Financial Excellence

The Royal Osteoporosis Society has restructured its financial model to overcome the challenges posed by lumpy legacy income to financial planning and sustainable growth. The new financial strategy aligns core costs of the charity with a legacy threshold based on a five-year rolling average of legacy income. Over-performance against the threshold then builds a Strategic Investment Reserve which can be invested in time-limited growth initiatives. Strategic investments to date include a prevention advertising campaign which secured an early diagnosis for over 9,000 people, and a fundraising campaign that attracted 400 new regular givers. The latter effectively converts lumpy legacy income to an annuity that can underwrite the growth of the core charity.

The new financial model has embedded a period of stability and growth since 2020, overcoming a historic tendency towards boom and bust cycles. The new financial strategy has had welcome downstream effects on morale and performance. A good example of the cultural impact is the competitive system of small internal grants (£1k-£3k) we’ve made available to team members to test their proposals for innovation projects. This system has played an important role in our employee engagement score of 92%.