How To Be An Effective Charity Trustee - Signposts To Our Published Guidance That Will Help You

Introduction

(Version July 2004)

This guide will direct you to our published sources of advice about the main topics that you will need to know about in order to carry out your duties as a charity trustee effectively. It is not exhaustive, so you will need to use the ‘Search’ facility on our web site if you can’t find what you are looking for here.

The guide contains links through to relevant explanatory documents on our web site. It also gives you some useful links to web sites of other government departments, where they, rather than us, can provide the appropriate advice.

Our booklets provide a good introduction to the topics; they and the web-based documents in the ‘Other’ column will probably answer your questions in sufficient detail. (More detailed advice is in the documents in the ‘Operational Guidance’ column.)

If our guidance doesn’t answer your question(s), please phone our Contact Centre on 0845 300 0218.

We hope you find this guide helpful.

Contents

Section 1

• What is a Charitable Purpose?
• Structures
• Governing Documents
• How to Register a Charity

Section 2

• Trusteeship
• Charity Land
• Financial Management
• Charity Accounts, Annual Returns & Annual Reports

Section 3

• Charity Investments
• Fundraising
• Working with Others
• Managing Staff
• Managing Change

Section 4

• Small Charities
• Particular types of charity
• Some other areas of legislation that affect charities
• The Charity Commission
• Charity Commission Powers