“the cost of good

management may
be high…but the
cost of insufficient
management is far,
far higher”
Glen Ford, Trustee

Aegis Trust
Mission Models Money exemplar case study
The Mission Models Money exemplar case studies

The largest strand of MMM’s third phase has been a relationship with seven diverse arts and
cultural organisations, all of whom have been exemplars of radical change and new working
practice. Each in very different ways have seized the opportunity to respond to change and
complexity in their contemporary operating environment by refocusing and/or refreshing their
missions, exploring how they might develop their business model and reconsidering how they
might strengthen their financial capacity. These case studies explore each exemplar’s journey
during their year-long involvement with MMM from Spring 2006 to Spring 2007.

Aegis and the other exemplar projects are involved in activities that will continue to develop well
past their involvement with MMM. In working with the exemplars, MMM did not set out to
monitor and evaluate the projects in a restrictive fashion. Instead, a support structure and
evaluation methodology was developed that framed them as colleagues on the front-line,
laboratories for learning and for testing new ideas. With these principles in mind, each exemplar
enjoyed a range of interactions with MMM which included on an individual level – interviews,
bespoke support, and access to the wider MMM programme and on a collective level –
participation in the exemplar learning community developed through a series of checkpoint
meetings and advocacy events.

MMM has used its seven principal issues to form the basis of its enquiries across all its activities
in each of its seven programme strands. The two which are most addressed by this case study
are:

• Expanding financial capacity

• Developing new markets, building engagement and participation

Making changes to keep making a difference

In this exemplar case study, we follow the Aegis Trust as it makes a step-change from being a
small but remarkable family-led organisation, which created the first Holocaust Centre in the UK
into an established international institution with a global reach dedicated to the prevention of
genocide. It is often assumed that the organisation’s high profile ensures a steady financial
base. However, while Aegis’s programmes are well supported by a range of funders, this income
is restricted exclusively to programme activities rather than core costs. As a result, Trustees and
the Executive recognised the necessity to develop a more predictable and more reliable income
stream able to underpin these essential but often neglected core costs of the organisation.

In responding to this challenge, Aegis decided to develop its payroll giving and membership
schemes. Not only did this start to produce an unrestricted income stream, it had the additional
benefit of expanding the individual supporter base, enabling Aegis to increase the number of
people whom it can educate and influence about genocide; thereby strengthening the foundation
both for stability and for growth.

Aegis Trust: MMM exemplar case study 2

The structure of this case study

This MMM exemplar case study uses two frameworks to tell the Aegis Trust’s story: the classic
mythical story structure of the hero’s journey and the three M’s.

The hero’s journey

The hero’s journey is a phrase based upon ideas from the comparative mythologist Joseph
Campbell. It is a metaphor for transformation. Taking the models outlined in Campbell’s Hero
with a Thousand Faces (1946) as the archetype, the basic cycle of transformation is represented
as:

The call to action The trials Wise advisors The prizes The return

From the initial call to action that embarks us on the journey of the project to the return to our
communities at the completion of the MMM process, this is a familiar yet effective narrative
structure that provides a powerful container for the exemplar’s stories. It should however
always be remembered that these are rarely linear journeys but are instead cycles of experience
and of learning

MMM: the iron triangle

As explained in Linking Mission and Money: an introduction

Mission to non-profit capitalization, (Nonprofit Finance Fund (NFF)
2001), all not for profit, and especially those going through
any major change project require a balance between
mission/programmes, models/organisational capacity and
money/financial capacity.

The NFF terms this interdependent relationship “the iron

triangle” where any change in one of those three elements
inevitably has an impact on the other two.
Models Money
Recognising how essential this holistic approach is to the
sustainability of not for profit arts & cultural organisations
in today’s ever changing environment, the MMM took the
inspiration for its name from this triangle.

The terms mission, models and money will be used throughout this case study to illustrate how
attention to each and the interdependence of all three will enable holistic development of
organisational and financial sustainability.

Mission: the non-negotiable core purpose of your organisation

Models: your legal structure, business model and organisational capacity

Money: your financial capacity – your assets: cash, working capital, reserves, debtors,
fixed assets and your liabilities: short and long term debt

Aegis Trust: MMM exemplar case study 3

What you should know about the Aegis Trust before reading on…

• The Aegis Trust was incorporated in 2000 as a charity whose mission is to

campaign for the prevention of genocide.
• The formation of the Aegis Trust was preceded by the creation of the Holocaust
Centre in 1995 by Drs Stephen and James Smith, which continues to act as a
centre for memorial and education. The centre legally exists as a separate charity
to the Aegis Trust.
• The Aegis Trust is made up of four overall divisions: the Holocaust Centre, Aegis
Rwanda, Policy & Campaigning and Fundraising & Communications.
• The Aegis Trust has 24 FTE (full time employees) equivalent in the UK and 31 in
Rwanda
• Current turnover of The Aegis trust in the UK is £1.2m and in Rwanda, its Sterling
equivalent is approximately £0.4m
• MMM’s chief contacts for this project have been Trustee Glen Ford, Mike Caro,
Chief Finance Officer, and Mike Saunders who held a short-term contract
position as Chief Operating Officer for much of the duration of the study.

www.aegistrust.org.uk

www.missionmodelsmoney.org.uk

Aegis Trust: MMM exemplar case study 4

 The Global Day for Darfur demonstration in London, organised by Aegis Trust, involving survivors and Aegis members

The call to action

.
The call to action The trials Wise advisors The prizes The return

What is it that makes us want to embark on our journeys of change and of transformation? Are
we forced to by circumstance, invited by those around us or do we just have a feeling that
evolution and innovation is the only road possible to take?

WE LIVE IN A WORLD OF WHICH WE MIGHT DESPAIR. A WORLD WHEREIN TERMS

LIKE FREEDOM, INNOCENCE, LOVE, CARE, HOPE, PEACE AND GOODNESS ARE IN
THE VOCABULARY OF ALL, BUT NOT IN THE EXPERIENCE OF ENOUGH. SOMEHOW
WE HAVE TO LIVE IN THIS WORLD. SOMEHOW WE MUST MAKE IT WORK.

Stephen Smith, World Holocaust Day, 2000

The Aegis Trust is a relatively new organisation, born out of the passion and commitment of its
founders, Drs Stephen and James Smith and their experience of founding The Holocaust Centre.
Understanding the dangers of over relying on their energy to enable the organisations’
sustainability and growth, Trustees and Executives recognised that they needed to find solutions
to three broad challenges:

• Developing financial sustainability

• Effectively communicating with multiple stakeholders across different continents
• Developing organisational sustainability and managing growth

Aegis Trust: MMM exemplar case study 5

Financial Sustainability. Historically, the organisation has had a hand-to-mouth existence,
relying on project based funding to deliver its mission. This reliance on one-off project grants
secured through fundraising has created an unpredictable environment which is not fully
conducive to supporting growth or developing sustainability.

Like many organisations, Aegis have on occasion been over-extended through becoming involved
in a large range of projects and programmes. Recognising the impact that such extension can
have on the wider organisation, the trust’s executives now have put in place strong protocols on
deciding which fundraising opportunities to follow so as to ensure that they are as compatible as
possible not only with their capacity but also their mission.

Ability to communicate effectively with multiple stakeholders. Aegis’ distinct areas of

activity across education, campaigning, research and fundraising means that it has attracted a
diverse group of stakeholders who respond to communication approaches in different ways.
Added to this, contact information on the thousands of supporters who have visited the
Holocaust Centre over the past ten years has not been collected as the Trust has lacked effective
mechanisms to do so. Reflecting on both these very different challenges, Aegis realised that
they needed to draw up a more sophisticated communications strategy in order to communicate
more effectively across stakeholder groups raising awareness of all their activities and the
benefits all parties derive from them.

Organisational sustainability and the challenge of growth. As a maturing, growing

organisation, with an ambitious mission, Aegis needs to build its organisational capacity and
grow out of its reliance on its founders and at the same time grow its financial base. How can the
internal management practices and organisational behaviours be developed to enable this to
happen?

The first two of these challenges will be addressed through the development of the payroll-giving
and membership schemes, while to address the third, Aegis appointed Mike Saunders in an
interim management role, who brought with him a wealth of management experience from the
private sector.

The attractiveness and potential of payroll-giving. Payroll giving is one of the most tax
efficient ways of giving to the causes of our choice. Gifts made through Payroll Giving are
deducted from the donor’s pre-tax income, so unlike Gift Aid, the donor receives the full benefit
of the tax relief. A basic rate tax payer who make a payroll gift of £100, for example, reduces his
taxable income by £22 and the charity receives the full £100. Often the employer company will
also make a match contribution for a period too. In Aegis’ case, one particular government grant
and one of their major funders, the Pears Foundation, offer additional contributions. Membership
schemes also have similar benefits but have the additional costs of servicing the members
through regular communications and other means.

Aegis Trust: MMM exemplar case study 6

The trials

The call to action The trials Wise advisors The prizes The return

Selling payroll-giving. Despite the attractiveness of this form of tax effective giving Aegis’s
research and experience bore out recent national research and showed that:

Despite the fact that payroll giving has been in operation in the UK since the late 1980s it has
not developed a strong take-up, with only 2% of employees enrolled. This compares to a much
higher rate in the US of 35%.

One of the main causes is that each payroll giving relationship requires the co-operation of three
parties, Aegis, the giver and the giver’s employer. Additionally, the employer will often have to
use a third party payroll-giving agency to facilitate the process if it does not have one already in
place.

“THE GOVERNMENT NEED TO PROMOTE PAYROLL GIVING AS A VERY TAX

EFFICIENT WAY TO GIVE MONEY TO CHARITY AND THEREBY INCREASE
AWARENESS AND UNDERSTANDING”

Mike Caro, Financial Controller

Another significant barrier is getting good leads into companies that are prepared to work with
Aegis to get the payroll giving established. There are many passive partners who will not do
anything to prevent establishment but very few who are prepared to be proactive.

A further important factor relates to the reciprocal exchange between the organisation and the
individual donor. In a payroll-giving relationship the legal restrictions are such that the recipient
is not able to provide any benefits over and above ensuring that the donor knows that their
money is going towards an important cause in a very tax-efficient way. On the other hand,
membership, while less tax efficient, allows the donor to receive more in the way of benefits and
therefore is often the more attractive of the two options.

Resourcing the project. In common with many overstretched undercapitalised organisations,

the project was initially undertaken by existing staff with existing roles and responsibilities.
However, the Trust soon understood the labour intensive, specialised nature of the task which
required an ability to sell which not everyone is either comfortable or capable of performing. In
response a dedicated staff resource was found from their wider volunteer group.

For more information on payroll-giving visit:

• www.institute-of-fundraising.org.uk
• www.payrollgivinggrants.co.uk
• www.workplacegiving-uk.com
• www.payrollgiving.co.uk
• www.hmrc.gov.uk/payrollgiving

Aegis Trust: MMM exemplar case study 7

Wise advisors

.
The call to action The trials Wise advisors The prizes The return

In the course of the journey of innovation, there are often many people that guide us on our way
and through our times of trouble. Sometimes they are not people but incidents, episodes that
teach us and inform our practice.

Trial presentations to companies

This wise advisor came in the guise of an incident, a “eureka moment” during a trial
presentation on the benefits of payroll-giving for Aegis held at a large construction company
which resulted in a drastic change in approach of the payroll-giving presentation. Despite the
team’s cautious approach the actual feedback was that the presentations need to be more hard-
hitting and graphic. “People wanted to be deeply shocked. It was too soft”.

The session also gave the team an invaluable understanding that genocide can be very difficult
to understand given that the audience members had no experience of such occurrences of such
scale or terror. This therefore encouraged the team to help contextualise the work that Aegis
were doing through using more accessible and less provocative terms such as educate, support
and promote when explaining their activities.

Mike Saunders

CAN WE PLEASE SAVE THE WORLD BY NEXT WEEK

AS OPPOSED TO THIS AFTERNOON?

Mike Saunders to Dr James Smith

Mike Saunders was brought into an interim management position to help tackle the issues of
financial and organisational sustainability during 2006. Beginning with the resolution of an
outstanding property related issue, Mike’s main focus moved on to investigating the existing
management practices and planning for organisational change. Bringing a great deal of
experience from the private sector, Mike played the role of an advisor from the inside.

As an example of some of the work Mike drove, he helped separate and clarify the roles of
Trustees and senior executives and instituted new management processes to enable more
effective communication between the two groups.

Short package of Accenture pro bono support

Using MMM’s relationship with Accenture, an Accenture consultant was able to give a short period
of support to discuss the requirements Aegis had with regards their existing database of
individual givers. While there were initially issues around the expectations on both sides given
the scale of system that both parties were used to dealing with, the exercise allowed Aegis to
understand the issues they faced in developing their database and their data quality.

Aegis Trust: MMM exemplar case study 8

 The prizes

.
The call to action The trials Wise advisors The prizes The return

While all these exemplar journeys will not be completed during their involvement with MMM,
there are many prizes which have been collected so far.

Refreshing the mission. Given the interrelation of mission, models and money, along with the
work to boost core income and adjust internal governance and working practices, there was a
need to recognise how these changes affected Aegis’ mission. This analysis proved to be very
fruitful and what was generally found was that the previous mission was too wide and too easy
to influence. In addition, a great danger was recognised in that the higher profile international
Aegis activities were at times distracting the organisation from UK-based education work whose
great value had been recently demonstrated by a set of seminars held for the police which
received excellent feedback.

A recent example of the result of this activity has been an external request to secure some
funding from a European country’s government fund for campaigning work. In this case, an
assessment both of risk and relevance to mission in the short-term resulted in Aegis not
pursuing the opportunity thereby allowing it to focus on higher-priority objectives.

THE SHORT-TERM RECRUITMENT OF MIKE SAUNDERS FORCED US TO REAPPRAISE THE

OVERALL MANAGEMENT, AND CAUSED US TO QUESTION THE OVERALL STRUCTURE

Mike Caro, Financial Controller

A more structured approach to management. . While Mike Saunders has now moved on,
having completed his contract, this fundamental reappraisal has led the Trustees to the
conclusion that the Chief Executive’s position covers too much ground for one person, and have
therefore recruited a Managing Director to work alongside James Smith from May 2007.

Growth of the membership base. Given the lessons of the difficulties of payroll-giving, the
resource was duly diverted into the growth of the membership scheme. This has proved to be a
great success with membership income of over £700 a month from a standing start, increasing
at an average rate of £50 a month. While this figure may not appear startling, this represents a
current annualised income of £10,000, the equivalent income from an annuity of approximately
£150,000 - a figure which is increasing on a monthly basis. In contrast, notwithstanding the
focus and resource invested in development and testing of a payroll giving model, the resulting
£46 a month, has been most disappointing.

Financial lessons

For payroll-giving, the total investment in the project when considering time and expenses
was £15,600 with a return during the trial period of £288. The anticipated return going
forward is £46 per month with minimal growth. Therefore the scheme was considered not
to be a viable method of fundraising in the current climate of low general support and
awareness of payroll giving amongst businesses.

For memberships, the total investment was £12,450 with a total return during the period
of £2,400. The anticipated return going forward is £750 a month currently, growing at an
average £50 per month. Therefore the annualised value of the income stream is over
£10,000 and growing. Since there is a significant net cash benefit to the organisation,
AegisAegis
Trust: will
MMM continue
exemplartocase
pursue
studymemberships. 9
 The return

.
The call to action The trials Wise advisors The prizes The return

Now that the Aegis Trust have arrived at end of their time with MMM, what have been the
benefits, effects and inspirations of their involvement?

“Developing a sustainable organisation requires much more than a grant or some extra funding
to get over the next period of time. We have been working hard over the past few years to
establish Aegis as a new organisation, one that is dedicated to our core purpose to campaign for
the prevention of genocide and one that is also capable of sustaining itself. This is a tough
challenge. Aegis was not established with a large grant from the Government or elsewhere, it
was borne out of conviction to do something in a specific area where we felt a difference could be
made. For this conviction to have substance the organisation must be sustainable.

We have learnt that there are many aspects to achieving a self-sustaining organisation. It is not
just about money, although finance is key. These aspects are also the central themes within
MMM.

One area is mission – in practice this means there is a clear understanding of the boundaries of
the organisation and its main priorities. Insufficient clarity over mission and strategy make it
very difficult to define the organisation, and therefore difficult to channel resources and bring
onboard stakeholders – people want clarity over the purpose of the organisation and how it will
achieve this purpose. This is not about some lofty mission statement, but constantly reviewing
the scope of the organisation to ensure that it is focused on its mission. It is all too easy to get
diverted into other fields.

The other aspect is the generation of sustainable finance. Many charitable organisations spend a
large amount of time and resource on generating funds. This is secondary to the purpose of the
organisation but is critical to enable the purpose to be achieved. It is all too easy for these
activities to be sidelined, as the organisation is focused upon achieving its purpose. There is a
difference between resource that is expended on activities and resource that is used to create
more resource – one is an investment, with a return, and the other is an expense.

MMM has helped us to focus on two specific areas, that of membership and payroll giving. Payroll
giving has the potential of large amounts of income, aided by tax benefits, but we soon found
that the cost of overcoming inertia was too high for us. Also, there are tax related restrictions on
what can be provided by Aegis to givers, and this meant that it was difficult to encourage people
to join. Membership has been much more beneficial. We have been able to establish a modest
but growing membership, which generates regular income for Aegis and in return we can provide
benefits to the members. There is therefore an ongoing relationship that sustains the
membership and therefore the income.”

Aegis Trust: MMM exemplar case study 10

Mission, Models and Money

Now that we have come to the end of the Aegis Trust’s story with MMM, what has been the effect
of the project to date on the interdependent areas of mission, models and money?

The opportunity to build management capacity and

financial support for core costs will enable Aegis to
develop from a small family-led organisation to an
international institution with strong foundations, in
complete alignment with their mission.

Mission

Models Money

The development of an unrestricted and While the payroll-giving part of the

regular income stream will bolster the project offered disappointing financial
organisation’s business model whose returns, thanks to the support of MMM,
income is typically dominated by the development of the membership
programme-specific funding. scheme has been very encouraging with
significant growth. This is therefore a
strand which Aegis will strongly pursue
with the regular return expected to
continue to grow over the short and
medium terms.

Further resources related this story

Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell (1946)

Linking Mission and Money, Nonprofit Finance Fund (2001)
www.aegistrust.org.uk
www.missionmodelsmoney.org.uk

Aegis Trust: MMM exemplar case study 11