MBAs

Cranfield School of Management has offered an MBA for 45 years. Séan Rickard, the full time MBA director, is adamant that the business qualification is relevant for charity professionals.

“You do an MBA to learn how to manage people. The problems are nothing to do with the sector you’re in, profit or non-profit,” he says.

Dedicating a course to charity issues means less time is spent on management, finance and marketing, he says. “If you take a third of the course to concentrate on the voluntary sector, the corollary is that you end up with something pretty half-baked.”

A primary reason for doing an MBA is networking. Rickard argues that being among business students encourages the exchange of ideas. “It’s marvellous to have people with different values, it’s a much richer learning environment.”

In this respect, tailored courses are too narrow, he says, citing British Airways’ short-lived decision to run an MBA. “You end up talking about problems you’re all aware of [and] bringing up the same old solutions. It works very well for charity professionals to hear what goes on in other sectors of the economy.”

MBAs’ notoriously high fees may be off-putting: Cranfield charges £28,000. But each year the business school offers two scholarships for its executive (part time) MBA. Previous years have attracted around eight applicants.

Professor Stephen Lee, director of the Centre for Voluntary Sector Management at Henley Management College, is a former chief executive of the Institute of Fundraising and spent 20 years in the voluntary sector. He also advocates the MBA for charity professionals.

At Henley, core modules are typical MBA fare but case studies are drawn equally from public, private and voluntary sectors, to prepare managers to work across all three.

“The issues are exactly the same but in a different context,” Lee says. “We try to make our MBA relevant to the management challenges and opportunities in each of the three sectors.”

Around 10 per cent of Henley’s students come from a non-profit background. Lee feels the MBA brings them into closer contact with business. “Charity courses ghettoise non-profits. In trying to do something special for people they are marginalising them,” he says.

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MVAs

Professor Alexander Murdock might disagree. Five years ago London South Bank University launched the MVA as “an MBA for the voluntary sector”. Murdock was an MBA course director prior to joining LSBU and says the main purpose is the same. “The MVA picks up very much on management, finance, HR, marketing, and strategy,” he says.

But students can also expect a grounding in charity law and governance. Murdock believes a tailored course helps students cope with unique challenges facing the sector, such as precarious funding and organisational security.

“[Charities] are perpetually vulnerable,” he says. “The MVA provides charity managers with practical skills and knowledge.” Students come from organisations of all sizes, most employing around 10 or 20 people. Many are chief executives looking to grow their charities.

Trustees also benefit from the course, especially those who hail from the private sector, he says. “Though the trustees affect to know it, they are often fairly flaky on aspects of legal issues and governance.”

For chief executives in small charities the ability to get business acumen is especially important, he says. “Small charities say ‘we don’t need HR’, but charities appear in industrial tribunals [a lot more often than] you would expect.”

Designed with charities in mind, the MVA is priced at under £4,000 and does not include MBA extras such as a foreign study trip. Murdock does not feel that students lose out. “The MBA market has become heavily over-hyped. Even a ‘blue chip’ business school does not assure you of success.”

At Cass Business School, four masters’ programmes have sprung up alongside the MBA at the Centre for Charity Effectiveness. The most popular is in voluntary sector management, says Professor Paul Palmer, the course director. Others focus on marketing and fundraising, accounting and finance, and grant-making. But all share a common two thirds to encourage interdisciplinary working, Palmer says.

“Charity people tend to work in functions. We believe there is a common body of knowledge which all charity managers should have.”

The most striking departure from the traditional MBA is social policy, studied at both Cass and LSBU. At Cass, MBA tutors contextualise their teaching for the voluntary sector. “For example, tax carries complications around Gift Aid and VAT; governance is very different with an unpaid board of governors,” Palmer explains.

Student experiences

Sarah Illingworth, the director of search and selection at People Unlimited, a charity recruitment firm, had been a trustee for 15 years when she undertook the part-time MVA at LSBU to learn theory to underpin her experience. “I’d taken organisations through mergers and given advice on governance and structure. I learnt on the job, but it got to the point where I thought ‘am I doing this right?’”

The MVA was an intellectual tool, she says. “It gave me a formal structure for writing a business plan, for example, rather than relying on gut instinct”. As an MVA student she had the opportunity to write a charity-focused dissertation (Do voluntary trustee boards add value?). Making charity contacts should not be underestimated, she says. “It’s given me a great group of people to bounce ideas off of.”

Illingworth never considered the MBA. “I didn’t want to learn about investment banking – I needed to know SORP 2005, strategic management, how to make a balanced scorecard work when you can’t measure profit.” She admits questioning the value of a new qualification. “I did think, ‘no one’s heard of it’. But as a recruiter, CVs that are tailored to what people want to do are more powerful.”

Liz Neal, director of Mencap Cymru, has spent almost her entire career in the voluntary sector. She chose the Cranfield MBA to expose herself to a different way of thinking. “Each sector has a set of assumptions that rule our decisions and our behaviour. I wanted to step outside and see it through other people’s eyes.”

With issues such as corporate social responsibility and private sector alliances ever more prevalent, Neal felt that a business qualification would enable her to talk to those on the other side. Most of her staff are employed through services contracts with the public sector. “I thought that if I were going to have a career in the voluntary sector then I needed to understand what people from other sectors expect,” she says.

Getting to grips with the language of business was not easy, but things that seemed least relevant turned out to hold the greatest scope for innovation. “We only talk about full cost recovery, but looking at other pricing models was really interesting.”

She recalls some of the reactions from MBA classmates. “Some people said ‘I don’t believe in charities, the government should do it. Others were amazed – they had no idea of the complexity of what we do.” Nevertheless, she cites the opportunity to influence business colleagues as an enjoyable part of the experience.

Paradoxically, Neal finished her MBA more charity oriented than before. “Now I know absolutely why I’m in the sector, that my value base is what motivates me. The challenge and complexity is why I’m here,” she says.

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