The charity sector is at a crossroads, particularly around finances and operations. The pace and scale of change your organisation needs will vary but standing still is not an option. Knowing how far to push, and how fast to move, is one of the hardest calls you’ll face. PwC’s Amy McEwan & Emily Beatty provide a practical framework to getting it right.
Legacy versus changemaker
Some organisations are holding firm to what they know: proven models, deep institutional knowledge, and tried-and-tested approaches. Others are embracing radical disruption, reimagining delivery models and rewriting the rules entirely. The temptation is to frame these as opposing camps. But the more useful lens for charity leaders is a spectrum and the real question is: where does your organisation sit – and what will it take to shift?
The stakes are real. Purpose alone won’t carry you through the next phase of evolution. To survive and succeed, you’ll need to translate mission into disciplined execution, make difficult trade-offs, and act with urgency. The cost of standing still is measurable. Lost impact. Eroded trust. Organisational fragility.
Two ends of the spectrum: Where would you place yourself?
Imagine a large, well-established charity with strong brand recognition and stable restricted funding streams. Its governance is thorough, its reporting exemplary, its reserves policy conservative. On paper, it’s well-positioned to invest in change. In practice, its decision-making culture means any new initiative needs sign-off from multiple committees across a cycle that can take six months. By the time approval is granted, the funding window has closed or the need has shifted. The issue isn’t a lack of resources or intent. It’s a cultural operating model built for stewardship, not adaptation — and no one’s ever named that explicitly.
Now picture a smaller, mission-driven charity operating with a lean team and tight margins. It pivots constantly responding to new needs, chasing emerging funding opportunities, experimenting with delivery. Its agility is real. But so is its fragility. Each pivot consumes management attention and erodes reserves incrementally. Nothing sticks long enough to demonstrate impact at the level funders increasingly demand. The issue isn’t lack of ambition. It’s innovation without the financial scaffolding to evaluate, sustain, or scale what works.
Culture, not just size.
It’s tempting to assume large charities are the legacy-keepers and smaller ones the agile disruptors. A large organisation can operate in highly entrepreneurial, autonomous teams. And a small charity with a strong command-and-control culture may be just as resistant to change as any large institution.
What matters more is cultural mindset and understanding it honestly. Well-established thinking on the informal organisational psychology offers a practical approach: rather than attempting wholesale culture change, identify the critical few behaviours that define how your organisation actually operates and design your change to work with those traits, not against them. This isn't about waiting for the culture to be ready. It's about designing change that moves with the culture you have.
Key dimensions to map are:
- Change history - is the organisation change-fatigued, or has it never meaningfully changed at all? An organisation that has weathered repeated restructuring through individual heroics will rally in a crisis but may struggle with planned, proactive transformation. Change needs to be framed around mission urgency, not abstract modernisation.
- Decision-making culture - is accountability clear, or diffused in ways that allow action to stall? In strongly process-driven cultures, innovation requires permission that the system is not designed to grant quickly. Change here needs structured boundaries: ring-fenced pilots, defined evaluation criteria, explicit go/no-go decision points.
- Digital and technology readiness - not just infrastructure, but genuine appetite and capability for doing things differently. If your organisation adopted a new finance system three years ago and teams are still using workarounds in spreadsheets, that tells you something about technology readiness that no IT audit will.
- Capability and capacity - do teams have the skills and bandwidth to sustain transformation? Change that lands on already-stretched teams without additional resource isn't transformation. It's overload — and it will be quietly deprioritised.
None of these traits are inherently good or bad. They're your raw materials. Trying to turn a compliance-driven organisation into an agile one is expensive and usually futile. But designing change that works within a compliance-driven culture - structured experimentation with clear guardrails - will be highly effective.
What are you actually solving for?
Before choosing how to change, you need to be clear about what you're solving for. Your north star is maximising impact relative to available resource; connecting every spending decision back to mission outcomes.
One of the sector's most damaging patterns is prioritising spend risk over opportunity risk: intense scrutiny on costs, with far less attention on the cost of delay, under-investment, or inaction. As a finance leader, you're uniquely placed to rebalance this. Be the voice in the room that asks, 'what's the cost of not doing this?' That question matters just as much as rigorous budget management. That question matters just as much as rigorous budget management. Reframing that role is one of the highest leverage shifts you can make.
There's a salient point here. You already hold much of the evidence needed to diagnose your organisation's readiness for change - you've just never framed it that way. Spending patterns reveal where the organisation's priorities really sit, as opposed to its stated ones. Persistent budget variances tell you where emotional energy and informal commitment flow, and where they don't. Approval bottlenecks reveal where the informal organisation is resisting what the formal organisation has sanctioned. A programme budget that is consistently underspent might be a sign that the organisation has approved something it has no cultural intention of delivering rather than a sign of good financial management.
None of this is financial management data. It’s cultural intelligence. Bring it to the leadership table in those terms and you’ll fundamentally shift the conversation about what kind of change the organisation can genuinely absorb.
Three things to get right.
- Get crystal clear on what you're measuring. Every initiative should trace a direct line back to mission impact. If it doesn’t, challenge it – or cut it. Clarity on outcomes, not just activities, is what separates purposeful transformation from organisational noise.
- Be clear on your cultural starting point. Understand your organisation's relationship with authority, its risk appetite, and its history with change before deciding how fast or how boldly to move. Then design change to work with those traits, not against them.
- Thinkin ecosystems, not silos. Charities that collaborate - sharing capability, redefining their value exchange with commercial and statutory partners, avoiding duplication – will unlock far more impact than those going it alone. Stop approaching partners transactionally, and start asking: what are we uniquely positioned to offer?
The charities that thrive won’t be those that changed the most dramatically, or those that held their nerve the longest. They’ll be the ones whose finance leaders asked the uncomfortable questions first. What are we solving for? Does our culture support the change we say we want? Are we honest about the gap between the two?
Change isn’t the hard part. Making it stick is. And that starts with clarity, not courage.