Balance
Understanding Balance
- At Manchester Metropolitan University’s Centre for Enterprise we bring specialist expertise in creating on-line assessment tools to unlock potential in individuals and organisations. These are designed to plot and capture distance travelled towards goal fulfilment
Balance was created by Mike Bull and colleagues during 3 years of research with Third Sector Organisations and business support providers - Balance stimulates critical reflection by identifying stages in organisational development. Through the process Balance supports positive changes in organisational development
- Balance simply draws together different parts of management life into one picture to guide solutions for ‘whole organisation’ performance optimisation without the effort and ‘number crunching’ required with statistically driven tools
- To achieve this we have built Balance around 5 important key management skills areas for Third Sector Organisations:
Balance is designed for small to medium social enterprises, charities, social firms, community and voluntary organisations and co-operatives
Discovering Balance
- Ideal for managers, boards of directors/trustees and also for business development agencies and enterprise coaches working with socially enterprising organisations
- 24/7 access to a self assessment tool based upon 28 critical management scenarios to enhance competitiveness & sustainability
- Built for fast snapshot analysis and benchmarked results
- 1 hour assessment offers instant visual feedback – providing the user with a graphical snapshot of their organisational development and a personalised or full strategic action plan
- The strategic action plan provides thoughts, suggestions and actions for each stage of organisational development
- Benchmarking feature provides comparative analysis drawn from a growing database of around 300 Third Sector Organisations
- The website www.socialenterprisebalance.org provides background information and articles on the rigorous development of the tool
Benefiting with Balance
For Socially Enterprising Organisations
- Fast and simple to use
- Stimulates business planning and improves delivery capability
- Powerful insight into organisational capacity and critical path to change
- Year-on-year knowledge: saved and retrievable assessments provide an annual benchmarking framework for managers and stakeholders
For Licence holders
- Balance is a web based engagement tool to support business development activity, and can be used as part of a programme of delivery
- Balance provides a structured framework for business interview interventions and aids action planning and goal setting
- Balance can be used as an evaluation tool to identify the distance travelled by clients through a delivery programme
- Balance has the capability to capture and export the data into an excel spreadsheet for statistical analysis, evaluation and monitoring – speak to our team for further details on how we can support you with data analysis
What people say about Balance
“The analysis gave us a good indication of where we are at, as a business – and the areas we need to be looking at for the future”
Dennis Maginn – Working Class Movement Library
“I found it very useful. It confirms that we are well in front of the game but there are very specific things we can do to improve”
Kenton Mann – Music Unlimited
“Balance has worked for us. It has influenced our thinking and our organisational development”
Aftab Hussain – Peshkar Productions Limited
Download the Balance brochure (PDF) 
Further details
More Information
To arrange an on-line demonstration off Balance in action or for more information on training, support, licence agreements and purchasing options or further information please contact:
Mike Bull at cfetools@mmu.ac.uk or telephone 0161 247 3951