The Charity Commission wants to work with the voluntary sector to make trusteeship more attractive, its chief executive has said.

Speaking at a Trustees Week event in London yesterday, David Holdsworth highlighted research the commission has been conducting with the think tank Pro Bono Economics on charity trusteeship.

Holdsworth said: “We intend to use the findings to help us better support trustees through the advice and guidance we provide. We also want to work with the sector to think about how we can make trusteeship more attractive so that charities can fill trustee vacancies, and at the same time benefit from having a broad range of skills and experience on their boards.”

Initial findings from the research, released this week, showed that eight of out 10 trustees said they would recommend the role to others.

Holdsworth contrasted this with research published on Monday by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, which showed that four out of five charities were carrying a vacancy on their board, indicating a “crisis” of trusteeship.

The full results of the study are expected to be released in the new year.

He said the regulator was keen to understand more about the scale of federated charities and had included new questions in last year’s annual return to help it establish whether individual organisations were part of a federation.

“More data on this will, we hope, help us make more targeted interventions or offer more bespoke messaging where we see issues in one charity that is part of a federated structure that might be helpful for others to learn from,” he said.

Holdsworth said trustees were “a driving force in charities, whose work is often unseen, taking place behind the scenes of charities’ frontline work”.

He said Trustees Week presented an opportunity to “bring their work into the limelight, to celebrate and thank trustees for the contribution they make, and support and encourage more people to step up and take on the rewarding role”.

Holdsworth also said it would be remiss of him not to mention the sadness he felt about the demise of Getting on Board, which announced last month it was to close.