NCC Group and UK Small Charities Coalition celebrate one year of cyber partnership

Global cyber security and risk mitigation expert, NCC Group, is celebrating one year of its formal partnership with the UK’s Small Charities Coalition (SCC), which began with the sole aim of boosting the cyber resilience of small charities across the UK.

Despite challenges around Covid-19 over the last 12 months, over 40 individuals from 36 charities have benefitted from training workshops, helping to build the resilience of the charities’ 12,500 employees, trustees, volunteers, beneficiaries and service users.

The training and workshops, delivered by an experienced team of 15 security consultants from NCC Group, followed the National Cyber Security Centre’s (NCSC) Small Charity Guide, and included advice on keeping information secure, and managing new digital tools such as video conferencing.

As well as this, NCC Group’s experts recorded four cyber security advice videos, which offered hands-on, jargon-free advice and support for SCC members, many of whom were forced to shift their operations online faster than anticipated in 2020.

This programme resulted in attendees taking immediate action to boost their cyber resilience, such as reviewing their passwords and logins, ensuring that multi-factor authentication was implemented for finance systems and banking accounts, and storing and backing up files and data in the safest possible way.

Feedback from the sessions states how the training has given members “reassuring and realistic advice”, and “a broad introduction [to] cyber security [and] lots of specific and practical tips about many things to make our charity as safe as possible”. 

All of the small charities that attended provide crucial services to their local communities – from promoting social cohesion, tackling homelessness, loneliness, health inequalities and financial hardship, to supporting those living with disabilities or having suffered domestic abuse and providing education and back to work opportunities for disadvantaged communities.

Following on from the success of last 12 months, NCC Group will work closely with the SCC to expand its collaboration in 2021. This will see further cyber resilience workshops delivered, the launch of a dedicated cyber mentoring scheme as part of the SCC’s overall mentoring offer, which will provide one-to-one support for charities’ individual cyber security challenges and projects, and NCC Group becoming a Referral Partner for SCC’s helpdesk.

Kat Sommer head of public affairs at NCC Group commented: “From the outset of our partnership we knew that we wanted to give our brilliant consultants the opportunity to share their knowledge and expertise with organisations that might otherwise struggle to access it.

“To see the positive feedback from the small charities as well as our own consultants is just wonderful. In these uncertain times, providing organisations with the skills they need to boost resilience can be difficult, but we have proved how this can work in action and how valuable training like this can be to the third sector. I’m excited to expand our partnership with the SCC and continue supporting the UK’s small charities sector in boosting their cyber resilience.”

Rita Chadha chief executive at the Small Charities Coalition, added: “We’ve been very grateful for NCC Group’s support over the first year of our partnership. It has been an extremely challenging year for the UK’s small charities, but knowing that organisations like NCC Group remained true to their commitment and flexible to support us and our members in the best possible way we can all come to terms with our new digital reality. It has been an opportunity to learn and develop for our members and has helped the morale of many a small charity. We’re looking forward to seeing what more our partnership can deliver over the next year.”