Quality Assurance

The Community Matters vision is to provide a sustainable and effective “hub” of learning, support, advice and guidance, enabling local communities and organisations to grow and achieve through the provision of a high quality service.

Quality assurance is all about working out what an organisation is doing well and what could be improved.

The level of quality set is the standard that is agreed amongst the Directors, Trustees, Senior Managers and Stakeholders of your charity, voluntary or community group.

Benefits for community organisations adopting Quality Standards:

  • A recognised national standard
  • Provides a framework for development
  • Helps organisations to remain legally compliant
  • Provides evidence of the quality and breadth of your work
  • Gives confidence to existing funders and regulators
  • Can increase the motivation and satisfaction of staff and volunteers

Our Scheme

Having a quality assurance system in place helps you to run an organisation more effectively and efficiently. It enables management to plan, budget, allocate resources, and evaluate the degree to which you meet or exceed the quality standard set for the products, services or processes you provide.

There are two schemes we recommend that recognise best practice in community organisations:

Improving Quality

Improving Quality (IQ) is the quality scheme written to be used both as a self-assessment tool as well as external assessment. Its focus is on four key elements that all non-for-profit organisations need:

  • • Accountable – Good governance, leadership and management,
  • • Welcoming – Involving service users, managing and developing staff and volunteers, equality and diversity and working with others,
  • • Effective – refers to the services that an organisations provides and the planning, delivery, monitoring and evaluation that the organisations carries out,
  • • Sustainable – How the organisation manages, risk, money and the resources to make service delivery happen.

IQ is the only sectoral quality mark that covers the work of charities and other organisations: no other assurance award addresses all the essential areas necessary for the effective management and governance of a charity or other third sector organisation.

Details on the scheme are available here, or you can get in touch with our support team to discuss how we can help your organisation implement the IQ quality assurance system.

PreVISIBLE

PreVISIBLE is a simple and low-cost development tool which tests the management systems, policies and procedures that your organisation has in place. The pack asks you to identify the evidence you have to meet the criteria whilst making suggestions for the types of documents you should have.

The preVISIBLE Review is a desk-based assessment of your organisation’s compliance with the PreVISIBLE standard ensuring the organisation is fit for purpose and legally compliant.

Further information on the scheme is available here, or please get in touch for details on how we can support your organisation implement the PreVISIBLE quality assurance system.

Ready to dive in? Become a member today.

From just £25 per year you can subscribe to our services and get access to a knowledge bank of information as well as expert advice via email to support your organisation.

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