Learning from Supporting Change and Impact

This page sets out what the evaluation is looking at and what it has found to date.

Supporting Change and Impact provides extra support to existing BIG grant-holders in England who are coming to the end of their grant to better plan for their future in the current uncertain economic environment.

Supporting Change offers grant-holders up to £10,000 to help cover the costs of reviewing their delivery model to make it more sustainable.
Supporting Impact gives grant-holders who can demonstrate a high level of quality, learning and impact an additional year’s funding.

Supporting Change and Impact is part of BIG England’s wider Building Capabilities for Impact and Legacy framework.

In 2012 we commissioned Rocket Science to review and assess:

how projects have spent their funding
how this has affected their sustainability, reach and impact, and
how others funders support excellence, sustainability and impact.

We want to use findings from the evaluation, which will run until 2014, to help us and others to focus our support for excellence and sustainability in future.

The main findings from the baseline study include the following:

The funding has been well received by projects. They consider the funding a timely way of helping them to focus on their development and sustainability.
Projects were generally confident of their ability to diagnose their development needs and are open to using external support.
Projects have sought support from national and business support organisations rather than their local CVS or VCS support organisation.
Defining ‘project excellence’ is difficult. There is a need to understand what it means in particular circumstances and then how to measure it.
While there were high levels of satisfaction with the support on offer and how BIG administered the funding (including the desire to award funding without delay), some groups highlighted the short application turnaround times as a challenge.

The next phase of the evaluation will explore these emerging themes in more depth by tracking the experience of 100 projects. We will publish the next report in spring 2013.