Charities are in crisis. An estimated £4bn of income was lost during the first three months of the pandemic.

The current medical and economic crisis in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic confronts companies and social organisations with challenges hitherto unknown both in character and scale.

As organisations move beyond the day-to-day crisis mode of the last few weeks, they are starting to turn to longer term questions.

This article is the third in our series on making strategy in social progress organisations.

The world is changing fast, fundamental assumptions are being challenged, uncertainty is high and many describe tougher market conditions. Traditional strategic plans and tools are not helping them to address these issues.

At Firetail, we spend a lot of time thinking about how organisations interested in social progress should think about ‘strategy’.

Everyone knows mergers in the charity sector are rare. There are 168,000 charities in England and Wales, yet in the last year there were fewer than a hundred mergers. Firetail surveyed 39 Charity Chief Executives and senior leaders from across our network to understand why. We wanted to get a sense of why there are so few mergers in the sector.