The Difference Podcast: Kate Lee, Chief Executive of NCVO

"We're not MI5. There's not that many secrets here."

That's Kate Lee, talking about why she thinks charities are far too nervous about being honest with the public.

Kate is Chief Executive of NCVO, the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. Before that she led Alzheimer's Society and Young Lives vs Cancer, and before that she spent nearly seventeen years at the Red Cross. She has an OBE. She also, this week, accidentally kicked a hornet's nest while gardening. Both of those things are relevant to this episode, though only one of them is about impact measurement.

Kate’s story is one of the case studies behind Chapter 2 of the book, ‘Failure versus Success’. This is the conversation behind that chapter.

Two truths and a lie

We always start the same way. Kate gave us three statements - one false. She was once asked to advise a BBC drama about charities; she kicked a hornet's nest at the weekend; a friend of hers refuses to use the downstairs toilet because that's where Kate keeps her OBE!

Helen and I both got it right, for what it's worth. Listen to find out which one was the lie and stick around for Kate's pitch for the charity-sector drama nobody's made yet.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The heart of this episode is a report Kate published back in 2019 while she was at Young Lives vs Cancer, an annual report that did something most annual reports don't: it told people what hadn't worked.

We talk about why the "bad" and "ugly" sections did more for donor trust than the "good" ever could alone, and why Kate thinks transparency is a journey you start two years before you publish anything, not a decision you make on the day.

Trust, and why the logic doesn't work

We talked about the Ipsos Veracity Index (charity chief executives are trusted less than bankers), and Kate's answer wasn't what we expected. Her argument: this isn't a logic problem. You can't win a moral disagreement about executive pay with better impact data. Sector leaders keep trying to argue their way out of a values conversation, and it isn't working.

Data the sector already has

Kate also talks about the "wholesale impact" of the sector - the idea that charities collectively hold an enormous amount of evidence about what works, scattered across thousands of organisations that never talk to each other. NCVO has 17,000 members. What could we learn if even a fraction of them pooled what they know? It's a genuinely exciting idea, and one I suspect we'll come back to.

Also in this episode

• Why Kate is "evidence informed" rather than "evidence led"
• The reach-versus-resource-versus-impact triangle she uses when a service isn't proportionate to its cost
• Her message for the next Prime Minister
• What "done" would even look like for NCVO (spoiler: not any time soon)

Listen now

Kate Lee is Chief Executive of NCVO. Her case study features in The Difference: How to Understand, Measure and Maximise Social Impact, out now and a number one Amazon bestseller.

The Difference Podcast is hosted by Matt Stevenson-Dodd and Helen Gregg.