Charity Organisational Design

Elrha redesigned how it operates - from three separate teams working in silos to a unified organisation built around a shared model for delivering impact. This charity organisational design project created the foundation for a complete restructure and helped secure critical FCDO funding for the next phase of their strategy.

Elrha is a global charity that finds solutions to complex humanitarian problems through research and innovation. Based in London, they work at the intersection of aid, academia and the private sector - funding and supporting work that helps people affected by crises around the world.

With a bold 2040 strategy in place and a changing funding landscape, Elrha needed to rethink how the organisation was structured. Three programmatic teams had evolved independently over time, each with their own informal ways of working. The signs were clear:

Organisational knowledge was walking out the door because it wasn't being captured

• Spans of control were ambiguous

Value didn't flow as effectively as it could between teams

The leadership team knew they couldn't deliver the impact they wanted with their current operating model - it needed to be reimagined to support effective strategy implementation.

This challenge is far from unique. Across the UK charity sector, the Charity Commission reports that financial pressures are forcing many charities into difficult choices about how to restructure operations and services. The dominant response is reactive - cutting costs, managing decline. Elrha chose a different path.

Elrha wanted to move from a structure that had grown organically into one that was intentionally designed. The goal was to create a unified operating model - connecting strategy implementation, structure, and ways of working so that everything pulled in the same direction.

This wasn't just about changing the org chart. Charity organisational design at its best is about organisational effectiveness - standardising where it mattered, streamlining how work flows, and creating the conditions for a relatively small organisation to deliver far greater impact with the resources it already had.

Understanding how things actually work

The work began by mapping how Elrha actually operated - not what the org chart said, but how decisions really got made, how information flowed between teams, and where energy was being absorbed by disconnected ways of working. This created a single source of truth about the current state - something that hadn't existed before. For the leadership team, this was invaluable. You can't map the journey to where you want to be if you don't have a clear, shared picture of where you are.

Designing the future together

From there, the focus shifted to reimagining the future. Working collaboratively with staff across the organisation, the project moved through five connected areas of organisational design:

Business model design - how Elrha creates and delivers value

• Operating model design - how to structure for effective strategy implementation
• Work design - how activities and responsibilities connect
• Job design - how roles support the new ways of working

Organisational structure - how teams and reporting lines are shaped

Each built on the last, creating a coherent thread from purpose through to the detail of how work gets done day to day.

Built with the people who'll live with it

None of this was designed in isolation. Fourteen staff members contributed directly to the business model design work, exploring questions about purpose, audiences, service offerings, and how Elrha creates value. Ideation sessions brought the whole team together to shape proposals before they were finalised. The future wasn't handed down - it was built with the people who would live with it.

Giving clarity during uncertainty

This mattered especially because the work happened during a period of significant uncertainty across the humanitarian sector, with funding pressures and strategic questions affecting everyone. Rather than adding to that uncertainty, the charity organisational design work gave clarity. The business model design showed how Elrha creates and delivers value. The operating model design showed how to structure for effective strategy implementation. Together, they provided a framework for making decisions with confidence, even when the external environment was shifting.

Throughout, particular attention was given to building organisational knowledge - capturing what was learned so that it stayed within the organisation rather than depending on any individual.

The organisational design work led directly to a restructure - reshaping Elrha from three separate programmatic teams into a unified model built around how the organisation delivers impact. This wasn't a charity restructure driven by cost-cutting or crisis - with all the unintended consequences that kind of reactive approach tends to bring. It was deliberate, intentional, and rooted in a clear operating model and business model that the team had developed together - enabling strategy implementation through design rather than disruption.

The charity organisational design work also became the foundation for securing FCDO funding - demonstrating to funders that Elrha had thought deeply about strategy implementation and how it would deliver on its commitments. It gave them a credible, evidence-based story about how resources would translate into impact.

Perhaps most importantly, the process built the leadership team's confidence in making strategic decisions about their own organisation. As one of Elrha's Directors put it: "This work has helped us uncover questions we didn't even know we should be asking."

This project showed that charity organisational design doesn't have to follow the pattern that dominates the sector - where restructuring means cutting costs, managing decline, and hoping the disruption doesn't cause more problems than it solves.

When a charity takes a different path - mapping how things actually work, designing the future collaboratively, and building a clear operating model before making structural changes - the results are fundamentally different. The restructure becomes something people understand and support, because they helped shape it. The new structure works, because it was tested against reality before it was implemented. And the organisation retains its knowledge and capability through the transition, because that was designed in from the start.

This isn't just intuition. Research by McKinsey found that 70% of unsuccessful organisational transformations were planned by ten or fewer people, while the most successful were shaped collaboratively with much broader involvement. Elrha's approach - engaging fourteen staff in the business model design and the whole team in shaping the future - reflects exactly this principle.

The work also revealed how much potential sits locked inside disconnected ways of working. Elrha's three teams were each doing excellent work individually, but the organisation as a whole was less than the sum of its parts. Knowledge lived in people's heads rather than in shared systems. Workflows had evolved through habit rather than design. Organisational design that maps the connections between strategy, structure, and delivery - and redesigns them together rather than in isolation - unlocks capacity that's already there.

For any charity facing similar questions about how to structure for greater impact, this project offers a clear insight: the biggest gains often come not from adding resources, but from intentional organisational design that reshapes how existing resources connect. Start with a shared understanding of the current state. Design the future operating model and business model with the people who'll live with it. Build organisational knowledge into the process. The result is strategy implementation that works - not because it was imposed, but because it was understood.