With rising expectations and tighter laws around compliance, the current landscape can be tricky for charities and social care providers to navigate. Third sector organisations need to demonstrate strong Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) policies and processes to a range of stakeholders.
Combine this with the daily challenges of safeguarding, reporting health and safety events, and protecting lone workers and volunteers – GRC is a full-time commitment.
But the organisations that manage to juggle all this effectively have an opportunity to get ahead. Not only will you be able to protect the people in your care, but you can also prove high standards, win trust, and stay competitive for new funding and contracts.
We’ve put together six lessons that we’ve learnt from working with a wide array of organisations from across the charity and social care sector.
Lesson #1: Modern Event Reporting Goes Far Beyond H&S
At Vatix, we see a lot of different customers reporting a lot of different incident types.
Physical incidents (like slips, trips, and falls) are one of the most common incident types regardless of industry. Although it’s important to collect and track this kind of data, organisations with elite safety performance are capturing a wider range of events to get a more thorough insight into health and safety.
As a charity or social care provider, safeguarding the people that you support and care for is a top priority. And you don’t want to only report on safeguarding incidents that have actually taken place, but also those that could happen. Recording behaviours of concern in your event reporting platform can help you to proactively recognise warning signs and prevent risks from escalating.
We find that the most effective organisations record events promptly, escalate them properly, and have clear workflows and processes in place for following up. This means undertaking investigations to understand why an incident happened and putting follow up actions in place (and making sure they happen). For every event reported, learnings should be shared with the wider team so preventative action can be taken.
The right system brings everything together in one place while securely managing sensitive data, permissions, and workflows – ensuring that H&S teams, safeguarding leads, and operational managers have timely access to exactly what they need.
Lesson #2: Lone Worker Safety Isn’t Just For Employees – Volunteers Matter Too
Most charities and social care organisations will have employees who are classified as lone workers. Whether this be outreach workers, family support teams, or case workers, a lot of their time will be spent out in the field alone, or working directly with the people they support.
Lone workers are more vulnerable to risks and it is your duty of care to ensure they are protected. Leaving lone workers without adequate safety solutions also poses a governance and reputational risk.
Depending on the structure of your organisation, your lone workers may be paid members of staff, or they could be volunteers. If working with the latter, it pays to be aware that the risk is heightened when volunteers are involved – their wellbeing and sense of safety affects whether they keep showing up.
Good practice goes beyond basic panic alarms – having a system (like a lone worker app) that allows colleagues to check in with each other is a simple but powerful way to keep lone workers connected and supported all day long.
Lesson #3: Audits & Inspections Make Your Governance Visible
Undertaking audits and inspections internally is an important sensecheck to make sure safety performance is where it needs to be and to spot areas that could be improved. Identifying and improving weaker areas will put you in good stead when it comes to official, external audits.
Boards and regulators expect you to prove that you check the right things, at the right time. And have all the documentation to hand to prove that you’ve done so.
There are lots of different touchpoints to cover as part of your audit and inspection preparation, but we’ve listed some key areas that organisations working in the third sector could focus on:
- Fire safety checks in a residential setting
- Safeguarding policy compliance
- Internal spot checks for quality of care or youth work
- Substance misuse awareness training logs
- Delegated authorities and escalation procedures
- DBS checks completed and recorded
An integrated digital audit tool makes it easy to plan, record and evidence that all of these checks happen – creating accountability if something needs fixing.
Lesson #4: Policies, Risk Assessments & Procedures — Everyone Needs the Right Version
Another challenge that we see coming up time and time again is keeping on top of the piles of documentation that are part and parcel of working in the third sector.
It’s common to find multiple versions of the same policy circulating, with each stakeholder saving their own copy in a different format – often tucked away in a Word document or buried in an email. This makes it hard to identify the most current and accurate version, leading to confusion over which document should actually be followed.
Good governance means you know your staff and volunteers are always working from the right policy, the right procedure, the right risk assessment. And ensuring that you have the right tools and systems in place to easily keep track of documents and manage version control.
A good GRC system makes it easy to create, review and share live documents with the people who need them – without confusion or version sprawl.
Lesson #5: Insights & Dashboards – Make Your Governance Visible to the People Who Care
From event reporting and monitoring lone worker safety to audits and documents control, you’re covering a lot of different bases. How do you bring all this together to create a holistic overview of safety in your organisation?
The high-performing organisations that we work with create custom analytics dashboards that allow you (and your trustees) to see the big picture, such as trends in incidents, near misses, and potential compliance gaps.
It’s also important from a regulatory and compliance perspective. Your commissioners want evidence that you meet high standards – increasingly, this is make-or-break at contract renewal.
The smartest organisation don’t just compile these insights – they leverage them to gain advantage with their boards and win new opportunities during competitive tenders.
Lesson #6: Bring it together – one place, tailored to you
The underlying problem that we see with old or legacy systems is that many disparate tools are being used that don’t speak to each other, leading to complex workarounds and costly bolt-ons. All these inefficiencies slow you down and hold you back from delivering support and care to the people you represent.
We’ve seen firsthand how implementing a single, flexible system that brings all your GRC requirements together in one place can be a gamechanger for charities and social care providers.
Having one customisable platform to handle event reporting, audits, document management, and risk registers empowers you to tailor solutions that fit your exact needs without expensive consultants or technical headaches.
A Smarter Way to Stay Safe, Compliant, and Competitive
For UK charities and social care providers, delivering safe, high-quality services in a heavily regulated environment isn’t just a moral obligation – it’s a strategic necessity. From safeguarding vulnerable people and supporting lone workers to managing audits and compliance documentation, Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) is the backbone of trust, resilience, and operational excellence.
The six lessons we’ve shared highlight what the most forward-thinking organisations are already doing: using modern tools and systems to make governance practical, proactive, and visible – not just to regulators and funders, but to the teams doing the work on the ground.
Whether you’re preparing for your next audit, responding to a safeguarding concern, or simply trying to reduce paperwork and risk, the right GRC approach helps you respond with confidence and clarity.
And when everything – reporting, policies, audits, dashboards – lives in one secure, user-friendly system, you free up your team to focus on what really matters: delivering impact safely and sustainably.
Want to see how other charities and social care providers are modernising GRC? We’re happy to share more lessons learned – book a short, informal call here.
