Guide to using these pages for VCS organisations
You may be a very small organisation who has done no trading at all or a larger one that is already selling many of your services.
You may have particular needs for information, for example, on business planning or public sector contracting. We hope that these pages offers some help and support for everyone.
1. An assessment
You can start on this page. Fill in the sections to see where you think your organisation is in terms of its activities or thinking. Once you have completed this, press enter and you will see a list of the areas of the website.
2 Resource pages
The resource pages cover a range of topics that you 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. You will probably want to talk to someone as well. For this look at the Directory of Support.
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 you. We have included 20 local case studies on this site. 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’.
You can search for these case studies by topic or area. You will also be signposted to the case studies that are appropriate to your needs if you go through the initial assessment.
If you look at the case studies you will see that there are links within these to related information on this website and elsewhere. We are also planning to include links to podcasts and videos that may give you more of an idea of the organisation and give 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.
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.