Foundation Impact

At the Foundation we believe it is important to understand the impact of the funding and support we provide to the many excellent organisations we work with. We see ourselves as ‘enablers’ and are careful to differentiate our programme and Foundation level impact from the impact our grantees’ projects have on the people they work with and the communities they serve. To help us see the whole picture we commissioned work from three different perspectives: a study to look at how effective we are as a grant maker, a study to see how the wider public views what we do and an impact evaluation focusing on our current strategic approach.

 

Interim Impact Evaluation

The Foundation’s strategy, launched in 2011, aims to strengthen the sustainability and resilience of the organisations and sectors we support, so that we can help secure long-term support to disadvantaged groups in the years to come.

The Foundation commissioned this impact evaluation to understand and describe the impact the Foundation is having on the sector and on the organisations it is working to support and to assess whether the ‘funder plus’ approach we use has the potential to create greater impact in terms of resilience and sustainability for the organisations the Foundation works with and the disadvantaged groups it prioritises. We also asked the researchers to create a baseline against which future progress can be measured and to advise on potential improvements to maximise our impact and inform our decision-making about future support.

 

Public Value

The Foundation targets its resources through a number of programmes, supporting voluntary sector organisations to address disadvantage and critical gaps in provision. Each of these organisations supports a number of beneficiaries – some work with hundreds of people, others reach smaller numbers but work with them intensively, to help them overcome disadvantage and move on in their lives.

The Foundation already had some understanding of the difference it was making to funded organisations  from the findings of the Grantee Perception Study we commissioned in 2010. The ‘Interim Impact evaluation we commissioned was designed to help us understand and capture the outcomes and impact of the Foundation’s current strategic direction. The missing piece of the jigsaw was a clear understanding of the wider ‘Public Value’ the Foundation generates.

Public value is a framework that was originally developed for the public sector and is now helping inform voluntary sector understanding of the impact an organisation makes at the societal level rather than at the level of the individual beneficiary or grantee organisation. The Foundation found it helpful to understand  what the public judges to be valuable about what our organisation does.

 

Grantee Perception Report

To help us to be more responsive in supporting the organisations we fund, the Foundation commissioned the Center for Effective Philanthropy to carry out an independent ‘Grantee Perception Study’ on our behalf. The research, based on an approach tested with more than 250 Trusts and Foundations in the US and UK gave our organisations an opportunity to feed back on how effective our support was and what impact it had on their work. The findings have helped us improve the way we work and communicate with the organisations we support and share the things we have learned across all our work more effectively. The report summarises how we work compared with other funders and makes recommendations for  possible improvements.