Insights of a CEO: Nanette Mellor

The Brain Charity offers emotional support, practical help, and social activities to anyone with a neurological condition, and to their family, friends, and carers.

After nine years, Nanette Mellor is leaving her role as CEO of the charity and will be taking up a new role of CEO at Drake Music. As The Brain Charity launches its search for a new leader, we took the chance to talk to Nanette about her experiences at the charity, her thoughts about digital accessibility, and about what she sees for the future of the sector.

CD: As the CEO of The Brain Charity, how have you been able to use the voices of service users to form the basis of strategic decision making?

NM: The obvious place for any charity is to start with the needs of people you’re here to support. Once you understand that your service users’ needs are the starting point for everything, the rest of the strategic planning falls into place.

When making any big decision, I go back to where we began – what do the people we support need?

At The Brain Charity, we also make sure our service users are represented within our staff and volunteer teams through lived experience of neurological conditions. Our offices being based in our public centre also means service users are coming in and out all the time and I can speak to our community in the café and pop into workshops when I need to gauge opinions and feedback.

CD: When it comes to championing people with disabilities, what do you think is the role of digital accessibility?

NM: When making any decision about how best to support our clients with disabilities, we consult with them. We try to consult with people in as many different digital and non-digital ways as possible to make sure we are accessible – verbally and paper-based will always have a place for some clients, but also electronically via web, smartphone, and QR code.

Tapping into text-based questionnaires that work on any sort of phone is our next plan – so we can have a quick live snapshot of what we are doing and what people’s needs are.

Another factor in terms of digital accessibility is that we are lucky to be living in a time where things we would previously have had to buy as specialist software are now becoming part and parcel of what’s on offer from the big players like Microsoft and Google.

CD: How do you feel about the charity sector in 2023 and where it is going?

NM: As a sector, we are becoming more experienced in delivering business activity and that’s a really great thing.

As an economy, the third sector owns very little of that economic space, but as a society people would prefer to buy products and services from a not-for-profit than from anywhere else – particularly the younger generation.

We need to do more business and take more of that market share away from the private sector. If we can tap into those streams of income, they are more stable and reliable than other areas of fundraising.

Digital advances can also help us streamline and automate flexibly.

CD: What is the best lesson you have learnt as CEO of The Brain Charity?

NM: Surround yourself with people who enjoy the things you don’t enjoy. You can either try and do everything yourself and not do everything well or find someone who is brilliant at the things you’re not so good at.

As a team, that’s where the strength comes from – diversity and differences.