“They need the same level of skill in the 'boardroom' as a company with the same turnover and budget.”
If only they had, though, Eddie.
I worked in a volunteer capacity for more than nine years for a major charity. I enjoyed the work and I think the charity’s clients benefitted from my input. Along came a new Chief Exec tasked with "placing the charity on a more business-like footing". Among the measures he took to make the charity perform like the business he had recently left, he thought it a good idea to make his volunteer workforce more “flexible” (An admirable idea for a paid workforce which I have endured throughout my working life). The result for me (and hundreds like me) was that instead of being asked to travel to a local site a few miles away I could be “reallocated” on a weekly basis to anywhere in the County (which is more than seventy miles from one end to the other, and I live at one end). So, instead of a ten minute drive to carry out my eight hours of unpaid work, I might be expected to travel 150 miles in a day to do the same.
Unsurprisingly, after trying unsuccessfully to have such an arrangement reversed in an effort to see common sense prevail, I left. Also unsurprisingly so did most of my colleagues. Also unsurprisingly, because the charity was then unable to fulfil its obligations to the public (which are actually required under Statute) it lost its contract to do so.
The charity still exists (it has other arms providing other services). The Chief Exec is still in post (earning the same ridiculously high salary). But the people benefitting from the services of the part I used to work for are now served by another charity which is still “developing” the service it has taken on (because it was tasked with providing the service at short notice, hadn’t a clue how to provide it and had nobody in its organisation who did).
So I’m afraid skills in the boardroom, unless accompanied by common sense, do not necessarily equate with skills to run a charity which relies heavily on volunteer input (which most do).