Guide to using these pages for infrastructure organisations

These pages seeks to provide useful information and signposting to those that support VCS organisations that are looking at starting or developing trading. It should also help VCS organisations and you identify when pursuing a trading path may be appropriate or not for the organisation.

We hope that it will help you to find useful information for a specific client easily. A VCS organisation can use the pages themselves, you may want to direct them to certain parts or you may sit and work through the site with them.

Rather than producing a lot of information here the pages seeks to help you and your clients to identify what the organisation’s needs are, to suggest the information and support that would be useful and to provide links to other websites or web based materials and lists of support providers. There are also lots of links between different parts of the site signposting you to, hopefully, the most useful parts of the pages for you and your clients.

1. An assessment
Either the VCS organisations themselves or you working alongside a VCS organisation can start on the 'Your needs' section of the website that has a short or multiple choice assessment. The idea of the assessment is to find out where organisations are in terms of their activities and thinking so that they can better be directed to the information and support that is relevant to their particular needs. responses to the assessments bring up links to other sections of these pages that may assist in taking that area forward.

2. Resource pages
The resource pages cover a range of topics that you or clients may find useful including:

• Generating trading ideas
• Charities and trading
• Financing your idea
• Being an entrepreneur

Each section includes some or all of the following:

• Quick pointers and tips
• Links to other websites
• Links to publications to download
• Links to information sheets
• Links to worksheets for you to complete
• Sources of further advice and support

This information should give you some ideas and useful information.

3. Case studies
It can often be very useful to find out what other organisations have done to give ideas, to give lessons learnt and also to encourage you to think about how they actually achieved what they did that may help a client. We have included 20 local case studies on these pages. Each case study picks up one or two major themes related to their story, for example, ‘selling to the public sector’ or ‘the importance of the entrepreneur’.

If you look at the case studies you will see that there are links within these to related information on these pages and elsewhere. We are also planning to include links to podcasts and videos that may give more of an idea of the organisation and a more in depth explanation of how they have done what they have.

We hope that you find them useful.

4 Directory of support
There is a lot of support out there. It is just a question of finding out who can best provide support for you at this time. The directory includes a list of some providers of support including those that provide a free or partly free service and those that will charge for advice. If you know of other support that is not in here do let us know.

5 Glossary of terms
There are a lot of terms that are used in this area that you may not know. Look at the A-Z listing. Contact us if there is anything that is missing that we can add.

We hope that you find it useful and easy to use. Please do let us know what you think of it and if there are other links that you would recommend.