Trading Goods and Services

• UCIT

Voluntary and community organisations seeking more sustainable alternatives to grant funding often take the option of earning income by selling goods and/or services, bidding for contracts or making money from investments.

Perhaps the best known form of trading for fundraising purposes is the charity shop, however organisations trade in ever increasing areas and often compete with the private sector to market goods and services. Many organisations deliver services through Service Level Agreements or Contracts with the public sector - most typically in the field of Healthcare.

To see a range of articles regarding trading in the voluntary and community sector visit the Trading Goods and Services section of the www.grant-tracker.org website.

Other earned income to voluntary and community organisations comes through investments such as those organisations with a large capital endowment.

Organisations like UCIT provide finance to social economy organisations to enable the growth of business activity. UCIT also provide support free advice, business support and mentoring to these organisations.

In England, NCVO have developed extensive work on encouraging voluntary and community organisations to consider earning income as part of a diverse portfolio of funding. Their Sustainable Funding Project (SFP) considers Earning as a method alongside more traditional (for some) funding sources.

Earned income can be a valuable source of unrestricted, independent income and a real means of supporting organisational independence and growth.

Earning can be done by either trading on the open market or entering into contracts to deliver services (earning through the structured market).

Approaches to generating earned income include:

• Core related trading - selling things related to your organisation's aims and mission
• Cost recovery - charging users a minimal fee
• Contracting - providing specified services via a contractual agreement
• Social firms - involving service users in income generation
• Unrelated trading - selling things purely for profit, including property based development

Earning may require lateral thinking about what your organisation does, who it does it for, and what it could sell to generate income. There are also issues to consider before starting to earn and at the end of the day, earning may not be for everyone. Nevertheless, there is further support available and, for those organisations for whom earning is an option, earned income can be a big step towards sustainability.

Grant Tracker provides a range of Social Economy Case Studies to provide real local examples of how trading can help an organisation fulfill its mission.

For more information:

www.ucitltd.com
www.ncvo-vol.org.uk/sfp/