2026 State of the Sector Survey

Why this survey matters

Involving Lincs acts as a network of networks, bringing together organisations across Lincolnshire’s voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise (VCFSE) landscape. It helps build stronger strategic leadership and a clearer collective voice, supporting organisations to engage with confidence when working with statutory partners such as local authorities, health services, and wider public and private sector bodies.

In 2023, Involving Lincs, working alongside HWLincs, carried out a countywide survey to understand the pressures facing VCFSE organisations in Lincolnshire. Organisations raised shared challenges, including funding instability, volunteer and trustee pressures, rising costs, limited collaboration, and concerns about long-term sustainability.

As a direct outcome of that survey, Involving Lincs secured National Lottery funding to develop the Strength and Leadership programme. The programme focuses on system-level issues that cannot be solved by organisations working in isolation. Since July 2025, it has begun to strengthen leadership confidence and support more joined-up ways of working across VCFSE organisations in Lincolnshire.

This survey is the next step in that journey. It is designed to provide a broad snapshot of where organisations are now, rather than repeating detailed data collection. Survey fatigue was raised clearly in the 2023 survey, so this work has been developed with infrastructure partners including Lincolnshire Voluntary Engagement Team, Lincolnshire Community and Voluntary Partnership, Lincolnshire Community Foundation, Active Lincolnshire, and the Children and Youth Forum Network facilitated by Children’s Links.

Together, these partners agreed what information is most commonly requested from organisations and what evidence would help move the issues raised in the last survey forward. By collecting this information once, future work can focus on smaller, more targeted questions rather than repeating whole surveys.

By taking part, organisations help build a shared evidence base that can be used collectively to inform support, funding conversations and wider system discussions. Importantly, this survey shows that feedback from the previous survey was listened to, that action has followed, and that organisations across Lincolnshire continue to move forward together.

Data protection and privacy

You can complete this survey anonymously.  Your answers are combined with others to build an overall picture of the VCFSE sector across Greater Lincolnshire.  This supports shared learning, better planning and future investment amongst other things.  All survey results that are shared more widely will be anonymised.

Providing contact details is optional and used only for the reason you choose.

For example to receive a summary of the findings or for an organisation to contact you directly if you have identified you would like support. This option will be at the end of the survey.

All data is kept securely and shared only in anonymised form with a wide range of partners, such as VCFSE organisations, infrastructure organisations, funders and statutory bodies.  This helps improve understanding of VCFSE organisations and the sector at a system level.  You can ask to see, change or delete any personal data you provide.

For any questions, please contact Dale Wootton at Involving Lincs: Dale@involving-lincs.co.uk or call 07923 614704.