Helping second tier organisations and funders
We help second tier charities and funders to develop their impact strategy and to develop application, management and reporting frameworks that support good evaluation practice among the organisations they support.
1. Develop an impact strategy
We help funders to assess need, identify effective approaches for addressing a social need, and monitor long term change in people and communities. We do this through desk research, secondary analysis of data, and, when appropriate, conducting or commissioning and managing independent primary research.
2. Develop an effectiveness framework for supported organisations
We help funders to develop impact, evaluation and effectiveness frameworks for the organisations they support that focus on standards of governance rather than standards of evidence. We believe that the most important priority for funders is to support frontline charities to deliver ‘good governance’ rather than ‘good science’. This means that funders should encourage frontline organisations to develop their own short term outcomes to use as key performance indicators to feed back to their funders – while explaining how these contribute to the long term social objectives. Funders should not be asking charities to report against the long term objectives themselves.
3. Provide evaluation support for frontline organisations
It is important that funders support charities to conduct their own evaluation but this should focus on understanding each charity’s own keys to success and exploring how they can improve their efficiency and effectiveness rather than on ‘proving’ that what they do works. We help funders to encourage methods that are going to give charities insight into what they are doing well and what they are doing less well thus helping the charity learn and improve. In this context, it is the appropriateness of the methodology rather than the strength of the methodology that is important and qualitative methods can be as useful and informative as quantitative ones.