We’re delighted to present our next two-year business plan and our 2025-26 budget. They’re based on discussions at our 2 April 2025 annual meeting, input from the IP Inclusive Advisory Board, and ongoing consultations with our volunteers and other stakeholders, including through our early 2025 impact survey.
Here you can download:
By way of background to this latest set of plans, you might also be interested to read our 2024 Annual Report and in particular our 2025 Impact Report.
A special plan for special times
This year’s business plan comes at a special time. 2025 marks IP Inclusive’s tenth anniversary. We are also seeing significant change in global approaches to diversity and inclusion, which makes it more important than ever for initiatives like ours to remain strong for the people and businesses they support. Our plan is therefore committed to the values that have always been key to IP Inclusive’s success, most notably through the community it creates.
Community is key
At the start of our second decade, IP Inclusive’s mission remains unchanged. We want the IP professions to be welcoming, accessible, respectful and supportive places to work.
Key to this, we believe, is creating a strong community within the IP sector, in which people can work together to improve diversity, inclusion, fairness, accessibility and wellbeing. The over-arching theme for our work over the next two years is therefore “community”. The business plan is aimed at strengthening and supporting the IP Inclusive community and increasing the impact it can have in the IP professions. It will focus our 2025-27 activities on four strategic priorities:
- Supporting our volunteers
- Strengthening engagement
- Keeping equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) and wellbeing on the agenda
- Developing the pipeline
Specifics to look forward to
Under those four headings, the plan commits to a number of specific projects as well as ongoing work to develop our existing activities. New projects include helping our Women in IP community to establish its proposed mentoring scheme; supporting the creation of networks for men in IP and for business support professionals; undertaking a review into the effectiveness and value of our Charter and Senior Leaders’ Pledge schemes; publishing our promised toolkit of basic standards and guidelines for EDI data gathering; re-running our 2019 sector-wide EDI survey; and creating a resource pack of collated Careers in Ideas materials, to support IP professionals in their careers outreach activities.
For 2026 you can also look forward to a flagship social and networking event for the whole IP Inclusive community, and a third Summer of IPÂ campaign from our Careers in Ideas team.
Funds allowing (and we would welcome contributions towards this particular project), we also aim to update the IP Inclusive website, improving its structure and functionality so as to enhance the way we interact with our supporters.
The budget
The new business plan covers the two years from August 2025 to July 2027. The accompanying budget is for the period from August 2025 to July 2026, as we continue to budget annually despite our 2023 move to a two-year business planning cycle.
We have increased this year’s budget slightly to take account of our continued growth, leading to a fundraising target for 2025-26 of £99,000. We believe that’s appropriate in view of IP Inclusive’s increasing importance in, and value to, the IP professions. We hope you agree!
We’ll be launching our 2025-26 fundraising campaign soon. Do please email us at [email protected]Â if you’d like to donate this year, or indeed for the next two years to see us through this business plan.
In line with responses to the 2025 impact survey, we will continue for the moment with our “Wikipedia”-type model, in which we ask all our supporters to give what they can, when they can, in the interests of the whole IP community. Our events and resources will remain free to all UK-based IP professionals, and signing up to our EDI Charter will not incur subscription charges. This only works, of course, for as long as the sector values our work sufficiently to fund it.
Feedback
Our governing body IP Inclusive Management (IPIM) welcomes feedback on the 2025-27 business plan. Please write to our Lead Executive Officer Andrea Brewster at [email protected].