Strategy pillar 4:
Be a sustainable and thriving organisation
Satff at the DEC office in London speak with representatives from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office including Anneliese Dodds, the then Minister for Development. Photo: FCDO/DEC
Two years into our five-year strategy, we have accelerated the delivery of the key strategic projects identified in our review. These projects will help us to better deliver against our core mission: to raise funds to save, protect, and rebuild the lives of people impacted by emergencies and major disasters overseas.
We will continue to invest in our capabilities, people and processes to ensure we are a sustainable and thriving organisation able to deliver effectively on our strategy. During this strategic period we are focusing specifically on:
- Supporting our people
- Embedding our Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) commitments
- Evolving our financial and risk strategy
- Investing in our systems and processes
Supporting our people
Our goal is to be a sector-leading employer of choice, protecting our strong organisational culture, investing in the development of our teams and supporting them to thrive.
This year we embarked on a culture project to undertake a review of the DEC’s values and to create an employee engagement plan that ensures we invest in our people and continuously promote inclusion and belonging. A staff representative group has also been established to ensure organisational decisions are shared through meaningful discussion and feedback.
ESG commitments
As part of our organisational commitment to ESG we will embed improved practices across the secretariat and the membership. This financial year we began the process of drawing on experts to assess our current ESG policies and create an action plan. Our ESG commitments include standards for energy usage andtravel, for example, but also standards to be applied to external suppliers and to our member agencies.
Evolving our financial and risk strategy
As a charity, it’s vital that we are a sustainable organisation that is better able to withstand risk and future unpredictability while meeting regulatory and compliance requirements. This will include evolving our organisational core costs model, revising our reserves policy, investing in financial budgeting, monitoring, and reporting, and establishing a new risk and compliance framework.
In the previous financial year we evolved our organisational core costs model and began targeted fundraising specifically for the DEC’s core costs, raising £300,000 in the first year. In 2025/26 we surpassed our core costs fundraising target, raising £600,000 thanks to the support of strategic donors including trusts and foundations, philanthropists, and corporate partners.
Moving to a model where we fundraise for our core costs means that more public donations can go directly to aid response for DEC appeals.
This year we recruited a risk and compliance manager who took up the post in October 2025. We have several initiatives, such as the implementation of a revised risk reporting process, internal audit plan, risk plans for our London office and for travel and security, an updating of our financial crimes policy and mapping of compliance regulations and contracts all on track for 2026/27.
Investing in our systems and processes
In the last financial year we began a Gift Aid process review to maximise the amount of Gift Aid received and to make our processes more efficient. We appointed a HMRC-recognised company that specialises in Gift Aid who have conducted a Gift Aid gap analysis and Gift Aid claim audit report, which will inform our roadmap for 2026/27.
We are on track with mapping out our business systems across the DEC to ensure they integrate where appropriate, including reviewing how we use Microsoft 365 and how we capture organisational knowledge. We began revising our finance manual, however this has been paused and will be completed in the next financial year.
