The sun is shining and it's a lovely autumn day at the BBC's impressive head office in west London, where every available bit of space, it seems, is festooned with a familiar image of a bear with a patch over one eye.
David Ramsden
The charity Children in Need has become part of the country's landscape at this time of year. This year's event, Friday 20 November 2009, marks the 30th annual appeal by the charity and David Ramsden, the charity's chief executive since 2006, acknowledges that some people in this country have known the great fundraising drive for the whole of their lives. So is there a danger of the whole shebang becoming irrelevant?
Not according to Ramsden. "The single most important achievement of my career is to maintain the relevance of Children in Need," he comments. "Relevance in terms of us being a vehicle to galvanise fundraising in businesses and schools across the country and relevance in terms of funding the right projects that make a difference."
Ramsden has been with the charity since 2000, when he become the director of finance and operations. He took over as interim chief executive in 2006 and was confirmed in the post a few months later.
A qualified accountant, he admits that people tend to see him as a technocrat rather than an enthusiast - but in fact, he has a passion for jobs with a social purposes.
"My first job was as a research assistant for an MP, but I realised I didn't want to simply pursue a career on the political ladder," he explains. "I decided to get a profession so in the heart of the last recession, I qualified as a chartered accountant.
That gave me solid professional background." Professional qualifications safely under his belt, Ramsden then joined the British Red Cross, before moving to Children in Need.
"I was coming from an environment at the Red Cross which is a very large organisation. That makes it hard to make significant change in a personal capacity of the direction of the organisation," he comments.
In contrast, although Children in Need is a "massive organisation", backed by the power of the BBC, Ramsden says at its heart is a team of just a few dozen people, able to determine the future direction for the charity. Having that agility of a small organisation with the firepower of a large organisation is just fantastic," he says.
Ramsden says everyone in that central team - "all of us in the cockpit" - are modest about their individual contributions to the charity, and acknowledge the huge efforts made by individual fundraising teams around the country.
"But it is a fact that at the tail end of the 1990s, funds had fallen and around 2000 there was some sense that telethons and the model had had its day and 20 years was enough," he says.
But since then, the profile of the charity has risen. "We have had more than doubled our income over the last decade and an audience of more than 11 million watch the show.
The fact that last year Children in Need raised its highest amount ever is something to be very proud of and the public should be very proud of that," he says.
"There is now a lot of energy around what we can do to increase our fundraising further and get even better at working in partnership with other organisations. Because we are very clear that we are not a campaigning or lobbying organisation We can continue to do a better job of highlighting the issues that disadvantaged people are struggling with."
The challenge of running the organisation is felt most strongly by Ramsden just before each year's annual event.
"We go back to the public every year and we open our books on the first of October with a bank account of zero. The challenge for me is each year to engage both with our heritage, so people understand yes it is Children in Need, but also do enough to enthuse people, so we can again raise a lot of money."
Children in Need employs 70 people, most of whom are grant-makers and grant managers, identifying projects and assessing applications for funding. At any one time, the charity supports some 2,000 UK projects and it is the largest dedicated funder of grants for children and young people in the UK.
Ramsden emphasises the need for the charity to work alongside those providing public services, either through statutory services or the voluntary sector, to complement existing provision. "By being non-prescriptive, we have been able to respond to need as it manifests itself," he explains. "We don't sit there at the start of the year and say these are our main priorities for the next four years. We leave it to our applicants to highlight the issues we need to address."
A change to the pattern
But some change to this pattern has now been introduced. In the past 18 months, the charity has launched two discrete proactive programmes, one looking at innovative ways of young people not in education, employment or training.
"We've funded five projects with a substantial amount of money and we're working with those five projects to share learnings between them - they're all in different parts of the UK. and we want to be able to come out of that three-year cycle of funding and say well this is some interesting learning and pass it on to policy-makers."
The second new programme is Fun and Friendship, which is about meeting the friendship and social networking needs of young people with disability. "Again we want to see that as a programme where we've galvanised people to talk to each other and learn," says Ramsden.
These programmes are, and will remain only a small proportion of the work of the charity. "It is vital that we remain a responsive grantmaker. But we do recognise though that over the years we've been doing this, we've been accumulating a lot of organisational knowledge. We see a lot of things that pass over our desks and to be simply in a responsive mode is a missed opportunity. So on a targeted basis we think it is appropriate for us to do more proactive work but it will be at a level that we feel is not such that it changes the character of our organisation."
And what will he be doing this Friday night? "On the night I will be at BBC Television Centre monitoring the calls and the money and most importantly thanking our fundraisers and supporters."
From Bubb's Blog
From Whitehall Watch
