The Guild’s consultancy services can offer practical and realistic solutions to meet the needs of ever changing organisations. We have extensive experience of delivering support to a wide range of clients including government departments and agencies, voluntary and community sector and social enterprise infrastructure bodies and individual groups.

Our main areas of work are:

Research

We undertake qualitative and quantitative studies to evidence policy development, consult with stakeholders and plan the delivery of services.

We specialise in research within the social enterprise sector but have undertaken a wide range of work in the voluntary and community sector and in various social policy areas including work for the Refugee Council, PCTs, Local Authorities and Housing Associations.

Evaluation

We work with organisations to help evaluate their activities in order for them to develop and plan their future work and to meet the needs of funders.  We use a variety of evaluation techniques, aiming to capture soft outcomes and long term impact as well as identifying if specific outputs have been achieved.

Our work has included a very small volunteer helpline piloting new services to participating in a three-year evaluation of restorative justice for the Home Office.

Business plans and feasibility studies

We have been commissioned to work with a wide range of organisations to help develop new services that will be financially sustainable and meet identified needs.

Recent work has included: supporting the community in a New Deal area in London to identify what activities they could develop if they took over the running of a community centre; testing the feasibility of a local authority externalising a service area as a social enterprise; working with Action for Market Towns in the Eastern Region to support groups with their sustainability planning.

Strategic development

Our business support and training activities maintain our close understanding of the needs of practitioners and communities, this informs the work we undertake to develop policies and undertake strategic planning.

We have worked on two regional social enterprise strategies and three sub-regional strategies. We have worked with Government Offices of the Regions, Regional Development Agencies and on national government initiatives to plan how actions will be delivered.

In particular, we have worked to engage communities and small, local groups to ensure they have the opportunity to participate in these actions. We have worked with a number of Local Strategic Partnerships, Economic Partnerships and boards in regeneration areas to help all partners to contribute to the planning and delivery of actions.

 

 

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