This week's blog explores the first of three reports by Joe Saxton and Sarah Eberhardt about the impact that Covid-19 has had on charities over the last year and what the future is looking like for the sector. 

Over the last week we continued our series of polls to understand the public response to the pandemic and how it is impacting on charities. In this week's blog Cian reflects on some of the latest trends across the charity sector.

The Lotteries Council commissioned nfpSynergy to write an independent report looking into the issues around problem gambling and responsible play. Here it is!

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.