Successfully navigating a restructure

04/25/25 • 26 min

Lucinda Rouse and Andy Ricketts are joined by Iain Heaton, deputy chief executive and chief financial officer at the Blue Cross, and Tiggy McCool, partner at the management consultancy Nine Feet Tall.

Iain describes how the Blue Cross implemented major changes to its animal rehoming services, starting with the closure of four rehoming centres in response to Covid-19-related financial pressures.

He recounts the charity’s subsequent adoption of a new pet foster model, which has reduced the overall cost per pet in spite of a budgetary uplift to pay for new specialist roles.

Tiggy explains the concept of organisational design and its use by the Blue Cross to improve service delivery. She stresses the importance of establishing communications principles at the beginning of the process to build the confidence of leaders and their teams.

They both provide their tips for managing a redundancy process.

Read Nine Feet Tall’s guide: The role of organisational design for charities, and Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile.

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Iain describes how the Blue Cross implemented major changes to its animal rehoming services, starting with the closure of four rehoming centres in response to Covid-19-related financial pressures.

He recounts the charity’s subsequent adoption of a new pet foster model, which has reduced the overall cost per pet in spite of a budgetary uplift to pay for new specialist roles.

They both provide their tips for managing a redundancy process.

Read Nine Feet Tall’s guide: The role of organisational design for charities, and Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile.

Tell us what you think of the Third Sector Podcast! Please take five minutes to let us know how we can bring you the most relevant, useful content. To fill in the survey, click here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

Self-care for overworked charity professionals

Lucinda Rouse and Emily Harle are joined by Claire Goodwin-Fee, chief executive of the psychological support organisation Frontline19, to consider the mental health challenges facing charity leaders.

They discuss recent research by Fair Collective, in which 85 per cent of participating small charity leaders said their mental health had been negatively affected by their work.

Claire describes her own experiences of burnout in Frontline19’s early days and shares some of the approaches she took to recover.

She suggests ways of separating professional and personal life in order to manage the stresses of a demanding charity role, and calls for the sector to come together to help solve some of the systemic problems.

Find details of accredited counsellors and therapists at the Counselling Directory.

For immediate mental health support, call Samaritans on 116 123 or visit the Samaritans website.

Tell us what you think of the Third Sector Podcast! Please take five minutes to let us know how we can bring you the most relevant, useful content. To fill in the survey, click here.

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Next Episode

Back to the basics of cost-effective programming

Lucinda Rouse and Dami Adewale are joined by Ben Williamson, director of recruitment at the incubator organisation Charity Entrepreneurship.

Ben outlines the different ways of modelling, tracking and evaluating the cost-effectiveness of direct delivery and systems change programmes.

He explains why it can pay off to apply the risk appetite of a start-up entrepreneur to voluntary sector initiatives, and potential ways of communicating failure to donors.

Tell us what you think of the Third Sector Podcast! Please take five minutes to let us know how we can bring you the most relevant, useful content. To fill in the survey, click here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.