Q5’s Pop Up Consultancy

About Project

Q5 place huge importance on delivering meaningful impact to the communities around us, both through and beyond delivery of our core consulting services. Since our inception in 2009, Q5 have been committed to ensuring that our business delivers wider social, economic, and environmental benefits.
The Q5 Foundation
Established in 2010, aims to tackle economic inequality and poverty. It extends our charitable work beyond our core consulting business and allows us to make a meaningful impact in the communities around us. Our dedicated Foundation Team and 60+ consultants each year drive initiatives to assist vulnerable people entering the workforce, start business initiatives, and provide executive coaching services free of charge in the Third Sector.
Pop Up Consulting
Pop Up Consulting is our pro-bono consulting initiative, offering 1-2 day interventions for charities, not-for-profits, social enterprises and small to medium-sized businesses, who would otherwise be unable to access consulting support. Since launching Pop Up, during the pandemic, we have helped over 128 organisations, providing 3,900+ hours of pro bono consulting support with 153 volunteering Q5ers.
Q5 provides support to beneficiaries facing strategic and operational challenges through a variety of services. These can include strategy and planning, where we help to renew their vision, translate it into strategic goals, and create a plan for successful implementation. We could also conduct an organisation 'Health Check,' examining their effectiveness and identifying areas of improvement. We also assist with marketing and business development, helping them understand what great business development and marketing should look like and practically generate more business or funding in the short to medium term. We have also helped beneficiaries review their fundraising strategy involving their existing revenue and funding streams, assessing their fit for the future, and generating new ideas for revenue generation. Additionally, we can explore the principles of building a high-performing team and successful leadership qualities through team and leadership development. Q5 could assist in developing an approach and plan for managing change effectively and sustainably within their organization through change management. Lastly, we are able to help introduce design thinking and facilitate an interactive idea generation workshop to help with proposition development and come up with new and innovative ideas for their products or services.
Our Pop Up assignments consist of a team of two or three Q5 members from different levels within the company, volunteering their time for each assignment, totaling around 30 hours. The Pop Up assignment process involves two 2.5-hour workshops, during which we collaborate with the beneficiaries to generate ideas and solutions to their challenges. At the end of each workshop, we collect all the ideas discussed and summarize them with an action plan going forward. Three months later, we reconnect with the beneficiaries to discuss the impact we have had and assess whether we need to run another intervention. This process allows us to make a tangible and sustainable difference in the communities we serve.
Our Pop Up Consulting initiative also won the Boosting Social Impact Award in the Lord Mayor’s Dragon Awards in 2021. This work has almost entirely been staffed by Q5ers volunteering their time and, such is the internal appetite and enthusiasm for Pop Up, that we have decided to incorporate this as an ongoing part of our business model.

Pop Up Consulting – which also won a Lord Mayor’s Dragon Award in 2021 – was recognised by Communitas’ judges for its work with Parentkind. The organisation dedicated to supporting school PTAs and advancing related research and charitable activities had developed ambitious new targets to serve the needs of the parent community on the education journey. To help realise their new organisational goals, the trustees hired an entrepreneurial CEO. A team from Q5 worked with the new CEO and senior leaders to understand the culture gaps between Parentkind’s current position and the desired future state needed to meet its ambitious vision, and created practical actions and enablers which would help the team make the transformation possible.

This involved discovery and planning sessions with the CEO and facilitating two workshops for the senior leadership team. The first workshop explored organisational strengths and weaknesses and the cultural gap between the current state and future ambitions. The second translated these into high-impact changes in behaviours and actions. Together with a write-up of the workshops, Q5 also provided Parentkind with actionable insights and recommendations for both quick wins and long-term change.