When should you use Compass?
Running a charity means making big calls, sometimes with less evidence than you'd like. You might sense that staff morale has shifted, suspect that trustees and the senior team see the organisation differently, or worry that a strategy written five years ago no longer fits the world you're operating in today. The trouble is, ‘sensing’ and ‘suspecting’ don’t provide the solid ground you need to start planning.
That's where Compass comes in. It's Lucent's survey framework, designed specifically for organisations with a social purpose. It is a way of hearing direct and candid feedback from your staff, trustees and volunteers, enabling you to move from anecdote and assumptions to evidence.
We recommend Compass at the start of a strategy review, but it's useful at other points in a charity's life too. Here are four scenarios where leaders come to us for a Compass survey – and how it helps.
Scenario 1: At the outset of a strategy process
The challenge: Starting a strategy review is daunting. You need to meaningfully engage staff, volunteers and trustees rather than simply telling them what's already been decided – but you're not always sure how. You might not know where to focus the senior team's attention first, or which issues need probing more deeply. And it's easy to fall back on assumptions – “our staff think X” – without anything to back that up.
How Compass helps: Compass gives you an independent, evidence-based stocktake. It crowd-sources views from across your organisation to surface your genuine strengths, weaknesses and untapped opportunities – including areas of work you might consider stopping, which is often difficult to identify alone. Because responses are anonymised and collated by us, people are more candid than they might be in an internal survey. You'll also get a benchmark against other organisations who've completed Compass, so you can see how your organisation compares. And you can repeat the survey a year into your new strategy, to measure how far you've come.
Scenario 2: Midway through your strategy
The challenge: While we recommend setting a 5-year or 10-year strategy, we know that the world is changing rapidly and priorities you set with confidence can suddenly feel less certain. You might be wondering if your strategy is still fit for purpose, or whether your staff can still connect with it. Perhaps the opportunities you originally planned around have moved materially, and you need to pivot – but don’t want to do that on a hunch.
How Compass helps: Compass gives you a fresh, independent read on your current opportunities and challenges, rather than relying on out-of-date assumptions. It helps you measure how far you've come against the work you set out to do and gives you a clear signal on whether your strategy still resonates with the people delivering it day to day. That means any mid-strategy pivot is grounded in what's actually happening, not just a feeling that something isn't quite right.
Scenario 3: A temperature check for new CEOs
The challenge: Stepping into a Chief Executive role is exciting – and disorientating. You're expected to get a rapid, confident grasp of what's really going on, often within your first few weeks. You will be wondering: where are the genuine strengths in this organisation? Where are the underlying challenges? And critically, in what order should you tackle them? Relying solely on what people choose to tell you in one-to-ones risks giving you a partial, filtered picture at exactly the moment you need the full one.
How Compass helps: Compass acts as an independent stocktake on your behalf, crowd-sourcing strengths, challenges and opportunities directly from staff, trustees and volunteers. Just as importantly, it shows you where there's consensus across your organisation – and where views diverge sharply. Knowing that, say, your senior team and frontline staff see a particular issue very differently is exactly the kind of insight that helps a new CEO prioritise with confidence, rather than guessing which fires to fight first.
Scenario 4: Following a restructure or merger
The challenge: Big organisational change – a restructure, merger or significant overhaul – takes a toll. Staff can feel burnt out, anxious or simply change-fatigued. Rebuilding trust and a shared sense of purpose after a major change isn't easy, and it's hard to do well without knowing how your staff are feeling.
How Compass helps: Compass gives you a direct, honest read on how staff feel and how far they resonate with your organisation's vision and values. You can share results organisation-wide, so that staff feel their voice is listened to. We also build in space for bespoke questions, so you can probe the specific areas of ambiguity or tension you're most concerned about. And we can support you to communicate findings back to your teams, closing the loop with a clear “you said, we did” – which matters enormously when trust has been tested.
The common thread
Whatever stage you're at, Compass exists to close the gap between assumptions and evidence. We can give you an honest, independent picture of your organisation, so you can move forward with confidence.
If any of these scenarios sound familiar, we'd love to talk through how Compass could work for your organisation. Get in touch and we'll help you find your bearings.