Capacity Building for Charities: Smarter Ways to Manage Time and Workload 

Capacity building for charities was the focus of Charity Recruit’s latest virtual boardroom, hosted by Emily and joined by Joanne Manville from The Indispensary. Joanne has spent over a decade supporting senior leaders across the public and private sectors and sits on the advisory board of the Society of Virtual Assistants. 

“It’s not a productivity failure. It’s not down to you as individuals. It is a structural issue.” 

Why Capacity Building for Charities Starts with Hidden Time Drains 

Joanne opened with a familiar scene: A board report due Thursday, an inbox full of unanswered emails and a team member waiting on a decision only the CEO can make. Her session focused on the everyday habits that quietly eat into a leader’s week. Admin and coordination often sit with the wrong person simply because no process exists to hand them elsewhere.  

Tasks get reinvented every time because nothing was ever written down and that missing documentation becomes a real risk when the one person holding it all in their head is away or leaves. Her advice was practical rather than theoretical. She has started using AI tools to draft standard operating procedures, turning a task that used to feel like an extra burden into something that takes minutes. 

Meetings and Governance That Actually Save Time 

Meetings came up early. Joanne changed her own calendar so appointments default to twenty minutes instead of thirty, building in breathing space between calls and one of her charity clients now insists on an agenda for every meeting, including one to ones. She also pointed to something smaller but just as costly – charities running on a founder’s personal email account, with no shared, governed system anyone else can access. 

Governance got the same treatment. Rather than everything landing on full board meetings, Joanne recommended task and finish groups with a clear start date, end date and set of terms of reference, plus a simple label on every board paper stating whether it is there for approval, discussion or information only. 

Delegation as Capacity Building for Charities in Practice 

Delegation was the thread running through most of the session.  

“You’re actually empowering somebody by delegating something to them. You’re showing them that you trust them,”  

Joanne said, pushing back on the guilt many leaders feel about handing work over. 

She shared a simple three column audit that any leader can run on their own week: 

• Tasks only you can do: Work that needs your specific expertise or position and genuinely cannot move to anyone else 

• Tasks that need your context: Work you can brief someone on once you have supplied the background, then step away from 

• Tasks that are fully delegatable: Repeatable, process driven work that a founder or CEO is often still doing purely out of habit 

Getting Recruitment and Flexible Staffing Right First Time 

Joanne backed this up with two client examples. One charity struggled to keep an executive assistant in post until the team mapped out exactly what the role needed to cover before recruiting again. Another faced a similar issue, needing someone confident enough to manage stakeholders ranging from local partners to Parliament. In both cases, understanding the role properly before hiring made the eventual recruitment stick. 

In Summary 

On fundraising, Joanne suggested building a bid library, a single folder holding every past bid, key organisational facts and pre-written answers of varying lengths, so applications stop starting from scratch each time. 

Attendees left with a clear message, which was capacity building for charities rarely needs new headcount, it usually starts with fixing the systems already in place.