What we learnt from a year of listening to the people behind the mission

Education and youth charities are powered by people who could earn more elsewhere and choose this work because they care. Yet most of these organisations have little consistent insight into how those people are actually doing, and the tools they reach for are usually borrowed from the corporate market. Those tools ask about what matters in a commercial setting and miss much of what shapes working life in a charity: mission connection, funding insecurity, small teams carrying wide remits, and the pressure of delivering for beneficiaries on tight budgets.

People Behind the Mission set out to address that. Over the past year, ten education and youth organisations ran a staff engagement survey built for our sector and shared their data to create the first benchmark of its kind. Here is what we learnt.

Engagement is high, anchored around mission and relationships

Across the cohort, overall engagement sat at eight out of ten. The strongest scores were about pride in the organisation, connection to the mission, and trust in the line manager. This is a real strength. It is also a risk, because if goodwill dips and underlying challenges around workload and systems challenges have not been addressed, this opens up retention risks.

The shared weaknesses are practical, and mostly within reach

The lowest scores in the whole survey were not about pay or purpose. They were about back-office systems and technology, the time to use development opportunities rather than their availability, and whether workload is sustainable. Systems and technology drew more staff comments than any other subject. Unlike pay or funding, these are largely within a leadership team's control, which makes them the clearest shared agenda in the data.

The Executive view is usually stronger than that of the rest of the team

Executives scored well above nine out of ten; the staff closest to delivery scored under eight. This gap is invisible in an organisation-wide average but is important to consider when segmenting the data. It is no surprise that Executives are aligned to the organisations they lead, but looking at dynamics underneath the Executive level can lead to the most actionable insights.

Averages hide more than they show

Two organisations with the same average score can face entirely different situations, which is why we use the APC (Advocates, Passives, Challengers) methodology through People Behind the Mission to analyse in great depth. Those two organisations with the same average score when compared to the cohort as a whole could have one with a broad range of engagement and another with a pocket of disengagement in a single team. Robust and interrogative analysis helps organisations to better understand the picture.

Help us build the benchmark

These are emerging findings from a pilot, not a definitive study, and they get stronger with every organisation that joins. People Behind the Mission runs twice a year, in November and May. If you lead an education or youth organisation and want to understand your own people better, and to help build the sector's first shared benchmark, please contact holly.waddell@impactedgroup.uk to speak to Holly who is leading this project and would love to hear from you.

You can read the full report here.