The 2015 State of the Sector survey has now closed.

Over the last four years, we have regularly surveyed our members and the wider voluntary sector working with people in contact with the Criminal Justice System.

Filling out our State of the Sector survey is a great opportunity for you to tell us your story; what successes or challenges is your organisation experiencing and how have you been able to respond? Are your service users showing increasingly complex, severe and multiple needs? Are you achieving full cost recovery on the contracts you are delivering?

Our latest State of the Sector survey is now open and we would really like to hear from you. The closing date is Friday 17th July 2015.

Please click here to complete the State of the Sector survey

Why is this so important?

Clinks’ mission is to support, represent and campaign for the voluntary sector working in criminal justice. For us to be able to do this effectively and really provide a voice for the sector to key decision makers, including the government, it is important that we have up to date information. One of the main ways that we collect this information from you is with our State of the Sector survey.

As the survey informs us of some of the existing and emerging challenges you and your service users are facing, the survey is also an important tool that we use to inform the support we provide to our members.

What did the last survey tell us?

In the last State of the sector report we found that:

• The needs of service users are increasing and becoming more complex.
• The sector continues to be diverse, with survey respondents ranging from small community based organisations that are completely volunteer led, to those with 2,000 members of staff.
• Volunteering remains vital for the sector, and volunteer recruitment is increasing.
• Many organisations are relying on their reserves putting them at risk of closure.

I wrote a blog summarising some of the main findings in the report, which you can access here.

Getting the most from your data

The Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion (CESI) worked with us on last year’s survey and we are delighted that they are continuing their support. CESI will be analysing the data we collect and have been providing us with invaluable advice to make sure the results we collect are more robust than ever before.

CESI’s support will further strengthen your voice by ensuring the data we collect is as representative as possible of the voluntary sector working in criminal justice.

The survey will take between 20-30 minutes to complete and you will need information about your organisation’s finances, staffing, number of beneficiaries and strategy to hand. Much of this can be found on the Charity Commission website.

So….what next?

During the next few weeks CESI will be keeping an eye on the responses we receive and some of the emerging trends from the survey that will inform an up-coming blog; we are also publishing a blog in which we will hear directly from one of our members about their experiences, so look out for those.

We anonymise all the results we collect from the survey and use them to write our State of the sector report that we are hoping to publish by the end of the year. The report will be a key tool that we will use to lobby and influence key decision makers, including the government, to make the case for the voluntary sector working in criminal justice.

You can get involved on Twitter by sharing your thoughts with us at @Clinks_tweets, and using the hashtag #stateofthesector

Here’s the link to our latest survey - I hope this blog has inspired you to fill it out!

Please click here to complete our State of the Sector survey