What does BUFDG stand for?

That’s a bit of a trick question, and for the purposes of this communication, the short answer is that it no longer stands for the British Universities Finance Directors Group – we’re now simply ‘BUFDG’.

The longer answer is that, with the approval of the BUFDG Exec, we’ve been subtly dropping that old name for about a year now and, while you might find it on some of our old guidance documents and courses for example, you won’t find it explicitly stated in our logo or on our web pages (a prize if you do spot it somewhere on a web page and are the first person to tell us about it/send us the link! Documents/downloads don’t count, web pages only).*

When we undertook the BUFDG review in 2023 members told us that the name was no longer inclusive of the entire BUFDG community, and we listened. A long time ago, the British Universities Finance Directors Group was exactly that - a group of finance directors in British universities who got together for meetings and conferences. But 32 years on, with more than 9,500 individual members from 189 member institutions, BUFDG is a lot more than that! We also now have higher education providers in our membership that are not universities. So the name was starting to feel unrepresentative of what we do and who we support.

We now have a broad membership from across all strands of university and higher education finance and finance-related roles (and beyond), and we provide all sorts of services to a variety of different networks and communities within our membership, all of whom are equally important in the interconnected web of internal professional services support for higher education providers.

When we asked members what the organisation (rather than the acronym) stands for and what it means to them, the responses boiled to down to some key themes which we have reflected in our mission statement, ‘Supporting Higher Education Finance Teams’, and our strategic pillars of Network, Knowledge, and Community (all of which you may have noticed around our website over the past year or so).

So, there you have it – like some other H E sector organisations such as EAUC and Jisc (if only it were as easy to pronounce as Jisc!), BUFDG’s acronym has become its full name. And if anyone asks you ‘what’s BUFDG?’ (which we usually hear pronounced ‘BUFF-DUG’ or even 'BUFF-DOG'), you can simply tell them it’s the representative body for higher education finance staff.

*Thanks to those who have already found our T&Cs pages, plus the Google map link and Google search result with the full name on - these pages will be updated shortly, and no need for anyone else to tell us about those ones, thanks!