What charities say

The Winchburgh Community Development Trust has been in existence for 10 years. It has one paid employee supported by around 50 volunteers. 10 of the volunteers are Trustees of the Charity.

The Trust has operated with minimal policies and procedures, only having them in place as needed for OSCR Governance and to support funding applications.

In 2025 the Trust reviewed its strategy and one of the outcomes was a recognition that the Trust required a significantly more robust structure to be healthy and safe in all it was trying to achieve.

One of the Trustees undertook the task of creating the policies. Approaches were made to SCVO and the West Lothian Voluntary Sector Gateway for support to carry out this gargantuan task. However, other than signpost to templates the Trustee recognised that in this task they were on their own. Over the autumn of 2025 several polices and procedures were created. They have all been plagiarised from existing documents and while the contents provided some guidance they were not personalised to the Trust. Neither were they appropriate nor proportionate to the information they needed to contain. All the documents created exist in draft form and require to be ratified by Trustees before their formal adoption.

When Stuart Gilliland approached the Trust to pilot his development, we agreed immediately to take part. This was in recognition that the support he offered us was personalised and assured to be a much more effective way of generating what the Trust needed to be compliant in all areas of its work.

Prior to meeting up Stuart had created a profile of the Trust which provided basic information about its activities and functions. Over 6 hours, across two online calls and two face to face sessions, Stuart led a small subgroup of 2 Trustees and the Trust Secretary through a process whereby the profile was confirmed as accurate, this was then fed into the system which allowed the team to generate a suite of documents relevant to the activities and functions of the Trust.

The outcomes were an organisational profile, a document providing the rationale for the process and the documents created, an action plan to take forward work that has not been possible under the pilot scheme, 38 Policy and Practice documents including Safeguarding, GDPR, OSCR Reporting and Financial management, and an action plan of activities that the Trustees need to undertake to support the policy and practice documents.

This process has been invaluable for the Trust. It has provided the opportunity to review everything it is involved with and to use the outcomes to fully inform Trustees of their roles, responsibilities and accountability.

The fact that the process was personalised means that every document that has been created is appropriate to the Trust and therefore will be more effective in terms of reporting requirements and fundraising applications as well as ensuring excellent governance.

The process was exceptionally effective in relation to the time it took to generate the documents. 6 hours to achieve what was needed is truly remarkable.

The Trust also discovered a lot of information about processes that it didn’t have in place. For example, being registered with the ICO.

The process gave the Trust opportunities to ask questions and to clarity ways of working.

In recognition that Charity Trustees in the main are volunteers then this system can only be described as a “gift”. It is all very well for funders, including the Scottish Government and Local Authorities to outsource work to the Third Sector but this comes at a significant cost to the “volunteers” involved. As many of the reporting requirements, practices, policies and governance structures are statutory requirements then thought needs to be given as to how best to support the Third Sector to achieve this. Making this tool available would significantly enhance the Third Sector Organisations abilities to be truly compliant with what is required and that their governance structures are proportionate and appropriate for their tasks and functions. In a culture where it is increasingly difficult to recruit Trustees it would also be a very useful and practical way of underpinning recruitment processes to secure Trustees who are fully informed and cognisant of the responsibility of the role and how best to operate within that role.

When Past Times Dementia-Friendly Community was introduced to Stuart Gilliland and the Charity Compliance Engine, we were looking for practical guidance to help our newly established charity develop strong governance and ensure we were on the right path towards full compliance.

From the outset, Stuart’s warm, approachable manner made the session both relaxed and highly productive. He quickly gained a clear understanding of our charity, its aims and the challenges we face as a new organisation.

Using the Charity Compliance Engine, Stuart carried out a comprehensive assessment of where we are on our compliance journey and produced a clear, prioritised roadmap showing both the immediate actions our Board should focus on and the longer-term improvements we should consider. This gave us real confidence that we were directing our efforts where they would have the greatest impact.

We were particularly impressed by the quality of the documents produced during the session. Draft policies were generated in Microsoft Word, making them easy to adapt to our own circumstances and saving us what would otherwise have been many hours of work.

One aspect of the consultation stood out above all others. Our Chair raised a confidential governance issue, and both Stuart and the Charity Compliance Engine demonstrated an impressive understanding of the situation. The response was thoughtful, balanced and practical, providing the Board with a well-considered basis for discussing how to move forward.

The two-hour session flew by, and it was reassuring to know that Stuart’s support does not end when the meeting finishes. Later that same evening we received a comprehensive summary of the consultation, together with the roadmap and supporting documentation, all of which will be invaluable as we continue to develop as a charity.

We have found the Charity Compliance Engine to be an innovative and genuinely useful tool, but it is Stuart’s experience, judgement and ability to apply it thoughtfully that make the service particularly valuable. We would confidently recommend Stuart Gilliland and Integrity-Nexus to any charity seeking practical, professional support with governance, compliance and organisational development.

Every charity should have access to the Charity Compliance Engine (CCE) which provides all the information you will require in the one place which is specific and proportionate to your charity. The CCE saves on the time spent on endless searching of websites and looking through the variety of options that you are provided with.

Having input the information relevant to our charity the CCE provided us with clear and defined information on the six governance areas relative to our organisation, an agreed document map outlining what we have in place and what we require to build upon within a chosen timescale and policies specific to our organisation. Additional information that we requested was also provided by inputting the question to the CCE. We have shared all of this information with our Board to start the process of building on the governance areas that require some work.

We only wish that a tool like the CCE, providing all the governance information which is tailored to the specific organisation, had been available in the past but thankfully we now have the CCE and charities should embrace it with open arms to ensure it becomes the go to system in the future.

One charity’s surprise is the whole register’s shape

Our sector analysis reads all of Scotland’s charities through this exact duty, because registration with the ICO is the one compliance obligation that open data can measure across the whole register, and it is close to the easiest duty a charity carries: a short form and a small annual fee.

Findable registration rises steeply with income. Among the largest charities it is the clear majority. Among the smallest it is a small fraction. The same charities carrying the least capacity are the ones least likely to have met even the most visible duty they have.

The inference matters more than the number. If the easiest, most visible obligation thins out that sharply as charities get smaller, the duties that take real knowledge and time, safeguarding, financial controls, employment practice, are unlikely to be in better shape.

Winchburgh was not an outlier. It was a charity that happened to find out.