Children's Book Project - Signed 2025 Accounts - Flipbook - Page 9
2. Create book rich communities
As we grow, we seek to build long-term relationships with every school, prison, food bank, community group
and other settings that we support. We want them to view our donations of books and their ability to put on
gifting events as an integral element of their literacy and reading for pleasure provision that they can count
on and dovetail with their wider activity.
Long-term relationships with hundreds of organisations necessarily requires a robust approach to our
outbound communications and to database management. We often need to engage new staff as our key
contacts move on, and work hard to ensure that the continuing relevance of our offer to their children and
families as their needs change or our partner’s priorities change.
3. Retain granular, user-led models
All our programmes are developed in conjunction with practitioners
to ensure their relevance and appeal to the children and young
people they support, and are designed to be easy to implement,
even with limited resources. We run several discrete gifting
programmes: for each educational phase, for prisons, for foodbanks
and for wider community groups, all acknowledging the respective
capacities of each setting to engage with their community and all
underpinned by our core principles.
Every partner is invited to provide feedback on the gifting events they put on using our books and we
regularly review this feedback to understand how we could improve our processes, communications or
programme resources. We also engage in regular dialogue with a panel of advisory teachers to ensure
that our programmes are pertinent to their needs and remain valuable. In June 2025 our primary school
panel’s input helped refine our Discover programme for the 2025-2026 year.
In addition Trustees recognised two further focus areas:
Support the move to centralised operations
The charity restructured at the start of 2024-2025, centralising its operations to build consistency across
its hubs in terms of processes, outputs and volunteer experiences. This remains a focus and one that the
Trustees supported with the introduction of a risk register, by the appointment of a Finance Director so
that finance could be brought in-house and by the development of a bespoke inventory system.
Sustainable staffing model
The Trustees recognise the incredible, ongoing value of the support given by volunteers to the charity but
at the start of 2024-2025 also noted the need to invest in staff to ensure sustainable, scalable delivery and
to support succession planning.
Annual Report & Financial Statements for year ended 30 June 2025 |
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