DSC Governance App helps its 6,000th trustee!

How successful is DSC’s Governance App? Well, before we could celebrate hitting 5,000 trustees using our free assessment tool to review and improve their governance, we’ve crossed the 6,000 mark! 

In case you’ve missed it, the Governance App is a free online tool for charity boards to assess their governance. What makes it unique is that the whole board (and executive if you want) score the board’s performance against seven sets of ten statements, all rooted in the Charity Governance Code.  

The really neat bit though, is that as well as getting your free report with all of your average scores, areas of highest performance and areas to work on, you get a breakdown of the governance areas where trustees had the biggest difference in opinion.  

For us that’s so crucial to being able to target any interventions or actions in the right place, and have really high quality and focused conversations as a board about improving your governance. If you just look at the average scores applied to a statement like “Our committees have suitable terms of reference and membership”, eight high scores from the most confident and aware trustees might mask the low scores from two lower scores from trustees that either engage less with sub-committees, or simply don’t remember. These things will show up easily, give you a clear action (review and rebrief the committee terms of reference in this case), and just like that your governance is a little bit stronger – which will show up in your next review.  

The other really exciting thing is that the anonymised responses enable us to build a picture of what governance in the sector looks like, where boards are doing really well, and where they are struggling. The last report we wrote on that is available for free here: Directory of Social Change – The Governance App Report. 

So if you’re thinking about how best to tackle any challenges, or just carry out a simple, free and easy to use review, check out the Governance App here. And if you think you might need a bit of extra help, either with the review itself or some expert facilitation to work through the results and what to do next, we can help with that, just check out our Guided Governance Review packages here.