Evidence and ideas
Resources for Community Business
Guides, resources and more for your community business.
We believe that community businesses are central to creating a stronger and more resilient country – starting locally.
Community businesses are helping communities across England to build stronger local economies and better places to live. With the right conditions, community businesses can thrive. But they face the same challenges as other businesses, with growing demand and less funding support.
Whether you’re wanting to start a community business or looking to do something different for your community, we have resources and tips that can help.
Our current projects
Take a look at our active opportunities to grow and develop your community business.
From our partners
MyCommunity
Through MyCommunity you can find resources to help with starting or growing a community busines and ideas on how to make your community a better place.
Ubele Initiative
The Ubele Initiative supports a wide range of community organisations through social action, development and leadership initiatives.
Platform Places
Platform Places is a social enterprise that convenes and supports councils, communities and asset owners, to create Local Property Partnerships in their town centre. They support these Partnerships with access to funding, technical expertise and networks.
Guides and reports
Research-backed guides and reports to help your community business.
The benefits of being in a community energy group
Getting started with Community Improvement Districts
The Community Hub Handbook
Looking for data?
Community Business Market dataset
The most recent dataset from Power to Change’s Community Business Market report, anonymised.
Community Business Dashboard
This brings together useful financial information from more than 830 community businesses throughout England. Learn more about the community businesses around you and get instant comparisons based on business sector and geographical region.
Keep It in the Community
An online database of all community assets in England, such as pubs, shops and land, that have been nominated or registered as an Asset of Community Value (ACV).
Digital resources
Getting started with digital
- BeMoreDigital workshops – an online (entree-level) learning space for civil society professionals to improve their digital skills and confidence.
- Phoebe Tickell -Toolkit for grassroots communities needing to move their work into the digital realm for the first time.
- Catalyst Resource – How to measure your service’s user-centredness – A free and downloadable scale based on the principles of good service design. Use it to measure how well your services work for your members and customers.
- DigiSafe – A new step-by-step digital safeguarding guide.
Building your digital skills, support and further resources
- Design Hops – A free workshop to help organisations redesign services for digital access.
- Digital Candle – free 1 hour of expert digital advice for mission driven organisations.
- Catalyst support library – 100+ free resources on a range of topics, from digital leadership, strategy, change management, creating and running digital services, working digitally.
- Service Recipes – Practical guides to help civil society organisations learn from one another’s services.
Networks and peer groups
- TechSoup – learn from experts that have deep experience with transformative technology solutions and skills.
- Tech for Good Network – A community of organisers across the UK and Ireland supporting each other to fuel the tech for good movement. To find a group close to you, search their network.
Comms, marketing, website, and SEO
- Charity Digital – Ten SEO tips to improve search engine visibility.
- Platypus Digital – Writing for the Web workshop.
- Control R charity digital training – Free charity digital training course in Google Analytics, Facebook ads and more.
- Catalyst Resource – How digital marketing can help you reach your audience – How can charities continue to help existing audiences understand the services they offer? Or even help new audiences understand their services using digital channels? That’s where digital marketing comes in.
Accessibility, equality, diversity and inclusion
- OneDigital – resources for specific types of learners: older learners; young learners; learners with physical disabilities; learners with mental health issues; learners with learning disabilities; learners whose first language is not English; and financial disadvantaged learners.
- Learn My Way – offers free online courses to help beginners (esp. people with learning disabilities, low income families, and older people) learn the basics and develop digital skills.
- This document signposts to digital resources and tools to help those who are less familiar with tech. This includes links to guides on using a webcam, Skype tutorials and video calling.
- BT’s Skills for Tomorrow – offers a range of courses including basic digital functions such as using email.
- The Basics of Digital Accessibility – this blog post explores the importance of accessibility in web and other digital communications as it relates to an organisation’s ability to serve its community.
- Web accessibility checker – This tool checks single HTML pages for conformance with accessibility standards to ensure the content can be accessed by everyone.
Cyber security
- Strengthening cybersecurity – YouTube video.
Data and impact measurement
- Data Kind’s Office Hours – Conversations with experts in data and mission driven organisations.
- ‘How to measure social value in Google Analytics’ – Blog by Richard Edwards about using Google Analytics to measure social value.
- ‘The why, how, and what of impact measurement’ – Blog by Dr Lucy Maynard on impact measurement.
- Data Collective – A community that fosters connections around data challenges, to share good practice, and to help organisations to share their data with other organisations, should they want to paint a fuller picture. Members have access to peer support through a mailing list and slack channel, group workshops, and direct technical support.
Customer Relationship Management
- A free, simple CRM in Airtable – reuse and amend to get started.