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NCVO wins grant to justify own existence

Finance | Tania Mason | 2 Jun 2009

The NCVO has secured a £750,000 grant from the Big Lottery Fund to help it demonstrate how it and other infrastructure bodies benefit the sector.

The umbrella body will share the grant with Triangle Consulting and the Third Sector Research Centre, who all bid jointly to BIG’s Basis programme for the funding.

The money will be used to devise the Value of Infrastructure programme – a three-year, England-wide project that will, according to the NCVO, “identify the most effective ways for infrastructure agencies to communicate the value of infrastructure to sector organisations and improve the planning and monitoring of their work”.

The NCVO will hire a full-time manager, a full-time communications officer and an administrator for two and a half days a week, to run the programme.

Online comparative toolkit

Triangle Consulting will work with the NCVO to develop a range of online tools that will allow infrastructure agencies to publicly compare the results of their achievements against others.

The toolkit will enable development workers in infrastructure organisations to assess what their frontline clients’ needs are in different areas, such as governance or strategic planning , and to track their clients’ supported progress over time.

This data that will be uploaded, by the infrastructure agencies, onto an online database that participating infrastructure agencies will then be able to use to demonstrate how their services have helped their frontline clients, and to compare the results of their support work with other infrastructure agencies, enabling them to publicly rate their effectiveness.

According to the NCVO’s head of strategy and impact, Richard Piper (pictured), this will help infrastructure agencies accurately monitor the impact of their work.

The Third Sector Research Centre will use its part of the grant to identify which infrastructure programmes are having the biggest impact on the sector, so that they can then tailor their work to better meet the sector’s needs.

Piper said the idea for the programme has been six years in development, and builds on the Perform Framework which was the first project ever funded by ChangeUp.

'Get own house in order'

“Most infrastructure organisations are more effective than they realise and certainly more effective than they tend to communicate,” he said. “And as part of the job is often to advise other organisations on how to demonstrate impact, we thought we should get our own house in order.”

He also admitted that while the last five years had been something of a golden era for government investment in infrastructure, tightening public purse strings in future would likely see this drop to a much lower level.

Therefore it was very important for infrastructure bodies to prove their worth. “We could be entering a period where only the best will survive,” Piper said.

He explained that the programme wanted to get to a stage where it could accurately state how much each pound invested in infrastructure leverages for a frontline organisation.

The bigger picture

And he said he wanted to reduce the emphasis on measurement that had come to characterise so much impact reporting. “It shouldn’t primarily be about data,” he said, “but about planning, improving, and communicating.

“The sector has so much more to offer in terms of demonstrating its impact but it gets stuck in measuring numbers. We want to take a new approach and look at the bigger picture.”

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Who's Who: Richard Piper | Tania Mason