Ceri Doyle, Big Lottery Fund
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Ceri Doyle, Big Lottery Fund
- 1. Impact of Infrastructure Ceri Doyle, Director, Strategy, Performance and Learning, Big Lottery Fund
- 2. Introduction • Context • Demonstrating impact • BIG’s investment in infrastructure • Building Capabilities: next steps • Future of support services
- 3. Context • Fresh Thinking • Policy Directions • Public spending reductions • Localism • New opportunities
- 4. Demonstrating impact • More important than ever, very hard to do! • Lots of different audiences – government, funders, frontline voluntary organisations • New Tools for a New World
- 5. BIG’s investment in support services • BASIS • Supporting Change and Impact • Transforming Local Infrastructure (delivered on behalf of government) • Assist
- 6. Building Capabilities for Impact and Legacy • Discussion paper published in December • More than 200 responses • General support for principles in paper, and lots of interesting responses • Updated paper later this year, setting out our plans to spend at least £20 million
- 7. Future of support services • Delivering Transforming Local Infrastructure • Ensuring that frontline voluntary organisations which receive BIG’s funding can choose high quality support services • Turning principles of discussion paper into action
Editor's Notes
- Good morning, I’m Ceri Doyle... In this presentation, I am going to cover the context – both internal to Big Lottery Fund and external influences – which shape our plans for investment. Then explain the ‘story so far’ of BIG’s investment in infrastructure – more than £150 million over the past seven years. This includes both our own Lottery funding on programmes such as BASIS, as well as the Transforming Local Infrastructure programme, which we are delivering on behalf of government (which I know there is a specific workshop about during today’s conference). In December, we published a discussion paper, setting out some principles for our future investment in support services in England, called ‘Building Capabilities for Impact and Legacy’. I’ll let you know about the next steps in taking forward this paper and all the responses which we received. With all this in mind, I’ll then offer some thoughts on the importance – and challenges – of demonstrating impact, and the future of support services for voluntary organisations.
- It is important to understand the context within which these discussions about the impact of infrastructure are taking place. We recently published ‘Fresh Thinking’, . This is a short document which re-states BIG’s key foundations and priorities and outlines how we intend to focus our work over the next three years. The refresh is not a wholesale rewrite of Big thinking, the strategic framework we published in 2009. Our primary focus is still on supporting those most in need, working with the VCS, being additional to government and distributing a mix of programmes including open, small grants programmes. The revised document now reflects many of the internal and external changes that have taken place since Big thinking was published in 2009. The refresh document also provides a clear steer as to how BIG will engage in new areas of policy development and funding practice. Fresh Thinking takes into account the new policy directions which we recently received from government, alongside a number of changes to the funding environment in which we work. In this particular context, it is worth noting that our Policy Directions refer to ‘Strengthening the capacity of voluntary and community organisations and social enterprises’ as one of our priorities. In terms of the external context, the world is very different from 2004-5, the last time that BIG developed a major funding initiative around infrastructure. Most infrastructure organisations and their members are facing substantial public spending reductions, challenging them to meet greater needs with fewer resources. In addition, we are seeing very different experiences in different localities – in some areas, infrastructure organisations are thriving and securing new resources, often building on excellent relationships with their local authority, whereas in other areas support for voluntary organisations is weak or non-existent. There are some exciting new opportunities out there, but some are proving more able to engage with these than others.
- Given this context, it is more important than ever for all voluntary organisations, including infrastructure, to demonstrate the impact of their work. But we all know that it is particularly difficult to attribute impact for end users of services to the interventions of infrastructure providers. Perhaps the best proxy is ‘stronger frontline voluntary organisations better equipped to deliver services / achieve their goals’. BIG has funded the Value of Infrastructure Project, and recently awarded it additional funding through our Supporting Change initiative. We think that this project has been very successful in developing tools to help infrastructure understand and demonstrate its impact. There are lots of different stakeholders to which an infrastructure organisation might need to demonstrate their impact, each of which is interested in different things. The measures of impact which might impress the local statutory sector, or government ministers, can be very different from those which other funders – including Big Lottery Fund – are looking for. And at the same time as demonstrating impact to funders, infrastructure organisations will be increasingly called upon to demonstrate impact to their members and frontline voluntary organisations. In the workshops today, you will be able to discuss the implications of more ‘demand-led’ approaches to funding infrastructure – we expect that those infrastructure organisations which are able to become financially sustainable and deliver high quality services are ones which manage to demonstrate impact and persuade customer voluntary organisations to choose and pay for the services which they have to offer. I’d also encourage you to have a look at a study which we funded by Professor Diana Leet, called ‘New Tools for a New World’. This study argued for a systems-based approach rather than one which focused exclusively on the voluntary sector, and noted the value of ‘bricolage’, finding ways of recombining existing resources in creative and different ways. Research has also shown that organisations don’t always find it easy to know what they want, or think they want eg ‘fundraising’ skills when in fact they need something more upstream (eg a better strategic understanding of what they are trying to achieve).
- BIG has been a major funder of support services for voluntary organisations. Over the past decade, we have spent more than £150 million in this area. In 2006, we launched a supplier-side investment - the BASIS programme – that made around £158 million available via three and five year grants to infrastructure organisations. There remains a legacy from that investment which will continue through a number of projects until 2014/15. We recently awarded ‘Supporting Change’ funding to over eight hundred of our grant holders, including a range of infrastructure organisations which receive funding through BASIS. This funding is intended to help them get support to think about the best ways to deliver their services in the future. We are very interested in how we can provide effective ‘in grant’ support to our grant holders, in order to make sure that the good work that they do with Lottery resources can be sustained even when our funding comes to an end. We are currently delivering the £30 million Transforming Local Infrastructure Fund on behalf of government, helping partnerships of infrastructure organisations to rationalise and transform the services that they offer. We will also be launching an initiative to support local and specialist infrastructure organisations, called Assist, this summer. Further details about this will be available shortly.
- In December, we published our ‘Building Capabilities for Impact and Legacy’ discussion paper. This set out key principles for our approach to enabling voluntary organisations to get the support that they need to develop and flourish. We’ve received more than two hundred responses to this paper, which we are currently analysing. We’ve received general support for the principles, lots of interesting examples of ideas on how to turn these principles into practice, and reflections on some of the challenges involved. We are planning a mixed approach to our funding in future. In some cases, we believe that the best approach will be for us to give frontline voluntary organisations the choice about which services they need and where to get them from, including access to independent assessments to help them identify their support needs. We recognise that there are some services which aren’t suitable for this ‘demand-led’ approach, and are considering alternative approaches about how we might support these. If you are interested in finding out more about this, my colleague Dan Paskins will be speaking at one of the workshops which are taking place during the day on the funders’ perspective on infrastructure. Once we have completed our analysis, we’ll published updated proposals, including responses to the main points raised (whether we agree with them or not!) and set out how we intend to spend at least £20 million in this area in the future).
- In conclusion, then, this is an important time for all of us to think about the impact of infrastructure and how we might need to work differently in the future. From BIG’s point of view, we’ll be focusing on delivering Transforming Local Infrastructure over the next year and a half. We’re also very interested in how we can work together to spread the learning from this programme so that even those areas which didn’t get funding can benefit. We’re also planning to ensure that organisations which receive, or which might receive funding in the future, from BIG are able to develop their capabilities. In these challenging times, this will help to ensure that the money which we give out in grants makes the greatest difference to those most in need and that the benefits of our funding continue to be felt even after the last grant payment. And lastly, we will be working to incorporate the ideas and experiences from across the sector and beyond to turn the principles of our Building Capabilities for Impact and Legacy discussion paper into action. We won’t be able to maintain every part of the current voluntary sector infrastructure, and even if we had the resources then we would not want to do so. However, we will endeavour to make sure that we use the resources which we have as wisely as possible, with the greatest possible impact.