The Prince’s Trust is the UK’s leading youth charity providing practical and financial support to the young people who need it most, helping them to develop key skills and move into work, education or training.

In January 2011, The Prince’s Trust joined forces with another leading youth organisation, Fairbridge, to form one organisation dedicated to supporting the marginalised and disadvantaged young people across the UK. This was the first major merger in the Charity sector and it presented wide-ranging challenges across both organisations.

Drawing on our extensive M&A experience, we helped The Trust and Fairbridge to define and execute a plan of how the two organisations would come together – from the level of business change and training required and location of the new headquarters, to how they could best integrate their IT systems.

At a time of substantial change, we helped The Trust to expand the reach and effectiveness of its services to young people by conducting market analysis to feed into their three-year growth strategy. Development of an action plan for spend with The Trust has helped them to maximise the impact of £500k of funding. As a result of the merger, the combined organisation has seen a significant increase in the number of young people supported, attracted higher income, alongside a reduction in costs per young person, with no reduction in the quality of support offered.

In addition, the Social Impact Bond feasibility study enabled The Trust to clearly demonstrate the social impact of its Enterprise and Education Programmes. The pro bono support was greatly welcomed and received an award from the Worshipful Company of Management Consultants.

Martina Milburn, CEO of The Prince’s Trust wrote to Deloitte to say:

“I want to extend my thanks to your colleagues for their hard work and support of The Trust over the past year. As you know, our merger with Fairbridge has been a large but successful undertaking and we wouldn’t be in the position we are today without Deloitte’s extremely valuable guidance.”