Useful Information – w/c 02/11/26
November 2, 2026
Events, training, charity news, surveys, research, feedback, reports, services and much more – in one handy place!
This page will be updated with new information as we receive it during the week. Please check back regularly. (Last update: 02/11/26 – items added on this date are marked as [NEW])
You’ll also find the latest Health and Wellbeing news, events and opportunities in the current post on our News page here.
You can view previous Useful Information posts here to catch up on our archive of information.
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If you’ve seen something you think we should be sharing, let us know! Email us: info@cumbriacvs.org.uk
Looking for funding information and news? Check out Focus on Funding here
Every Life Matters – Training
Every Life Matters offer a range of suicide prevention and mental health training, including Suicide Alertness, Safety Planning, Mental Health First Aid and Mental Health Awareness in the Workplace.
There are dates for sessions from now until December in this leaflet, online and around the county in-person: Cumbria Training 2026
Managing your lease and working well with local authority landlords
Tuesday 3rd November, online. Leading UK property advice charity, the Ethical Property Foundation is delighted to offer this free online property seminar for voluntary organisations.
This informative webinar is a must-attend for all trustees, staff and volunteers currently renting charity premises from their local council. It is an excellent CPD opportunity for local council property department staff.
With lawyers from leading charity law firm Birketts LLP – Louisa Saunders (Legal Director, Charity Property) and Claire Jones (Partner, Public Sector) – this is a fantastic opportunity to learn the basics of managing your lease and avoid misunderstandings and disputes.
Find out more and book your place here
Excel essentials – level up your skills
Tuesday 3rd November, online. Excel is an incredibly useful tool to help you store, analyse and present your data. Even with basic skills there’s a lot you can do to help with your organisation’s monitoring and evaluation practice – but how do you get started?
Join this practical session to navigate the Excel ribbon and create, format, sort and filter your spreadsheets. We’ll introduce basic auto and manual formulae and why you should be using Tables. We’ll also cover splitting and joining columns and inserting basic charts.
Best Practice Reporting
Tuesday 3rd November, online. In the current economic climate where fundraising from funders and the public alike is a tough ask, it is important that you sell your charity in the best possible light. We all know that funders will look at your statutory accounts and therefore they need to reflect well on your organisation to provide key messages in a way that encourages them to fund you.
Our half day online course will give the tips on best practice reporting in the sector and show you how to think about your Trustees report differently. It is much more than a compliance document and an opportunity to ‘tell your story’ in an engaging way.
Social Media Training for Charities
Wednesday 4th & Wednesday 18th November, online. Learn how to use social media more strategically.
This practical two-part online training course is designed to help charities make better use of social media by focusing on what really matters: understanding performance, reaching the right audiences and creating content that supports organisational goals.
Across two interactive half-day sessions, participants will gain a clear understanding of how social media platforms work today, how to measure success using meaningful data and how to turn insights into more effective strategies.
Festival of Trusteeship
Monday 9th – Friday 13th November, online. The Eastside People Festival of Trusteeship’s week-long series of online events is full of exciting discussions and debates, thought leadership, best practices, learned experience, educational topics and breakout sessions.
Sessions in the programme include:
- Festival Launch with Dame Julia Unwin, Chair of the Charity Commission for England and Wales
- Building board chemistry: What makes boards click?
- Trustees Like Us: Where are all the working class trustees?
- When boards turn toxic
- Show me the money: a trustee’s guide to fundraising
- The Joy of Trusteeship
- Brave boards in an age of hostility
- Goldilocks Governance: Big, small or just right?
Plus another 10 sessions covering everything from finance and fundraising to mergers, board diversity, AI and the future of trusteeship.
Introduction to Google Analytics 4
Tuesday 10th November, Online. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a powerful tool that can supercharge your charity. It provides an accurate and insight-rich understanding of your supporters and donors. It provides a complete view of user journeys and enables you to make effective data-driven decisions. And, perhaps most importantly, it can drastically improve your marketing and fundraising.
This course aims, in just three hours, to help you get to grips with GA4. It explores recent changes to the platform, how to ensure you have the best data, the metric that you must know, and a general run-through of the interface, dipping into ‘realtime’ reports.
Tour de France Grand Départ 2027: Bringing JOY to Cumberland
Thursday 12th November, Keswick. Join Cumberland Council at the Keswick Pencil Factory for – Tour de France Grand Départ 2027: Bringing JOY to Cumberland – an event bringing together Cumberland businesses, community organisations and key partners to explore the exciting opportunities presented by this international event being hosted as part of two stages in our region.
Discover how the event can create lasting economic and social benefits for Cumberland, support local communities and businesses, and leave a positive legacy long after the race has passed. The conference will provide an opportunity to connect with partners, share ideas, and explore how we can work together to make the most of this landmark moment for the region.
The programme will feature networking and Q&A support, providing guidance, advice, and direction to further information as the event develops.
Shaping strategy that delivers
Thursday 12th November, online. Charity Digital invites you to the first of our ticketed Leadership Series Events: ‘Building strategy that delivers’.
Leadership is essential for building and delivering a successful charity strategy. It integrates day-to-day operations into the bigger picture and brings everyone along with your vision – but to achieve this, leadership needs to extend beyond the executive tier, across all levels of your organisation.
The first event to kick off our new Leadership Series brings together charity leaders from across the sector to share their experience developing successful digital strategies. Join us for an afternoon of live Q&As and discussions designed to help charity leaders strategise for success. Tickets cost £20 & VAT.
Google Ad Grants for beginners
Tuesday 17th November, Online. This 2-hour course is specifically for nonprofit staff who have been awarded the $10,000/month Google Ad Grant, but do not know the basics for setting up their first campaign.
What will be covered:
- What is a Google Ad Grant?
- How to structure your charity’s account
- Google Ads & Keywords
- Setting up a conversion with Google Analytics
- Google Ad Grants compliance and maintenance
Fit for Funding
Tuesday 17th November, online. Reserves are a critical element when building small charity resilience. However, they are often, for very valid reasons, miscalculated.
The session will look at Why we hold reserves, how to calculate reserves, what a good reserves policy looks like and how to report on reserves.
How to use agentic AI with monday.com
Wednesday 18th November, online. Join Charity Digital and monday.com to discover how AI agents can help charities save time, stay organised, and reduce manual admin. In this beginner-friendly webinar, you’ll learn what AI agents are, explore real charity use cases, and see how they can automate reminders, follow-ups, volunteer management, and funding opportunities.
You’ll leave with practical ideas and an AI agent you can start using right away.
Making the most of M365 apps – tips and tricks
Wednesday 18th November, online. Microsoft 365 offers huge possibilities. It helps charities with email, file storage, and provides plenty of productivity applications that can streamlines your charity. Registered charities in the UK are eligible for discounted licenses and this session aims to help you make the most of your M365 subscription.
This three-hour session shows you how to master 365 apps. The first section will cover an overview of the apps available. It will explore web vs desktop applications, the joys of Copilot, the best way to use Microsoft Forms, and the secrets of Sway. The second section is dedicated to Teams, exploring meeting and channel management, file storage, whiteboards and polls, and so much more.
The Art of Fundraising
Thursday 19th November, online. Join Fundraising Everywhere for a practical, one-day conference focused on the human side of fundraising. Learn how to make the ask with confidence, tell compelling stories, build stronger donor relationships, handle rejection, and gain internal buy-in.
Featuring real-world insights, practical tools, and honest conversations you can put into action right away.
Supercharge your use of social media
Tuesday 24th November, online. The landscape of social media is growing increasingly complex. Legacy platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and X seem to constantly change their offerings and shift functionality. New platforms arrive every week, perpetually touted as the next big thing, perhaps even commanding time and resources, then fade into irrelevance. It can prove difficult to navigate the social landscape, to find the platforms that suit your organisation, to identify the best demographics, to maximise return on investment.
This course aims, in just three hours, to supercharge your use of social media. We’ll explore how you can pick the right platforms for your charity and how to know whether you should invest, or divest, in other platforms. We’ll show you how to increase social media engagement, how to extend your reach, and how to ensure you target the most rewarding demographics.
Understanding Governance: The Trustee Role
Wednesday 25th – Thursday 26th November, online. Governance fundamentals for new and experienced trustees.
If you are new to the role of being a charity trustee, this course will provide the perfect introduction, while experienced trustees will also benefit from a refresher of their responsibilities and comprehensive updates on evolving elements of the trustee role.
Ambulance Awareness Day
Thursday 26th November, Penrith. Whether you’re a young person exploring career options, a parent or guardian, or simply curious about the ambulance service, this free event is for you.
View a flyer for the event here with more information
Strengthen Your Cyber Security with Microsoft 365
Thursday 26th November, online. Join Qlic IT for a practical Brunch Bites webinar exploring how to strengthen your organisation’s cyber security using Microsoft 365 tools you may already have access to.
This webinar will explore hidden security features within Microsoft 365, including multi-factor authentication, conditional access, email security, and Microsoft Secure Score. You’ll also learn how to get more value from your existing licence and reduce cyber risks without increasing costs.
Advanced Excel – tips and tricks
Tuesday 1st December, online. Join this 3 hour session to find out how to optimise your spreadsheets so they can do what they’re meant to be doing – saving you time, facilitating effective service delivery and enabling you and your team to get insight into the bigger picture.
This hands-on workshop will guide you through demos and practical exercises using a sample spreadsheet. Key features covered include:
- Smarter formulas that save you time
- Conditional formatting, data validation, and other techniques to keep your data tidy
- Using Pivot Tables to summarise and rearrange data
- Connect, clean & organise data from different sources using Power Query
Safeguarding for Trustees and Community Buildings
Tuesday 1st December, online. This session will look at the legislation, and what trustees need to know and do.
It will also look at how best to apply it in a community building setting where you may be hiring space but have little direct interaction with the vulnerable people attending the activities.
Developing a Fundraising Strategy
Tuesday 8th & Wednesday 9th December, online. This popular two day course will walk you through Lime Green Consulting’s tried-and-tested framework for developing a fundraising strategy, enabling you to evaluate and prioritise the most valuable fundraising activities for your organisation and make the best use of your limited resources.
We’ll show you how to analyse your current fundraising performance, explore future opportunities and challenges, and identify key fundraising audiences – then scope out and prioritise a range of different types of fundraising, identify key building blocks to put in place for long-term success, and accurately forecast the likely financial return. Finally, we’ll explain how to get everyone in your organisation behind a shared fundraising vision and ensure they understand their role in successful fundraising.
Advanced AI – upgrade your skills
Tuesday 15th December, online. As more organisations begin using AI tools in their day-to-day work, many people find themselves wanting to go beyond the basics and develop a deeper, more practical understanding of the technology. Questions around prompting, workflows, reliability, ethics, and limitations become increasingly important as AI use matures.
This advanced Academy AI course aims, in just three hours, to help you take your AI skills to the next level. Designed for those who have already completed an introductory AI session or have some experience using AI tools, the course explores more sophisticated prompting techniques, practical agentic workflows, real-world applications, and a deeper understanding of how AI systems operate.
Disclaimer
The information above is provided in good faith. Whilst every care is taken to ensure that it is correct, Cumbria CVS cannot accept liability for any omissions or inaccuracies and does not take responsibility for the quality for any services or products mentioned.
