This week, we reflect on our experience of recruiting for new Research Assistants last Autumn. We received a record number of 650 applications for two positions - indicative of how tough the current job market is. We share our criteria for shortlisting candidates, and highlight things you can do to give your job application the best chance of standing out in this difficult climate.

'Do-gooders', so called by Home Secretary Priti Patel, continue to plug the gaps in society left by the inaction of the current government. In this week's guest blog Peter Markham, a correspondent for the Immigration Advice Service, digs a little deeper into this worrying trend and questions what this means for charity in the UK.

This weekend we continued our series of polls to understand public reactions to the pandemic and charities. Case numbers, hospitalisations and deaths have all increased dramatically since our previous wave of fieldwork so now is a particularly important moment to try and gauge how the public is feeling. Explore our results in this week's blog.

In May we saw a number of public bodies, such as the NHS, reach a peak in our measures of public trust. Charities, worryingly, seem to buck that trend. In this week's blog, Cian Murphy reflects on the potential reasons behind this and the implications for the sector:

Earlier this year nfpSynergy surveyed 143 grantees and 218 unsuccessful applications from The John Ellerman Foundation to understand how charities have been impacted by Covid-19, and the overall effectiveness of the foundation. In this week's blog, Tim Harrison-Byrne discusses some of the insights from that research.

There has been quite a bit of recent discussion about whether having a royal patron actually makes any difference (https://www.civilsociety.co.uk/news/majority-of-uk-charities-with-royal-patrons-had-zero-public-engagements-with-them-last-year.html). There is no doubt that, done well, royal involvement can make a real difference to charities and causes.

Volunteers have proved how crucial they are for the charity sector, and for society more broadly, during the Covid-19 pandemic. In this week's blog, Max Roche contextualises some recent changes in volunteering patterns within some longitudinal trends.

In this week's blog, Max Roche looks at some potential methods of quantifying charity CEO earnings beyond our fixation with the number of zeros at the end of the salary.

This week's blog highlights the importance of making LGBT+ voices heard and the fact that this audience remains largely under-researched in the charity sector. It also analyses our LGBT+ research and what an ideal LGBT+ charity would look like.

This week's blog focuses on the results of our latest wave of research into the impact of Covid-19 on the charity sector. We highlight the changing public perceptions of the crisis as well as looking at the government and charity response, drawing out key conclusions about what this could mean for the sector.