Pros
Id like to share my experience but also to offer a fairer appraisal of CDP that the ‘dysfunctional, avoid’ post who clearly made no effort to embed themselves into the culture or spend any time working to improve it. On the whole CDP is working very hard to improve. CDP is a good organisation to work with, with a warm culture and very nice people to work with. Its certainly a country mile better than my last place thus I think some perspective is required. Pros include good pay for the charity/non-profit sector (accepted not as good as the commercial sector but then you can always go and work elsewhere if you don’t like it). Nice offices. Friendly hardworking staff. Standard benefits for this kind of role. A very approachable CEO and Senior Team who are very aware of where their weaker points lie.
Cons
In terms of cons, none really. It has to be acknowledged that CDP has grown beyond that magic number of 150 employees which means operational change is required. This has been acknowledged and the organisation is about to roll out a programme of change to address many of the points raised in previous posters comments. So they have listened and are aiming to do something about it, the poster would know this if they had been here for 12 months. This will create fundamental challenges to the management team and challenge some of the politics that exists (show me an org where it doesn’t). The organisation does lack a lot of internal structure and key operational controls to deliver its work, but that is coming too. There has also been an acknowledgement that there isn’t enough management experience or formalised structures for management. The organisation has been investing in this over the last 18 months and bringing in some very experienced people into senior roles. Obviously there is a time lag to seeing the whole benefits of this, especially in an organisation whose model doesn’t allow for the most efficient deployment of these skills and experience but I feel the organisation and its new hires should be measured when this has come together in the next 12 months. It is not the most dysfunctional organisation out there, not by a country mile. The data isn’t abysmal as it is being used by some big players with little complaint. The salaries aren’t low for the non-profit sector. I have not witnessed any low level sexism, the organisation has a very healthy level of gender balance at all levels.