Festival of Trusteeship Blog: Panel & attendee trustee resources

Top tips and resouces for trustees recommended by panellists and attendees at teh Festival of Trusteeship 2025.

This blog by Eastside People Consultant (and charity trustee) Fiona McAuslan rounds up the plethora of resources, articles and tips shared by the trustee hive mind throughout the Festival of Trusteeship 2025.

Audience participation and engagement was huge at the Festival of Trusteeship 2025. One outstanding feature was the generosity of all trustees present, not only the experts speaking on the panels but also the many attendees who shared their expertise and favourite resources in the very busy Zoom chats. Thank you to all who shared.

Guidance for Trustees

Several of these guides are the creation of our brilliant Festival partners. All are invaluable resources for trustees on a question to improve their boards.

1. Association of Chairs: A new guide to equip chairs and boards to focus on equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI)
2. Board Racial Diversity UK: From Here to Diversity A practical guide for recruiting Black and Asian Charity Trustees
3. Reach: Trustee Recruitment Cycle: Guidance, tools and tips to help you recruit trustees and diversify your board
4. Eastside People: Charity merger guide: Everything you need to know about merging a charity in seven articles that cover the practical and technical aspects of mergers
5. Julia Unwin: The Five Ss of Governance: Julia Unwin’s document is ten years old next year and still the gold standard in what matters in governance
6. Charity Governance Code 2025: Published the same week as the Festival of Trusteeship, the updated Charity Governance code sets out universal principles of governance for charities to consider and helps to shape a common view of what good looks like.

Reports and articles for trustees

1. National Governance Association: Taking stock of governance workload research: NGA is the national membership association for governors, trustees and governance professionals in England’s state schools and trusts, they monitor and report on governor and trustee workloads
2. Charity Commission for England and Wales: Trusteeship – a positive opportunity: understanding skills, experience and demographics in England and Wales
3. Reach Volunteering: diversifying governance through shadowing programmes: This resource summarises the learning of five organisations running Board shadowing programmes: Smallwood Trust, John Ellerman Foundation, Charity Bank, University of Durham, Board Racial Diversity
4. Eastside People’s Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Survey looks at what representatives from UK charities and not-for-profit organisations said about their organisational environmental impact, social relationships & governance
5. Charity Finance Group: Charity board effectiveness: Why trustee motives matter more than CVs
6. Kaleidoscope Health and Care: Rethinking strategy development Why do strategies end up collecting dust on a lonely shelf? Rich Taunt blames a failure to understand why change fails, and explains that how a strategy is developed is just as important as the end product
7. The Artificial Intelligence Playbook for the UK Government: The AI Playbook is an important element of the government’s bigger goal of putting AI to good use – making things run better, encouraging fresh thinking, reducing the time spent on repetitive tasks, and giving the economy a boost
8. Association of Charitable Foundations (ACF): Trustee demographics in grant making trusts and foundations
9. Eastside People Charity Merger research: The Good Merger Index, annual research and review of charity mergers
10. Looking to diversify your board members? Read our Top tips and best practices for trustee recruitment from Eastside People.

Strategic frameworks for charity trustees

Our session on Strategy that Sticks was one of the most directive. Three clear takeaways were:

1. Strategy must be both focused and adaptive
2. The strategy development process is as important as the final document
3. Governance and implementation need ongoing attention

These brilliant frameworks support those goals:

1. The Design Council’s Double Diamond. This visual representation of the design and innovation process is a simple way to describe the steps taken in any design and innovation project, irrespective of methods and tools used
2. De Bono Group: Six Thinking Hats: Six Thinking Hats is a simple, effective parallel thinking process that helps people be more productive, focused, and mindfully involved
3. Participation People: Youth engagement feedback loop: This form camn be completed as part of a youth programme or workshop to review/share/design/test a product/resource/training approach to make it more useful, inclusive, and relevant to BAME and SEND young people
4. Hanlon’s Razor: This heuristic reasoning tool is very useful in framing challenge and disagreement between board members.

Training and courses

Many festival-goers were keen for more online training and community. Here’s an option from our Festival speakers.

1. The Confident Trustee Series: Festival speakers Claris D’cruz  and Fran Borg-Wheeler deliver this invaluable resource for new and existing trustees wanting to skill up

Follow Eastside People for more updates and tips

If you’d like to keep up with the latest news, insights, events and webinars for charities and not-for-profit organisations you can follow Eastside People on LinkedIn.

Keep track of our latest board vacancies here.