OR Society marks 200 pro bono projects completed
Howard Lake | 5 June 2025 | News
To mark Volunteering Week in the UK a group of professional problem solvers has announced that its volunteers have now completed over 200 free projects for UK charities. The OR Society’s Pro Bono Operational Research (OR) volunteers are skilled professionals who offer vital support to third sector organisations, often stepping in “to solve the most complex and tricky challenges where there are no obvious answers”.
Isma Shafqat, Pro Bono Manager at The Operational Research Society, explains the value that the Society’s volunteers bring to charities:
“With charities facing increased demand and tighter budgets, many are using operational research – a scientific, data-driven approach to decision-making. Our expert volunteers contribute their time and skills to help charities plan, adapt, and improve their work, especially when faced with problems that lack straightforward solutions.”
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What the Pro Bono OR scheme offers
The Pro Bono OR scheme provides charities with various types of support. This includes strategic planning and data analysis, which helps them make informed decisions even in uncertain situations. Volunteers also assist with improving daily operations and measuring their impact.
The Welcome Centre, for example, received help to streamline how they support people in crisis, enabling them to manage growing needs more effectively despite complex operational hurdles.
Volunteers also assisted RUHX, an NHS charity, in understanding their donors better, leading to more focused and effective fundraising campaigns that improved supporter engagement by uncovering insights from vast amounts of data.
Help for smaller charities
The scheme also provides help to smaller charities.
The Harvey Hext Trust, a bereavement charity that provides personalised Memory Boxes and Bears to grieving children, needed help to track their impact. An OR volunteer helped deliver a structured system for this by building a functional database from past invoices. This now allows the Trust to measure clearly their achievements, identify areas needing more support, and strengthen future grant applications.
Shafqat commented:
“These examples demonstrate how operational research can make a significant difference, particularly by tackling those difficult questions where intuition alone isn’t enough.
“Our Pro Bono OR scheme offers crucial support, especially when many charities have limited resources, providing a unique and valuable tool to address problems they might otherwise be unable to tackle.”
The OR Society is actively looking for more charities who could benefit from this expert, free support.
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.