Experts in the field: Charity management academics to advise leading countryside non-profit

Dr Haseeb Shabbir and Alex Skailes, from the Centre for Charity Effectiveness (CCE) at Bayes Business School, have been awarded a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) grant to provide expert structural and growth guidance to CPRE, the countryside charity.

The 30-month project will help to develop managerial expertise at CPRE, enhance commercial capabilities and diversify income streams, through the creation of new products and services. Academic expertise from CCE will help inform development of CPRE’s 2035 strategy, where it seeks to consolidate and strengthen common purpose across its network and beyond. In doing so, the project aims to ensure a sustainable and diversified income strategy is in place to meet the challenges of the future.

The project will be jointly funded by CPRE and Innovate UK.

Alex Skailes, Director of CCE, is an experienced advisor in non-profit corporate growth projects. She said she was looking forward to working with such an established organisation:

“In our recent research, The Future Charity Chair, participants reflected on challenges and opportunities that the not-for-profit sector and their own organisations were facing.

“These reflections varied in priority and emphasis, but mostly cited an increasingly volatile, complex and uncertain operating environment with the pace of challenge anticipated to increase. In such an operating environment there is a need for charities to develop diversified income portfolios that will give sustainable and predictable income flows.

“As a Centre, our extensive networks create platforms for the charity sector to enhance return on investment through education, consulting and knowledge exchange activities.”

Dr Shabbir, Reader in Voluntary Sector Management at Bayes, said CCE’s networks could help CPRE and the charity sector as a whole broaden its access to valuable connections and expertise:

“A federated branch structure can often make strategic change more complicated and challenging. National charities must maintain relationships with a large number of local leaders upon whom the centre has little or no control.

“While branches of federated charities have common beneficiaries and values, they are led by autonomous boards who may have different priorities to that of a national charity. These branches are bound together by common membership of a federation, not necessarily to each other, and can create a challenging role for national leadership with the need to build trust, obtain buy-in to any strategic change and ensure a consistent quality assured service delivery.

“This project aims to create significant learning and impact for CPRE and its network. It will create new knowledge for other charities too, particularly for those operating within a federated network.”

CPRE aims to promote, enhance and protect the countryside for everyone’s benefit and has a local branch in every county in England. The charity advocates for more integrated land use planning to make best use of our finite land supply. It promotes positive solutions to the challenges of what gets built where in ways that respond the to the climate emergency and promote environmental sustainability and nature restoration.

Roger Mortlock, CEO of CPRE, said the project would help the charity become more innovative:

“We’re delighted to have been awarded this Knowledge Transfer Partnership grant and to be working with such an expert team at the Centre for Charity Effectiveness. CPRE will celebrate its centenary in 2026 and we’re ambitious about building on the successes of our past to tackle future challenges.

“We’re asking for more from our countryside than ever before – with the pressing needs of nature restoration, a secure food supply, more genuinely affordable homes, clean energy infrastructure, climate change mitigation, and not least space in nature for our wellbeing and to take in beauty. This makes CPRE’s job promoting integrated solutions for how we plan for these needs increasingly important.

“This project will help us to become more innovative in our delivery for the impact we want to have.”

About Knowledge Transfer Partnerships

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships are two or three-year projects that aim to apply academic expertise to business practices with commercial impact. Each projects addresses a business or not-for-profit challenge, but are not limited to technical innovation. Management KTPs may also look at using management theory to transform how a business operates.