infrastructure organisations providing more
specialist services, formed a group called Encompass,
which was not a part of VIB but worked alongside it.
Developing the consortium and winning
the contract
ChangeUp funding supported VIB’s development, which
required considerable work to build deeper relationships
between staff and trustees. For example, trustee sub-
groups were set up, bringing together trustees from
across the consortium to work together on specific
issues. It was also used to: align policies and procedures;
backfill some Chief Officers’ time as they worked on
consortium development; and develop branding and a
joint logo.
VIB is not formally constituted, so one organisation
acts as lead body for each project that the consortium
undertakes.
VIB and its constituent organisations had not tendered
for public service contracts before. In preparing
their tender, they were helped by staff from a local
employer (GE Healthcare), through employer supported
volunteering. They also looked to learn from the
experiences of other CVSs that had tendered for
contracts.
In developing a strong tender, one key success factor
was getting trustees on board. The possibility of the
contract going to another agency “galvanised” trustees,
but there was still considerable work to be done in
relationship building and exploring how organisations
could maintain independence within a consortium.
Presenting a ‘united front’ externally seemed to be
important. In addition, consortium members thought it
was important not to assume that just because they had
worked in the area for a long time, that those making a
decision about awarding the contract would necessarily
be aware of everything they had done.
“We prepared for it like you would for a job interview –
we knew outside competitors would play the ‘we’re new
and sexy’ card, so we had to show how we too could
become more innovative”
Chief Officer, VIB partner organisation
The contract was awarded initially for three years (2007/8
to 2009/10) and has recently been extended for a further
two years, giving VIB secure funding until March 2012.
How have support services become more
sustainable?
Successfully tendering for the local authority contract
meant that VIB’s work could be sustained between
2007 and 2012 - while losing the contract is likely
to have meant that some or all of the constituent
organisations would have folded. However, it is not just
securing ongoing funding, but the added benefits of
collaboration at county level that have helped to make
support services more sustainable.
Collaborating more closely has also enabled the
partners to improve consistency in provision and
quality of services across the county. Project funding
bids are prepared by the ChangeUp consortium, led
by one of the partners and delivered countywide. This
has benefited frontline organisations, for example
by offering greater choice of locations and dates for
training and development, such as recent Trustee
Forums that were delivered countywide. Collaboration
has therefore provided better access to support for
frontline organisations. A single phone number and web
portal has also helped to improve access to support
by simplifying the system and making it clearer what is
available across the county.
Collaboration has also made project delivery more
efficient, and given opportunities for staff from the
different organisations to develop closer working
relationships. For example, the three Volunteer Centres
have jointly become Licensed Training Providers through
Volunteering England (saving money on the license by
working together) and when a trained staff member at
one centre left, staff from the other centres were able to
go in and train new staff.
VIB has also taken the opportunity to run countywide
conferences and funding fairs for the first time. Working
at a county level means that they have been able to
attract more high profile speakers and national funders.
There have also been opportunities to collaborate with
other organisations working at county level, which would
have been more difficult for district CVSs to do on their
own.
These benefits were anticipated when the contract
was put together, and indeed were a driver for
commissioning infrastructure support at a county level.
From the local authorities’ perspectives, the contract
gave them an opportunity to think collectively about
what services they wanted to fund. In turn, this was
influenced by the Infrastructure Development Plan that
the ChangeUp consortium had originally put together,
so the infrastructure organisations themselves (and
frontline organisations whose feedback had shaped the
IDP) influenced what was commissioned.
“The trick of the process, why it worked so well, is that
a lot came out of the original IDP. And putting together
the contract was seen as a lever for delivering the IDP.”
Policy officer, Buckinghamshire County Council
Improving voice
Closer collaboration has also strengthened the
infrastructure organisations’ voice within local
partnerships. Both VIB and Encompass now have seats
on the Buckinghamshire Strategic Partnership Board
and Implementation Group, broadening third sector
representation and raising the profile of infrastructure
support.
This has opened up new opportunities for closer working
with the local authorities - for example, two of the VIB
organisations’ Chief Officers were recently invited to a
‘strategic solutions group’ to deliver a workshop on
what the County Council could do, across directorates,
to support frontline organisations through the recession.
An Encompass member organisation worked with the
County Council commissioning team to work on issues
around commissioning the third sector. A contracts
commissioner, with a voluntary sector background, has
now been appointed specifically to work with the third
sector.
“We haven’t solved all the problems, but we’ve been
able to influence developments very strongly.”
Chief Officer, ChangeUp consortium member
organisation
Additional funding has also been drawn in as a result
of these relationships - for example, Buckinghamshire
Strategic Partnership has funded a new volunteering
project to help link up senior executives living in
Buckinghamshire who have been made redundant with
frontline organisations who could benefit from their
skills.
Where next?
While collaboration was preferred over merger when
tendering for the contract in 2007, since then VIB
members have decided to formally merge. A new
organisation (Community Impact Bucks) is due to be
formed on 1 April 2010. This decision flowed from closer
joint working on countywide projects, with boundaries
between organisations blurring somewhat, and from a
review of the likely environment for delivery of support
services over the next few years.
The new structure will be an integrated infrastructure
organisation with outreach points reflecting the local
geography. This will allow the new organisation to
maintain an ability to reach smaller, rural communities
and those with ‘additional support needs’. Integrating
back office functions, should allow efficiency savings to
be made so that staff can be redirected to providing
support services.
The new structure will also make decision making
“smoother and faster” as there will only be one Chief
Officer and Board of Trustees to work through, rather
than four. The main drivers are to improve effectiveness
and to leave VIB better placed to tender for a new
local authority contract in two years’ time. Although
the partners are aware that there is no guarantee that
funding will still be provided at the same level, it seems
that the local authorities are committed to continuing
to fund infrastructure - so the challenge is to keep
working on good funder relationships and make the new
organisation as ‘fit for purpose’ as possible, before the
current contract ends.
This case study was prepared by Shared Intelligence for the Sustainable Models of Support Services report, which was
funded by Capacitybuilders. To read more case studies like this please visit: www.improvingsupport.org.uk
Key learning points
• Involving statutory partners, including key funders,
on the ChangeUp consortium is seen by all partners
as a real strength, making discussions about what
infrastructure support services are needed more
collaborative and less confrontational. This also
provides a key opportunity for contact with the
District Councils, which could have been lost now
that the contract is managed by the County Council
• Good relationships with the local authorities have
had spin-off benefits - for example, one of the
local authority’s strategic directors is working with
VIB through the Council’s employer supported
volunteering scheme to provide consultancy relating
to the forthcoming merger
• The ChangeUp consortium has provided a good
opportunity to develop capability within infrastructure
organisations by building on strengths within the
consortium and using individuals’ skills across the
county
• In preparing the tender to provide infrastructure
support, VIB believed it was crucial not to assume
that the local authority commissioners knew what the
consortium could do, even though the members had
been working in Buckinghamshire for a long time.
Demonstrating partners’ experience, while showing
how they could be innovative, was thought to be a
key factor in winning the contract