April, 23, 2025 | Mike Rowlands | Non-profit | Strategy

Supportive Operations: A Key Capability of Transformational Charities

Program delivery. Community engagement. Project management. IT. Logistics. These are the tools and techniques of charity operations. In the Transformational Charity, these combine in an almost alchemical integration that drives inspiring high performance.

Mike Rowlands
Partner and CEO of Junxion, Mike has spent more than 20 years working to catalyse social responsibility and sustainability.

Strip any organization down to its simplest essence, and you’ll find that fundraising and operations are the heart and lungs of any charity. Fundraising pays for staff and supplies; operations deliver projects and programming. And in the Transformational Charity, operations liberate strategic agility, organizational culture, and community engagement.

Junxion’s Transformational Charity Framework sets out a range of operational structures and performance standards for contemporary charities. At the centre of the framework are five ‘Key Capabilities’ that guide the Transformational Charity to be more resilient and impactful. We wrote about Empowering Leadership in a previous post. The second Key Capability is Supportive Operations.

Pullquote: The charities that stand the test of time deliver impact efficiently, effectively, and consistently.

Sustainably effective organizations—the ones that we admire because they stand the test of time—align their operations to support impact delivery efficiently, effectively, and consistently.

But they don’t stop there: they also enhance organizational culture, promote good governance, and smack of the authenticity that only comes from a consistent, enduring, values-based approach to community engagement.

Authenticity comes from a consistent, enduring, values-based approach

Design Systems to Pursue the Mission

It’s easy to think of operational systems as boring, bureaucratic, back office stuff—like the basics of financial controls and data security. Program-driven leaders often want this stuff out of the way, so they can focus on constituents… but that has it a little upside-down: the right systems and processes can liberate capacity and enhance program delivery. Put another way, policies and procedures can be a change-maker’s best friends!

With the right rhythms and systems in place, the Transformational Charity enhances its ability to learn on the fly, respond to changing circumstances, and maintain its integrity. Better yet, by integrating operational and impact imperatives into key performance indicators or OKRs (Objectives & Key Results), they ensure stakeholder- or constituent-centricity through all their plans, decisions, and evaluations.

One shining example that we’ve had the privilege to support is Covenant House (link to our case study). Their work with highly vulnerable youth requires the highest possible levels of security, and their commitment to leading practices in constituent relations and security has shifted the way the organization thinks about all its operations. Rarely have we worked with such an exceptionally well-operated organization.

Prioritize Employees’ Experience

In any organization, employee engagement is a vital priority. In fact, many studies indicate that business executives increasingly prioritize employee satisfaction above customer satisfaction, recognizing that happy staff make for better customer experiences.

The Transformational Charity goes beyond regular performance reviews to embed reflection, learning, and team-based leadership into its operations. They also actively engage partner and peer organizations in staff development, proactively creating opportunities for individuals’ learning and for organizational collaboration.

Use Business Intelligence to Inform Decisions

Most organizations are flooded with data today. Healthy organizations assemble that data into coherent information that can be used to empower management decisions. The Transformational Charity goes a step further, using software and other systems to aggregate data and information to drive actionable insights that leaders can use to maintain an agile, responsive approach, and to uplift organizational resilience and performance.

Beyond internal program, project, and other data, leading organizations also integrate third party insights—perhaps from peers and partners, governments, sector associations, research organizations, and / or thinktanks. They recognize that the best, next idea could come from anywhere, and that their own interpretations of data and information can be made more robust with a more diverse range of perspectives and experience.

Continuous improvement requires leadership humility—accepting unlearning to shift from good to better to best

Consider the incredible work of the Take a Hike Foundation. Their ongoing analysis and assessment of their programming drives continuous learning and development. Both their performance data and their methodical approach to scaling the reach of their work rest on a strong foundation of analysis and learning.

Supportive Operations is the second of five Key Capabilities we’ve identified as crucial to ensuring charities remain effective, sustainable, and impactful in a rapidly evolving world.

Interested in transforming your charity? Read our Transformational Charity Framework, an outline of the contemporary imperatives and capabilities charities need to develop to thrive for the next decade (and beyond.) We’ve also created an assessment to help your organization identify strength areas and improvement areas.