The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations is the membership organisation for Scotland's charities, voluntary organisations and social enterprises. Charity registered in Scotland SC003558. Registered office Caledonian Exchange, 19A Canning Street, Edinburgh EH3 8EG.
Wave Two Findings — Winter 2021/22
The initial findings from the second wave of the Scottish Third Sector Tracker are available here.
The findings suggested that most third sector organisations continued to face challenges in the face of the pandemic. However, there had been improvement in the sector’s ability to deliver services and/or planned programmes of work.
The headline findings suggested that disruption to service delivery was no longer one of the top 3 challenges for organisations. That had been replaced by issues with staffing and volunteers and difficulty in planning for the future. Unsurprisingly, financial challenges remained in the top 3, up from 47% in summer to 53% in winter 2021/22. Despite this, organisations’ reporting a decrease in turnover had fallen from 48% to 25%.
Demand for services had increased from 57% to 62%, as had organisation’s ability to meet this increase in demand – up from 71% to 83%.
Redundancies had dropped 7%, but recruitment of paid staff was also down from 37% to 29%. Volunteering numbers started to stabilise over the winter after a 36% drop over the summer.
Finally, most in the sector were relatively confident in their future – 92% were confident that they’ll still be operating in 12 months’ time, down from 97% in summer.