Last Wednesday I offered five reasons why so many websites lack purpose. Whilst these can apply to any organisation, I’ve found the third sector is particularly prone to purposeless websites. The reasons why so many sites fail lie in the nature of the organisation that puts them there. If the organisation is not clear about its own purpose or the purpose of its website then it is inevitable the site will not have a clear purpose.
Business and Third Sector Organisations
Businesses seek profit and so they have to get their websites right; they must get to know their customers and potential customers and so offer a site they will respond to positively. Their existence may depend upon them getting their website right and keeping that way.
Third sector organisations can be businesses but many of them are not. They are often dependent upon grants and this means they need to satisfy their funding bodies and not their clients. The relationship with funding bodies is rarely a partnership. Usually funding bodies are interested solely in whether their money is spent for the reasons it was given. They are not so interested in how effective the work is, even allowing for all the talk about outputs and outcomes.
Outputs and Outcomes
Outputs are brilliant to the bureaucratic mind. They are measurable. So you offer a grant to an organisation and in return you might ask, for example, that the organisation sees 100 clients. The organisation needs to provide evidence they have seen 100 clients. Usually there are several outputs, so if the organisation helps people find work there may be further outputs detailing numbers who do training courses, find work, set up their own business, etc.
The problem with outcomes is they are far less visible. Let’s say you have a single output, which is that one person found work through the organisation that received the grant. The outcome would be the difference it makes to the client’s life and their family. Here things can get messy. How do you measure the extent to which they enjoy their new job? What if they enjoy it but are on low pay and have to travel 2 hours each way to get to work? What if they hate the job but the money really benefits their family?
I don’t want to get bogged down about how to measure outcomes; it is possible to record them. It requires qualitative methods and these are generally less well-known and more demanding than quantitative methods.
A business offering a service similar to a third sector organisation has to focus on outcomes if they are going to understand their customers and offer them a valued service. The third sector organisation has to understand their funding body and their requirements. They may be fully aware the statistics they gather for their funding body are effectively meaningless but they have no option but to collect and process them.
Their focus is on where their income is coming from and it is not coming from their clients. This means they have to become bureaucratic and not responsive to their clients’ needs. Any innovation has to be justified to the funding body at some stage. Sometimes the hassle is too great. Why bother changing things to meet the needs of clients if the funding body is already happy with your performance.
The Role of Business and the Third Sector
One final point: I am not making the political point that the private sector is more efficient than the statutory sector. These political ideologies seek to justify privatisation of public services and they have proved to be an unmitigated disaster. Most private sector organisations on government contracts are large corporations who generate their own bureaucracy and their accountability to the government generates its own bureaucracy.
The strengths of small businesses lie in their closeness to their clients and their ability to respond directly to their clients’ needs. Once consumed by bureaucracy they lose their advantages and deserve to lose their business. It leaves open to question the best way to fund services for clients who cannot pay for them. The least wasteful approach for mainstream services has to be through public services. This leaves small businesses and third sector organisations to fill the gaps in provision.
