Page published on 30th July 2024
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We’re delighted to present our 2024-25 budget for the twelve months from August 2024 to July 2025. Here’s what it means and why it’s important.
Still on track…
IP Inclusive now works to a two-year business plan, so we’re still following the one we created for 2023-25.
IP Inclusive Management (IPIM) and its Advisory Board have been reviewing progress against this plan in the last few months and we’re satisfied that we’re on track with its objectives as we reach the end of its first year. But there’s plenty more still to be done, of course.
Focusing on people power
By far the largest element of our budget is staffing costs. We want to explain why that is.
Largely we’re powered by volunteers and the generosity of our stakeholders. We don’t own any assets, we don’t make a profit, we work virtually, and wherever possible we make use of free or low-cost tools to keep our systems running. But those things need coordinating, and the volunteers need our support to free them up for what they do best: organising events, creating resources and supporting individual IP professionals.
Our activities also continue to increase, in response to demand from within the sector. We’re now particularly busy on the outreach front, with our popular Summer of IP campaign being repeated again this year – a great example of how, working together, the IP professions can achieve something much bigger than individual organisations on their own.
To keep this up, above all, we need more capacity in our executive team. So we’ve taken the bold decision to increase that again. To stint on HR resources would make it much harder for us to provide value to the professions, deliver on the business plan, seize new opportunities, and support the volunteers whose work remains key to who we are and what we achieve.
Please help: we need your donations!
We’ll be starting our next fundraising round soon. We have an ambitious target this year – £96,000; please help us reach it so IP Inclusive can continue. The initiative has so much value to the professions. Can you imagine an IP sector without it??
Please, give what you can. There’s information about how to do that on our fundraising page. And we’ll be writing to all our Charter signatories about this soon – because although we don’t charge for signing up to the Charter, it seems only fair that the signatories who benefit from their involvement in IP Inclusive should contribute to its upkeep. As a guide, we suggest between about £300 a year for the smallest organisations to about £3,500 for the larger private practice firms. Or you might prefer to set up a regular – say, annual – donation to simplify the admin; that’s fine too – as are larger donations to cover specific items in the budget.
Later this year, we hope to establish opportunities for people to donate at our events as well. But we’d like to stress: these will be voluntary. For the time being, we’re committed to providing all our events and resources free at the point of delivery.
More information
By way of background, do take a look at our 2023 Annual Report, and our Lead Executive Officer’s reports for 1Q 2024 and 2Q 2024, which show just how much IP Inclusive is doing at the moment.
We plan to consult with our Charter signatories and other stakeholders towards the end of this year, to reassure ourselves that we’re still delivering value and to help us focus on what matters most to the IP professions. We’ll follow up with a second impact report early in 2025: see this post for our first one in 2021-22.
You can access all of IPIM’s financial reports and budgets in this IP Inclusive finances post.