Aligning your work with professional standards

From Our Toolkit

Applying for a quality mark or standard

As your work develops you may wish to have it accredited by an outside agency. By working towards an agreed standard or quality mark you will not only be developing your organisation but also build confidence in others in your abilities. There are different schemes for different types of organisation.

For museums:

UK Museum Accreditation Scheme
- This standard covers 3 key areas of work: Organisational health; Managing collections and Users and their experiences.
- The scheme is managed as a UK Partnership between Arts Council England, the Welsh Government, Museums Galleries Scotland and Northern Ireland Museums Council.

For archives:

UK Archives Accreditation Scheme
- This standard covers 3 key areas of work: Organisational Health; Collections and Stakeholders and their experiences.
- The Archive Service Accreditation is supported by a UK-wide partnership of the Archives and Records Association, Archives and Records Council Wales, National Records of Scotland, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Scottish Council on Archives, The National Archives, and the Welsh Government through its Museums, Archives and Libraries Division.

Quality mark for not-for-profit organisations:

Improving Quality
- This scheme is both a self-assessment tool as well as an external assessment.
- The IQ framework addresses 4 key areas of organisational life:
  - Accountable – Good Governance, Leadership and management
  - Welcoming – Involving Service users, managing and developing Staff and Volunteers, Equality and Diversity and working with others
  - Effective – refers to the services that an organisations provides and the planning, delivery, monitoring and evaluation that the organisations carries out
  - Sustainable – How the organisation manages, risk, money and the resources to make service delivery happen

Aligning your values and priorities

If you are looking to work in partnership with external organisations or apply for funding from one of the major funders you may wish to look at their values and priorities and see if there are ways that you can align your organisations.

All major funders produce guidance on their current priorities. Some that you may want to look at include:

Defining organisational resilience

It can be helpful to see how external support organisations and funders define organisational resilience and robustness. These definitions can be used as part of your own organisational review process. Examples include: