We are delighted to announce the launch of our new and updated online toolkit to help charities, voluntary and community groups with records management. Record keeping is an important but often overlooked part of running a voluntary organisation. It is vital for good governance and necessary for complying with the wide range of regulations that apply to charities in England and Wales.

The toolkit is aimed at anyone with responsibility for records in a voluntary or community organisation. It includes:

• A self assessment questionnaire to help you find out how you are doing at record keeping
• A colour coded assessment of existing practice and the actions you need to take for improvement
• Resources and guidance for implementing your improvement plan
• Handy tables to help you identify relevant records, regulation and issues where records management can help your charity

Good record keeping can provide evidence of how an organisation has made decisions over time, thereby demonstrating good governance. It can make day-to-day work more efficient and make it easier to show the impact of an organisation. In addition to showing compliance with key regulations, good record keeping can also build trust with donors, funders, regulators, the public and other stakeholders. 

We have designed this toolkit because many organisations, especially small and medium sized ones, may find it hard to know quite what the state of their records is. There is a lack of advice, training and knowledge about record keeping and a bewildering array of different regulatory requirements.  The toolkit does not assume that you can immediately put in place a perfect system for managing records and information. Instead, it offers you some tools and guidance to help you continually improve your practices, policies and processes

You can access the toolkit via this link: toolkit.voluntarysectorarchives.org.uk

The toolkit was originally developed in partnership with  support of Charity Finance Group and funded by a UCL Public Policy small grant. We welcome feedback and suggestions in our attempts to further refine the toolkit. Please get in touch via our contact us page.