The first qualitative evaluation of the first four years of the ChangeUp programme has revealed that the local infrastructure groups that swallowed up much of the funding made very little attempt to measure the programme's effect on frontline charities.
The government spent £150m on ChangeUp from 2004 to 2008, setting up six national ‘hubs of excellence’, promoting and supporting the development of local support networks known as ‘consortia’, and operating national funding programmes for frontline charities working with marginalised people.
The programme was intended to radically improve the support available to civil society groups, especially to those that wished to deliver public services. One of the goals was that any new support services should become sustainably funded.
The executive summary of the evaluation concluded that the programme “contributed to a significant distance travelled in the way that third sector support services are organised”.
'Very limited' examination of frontline impact
However, it also stated that the impacts of ChangeUp on local frontline organisations have been explored only to “a very limited extent” by any of the local consortia.
It said: “Most consortium members believed it would be difficult to assess this impact, particularly since frontline organisations have little knowledge of whether a service was funded or originated from ChangeUp or other sources.
“Consequently, there is much less evidence around the impact on frontline organisations than there is around the impact on infrastructure organisations.”
Benefits to consortia
The positive effects of ChangeUp on infrastructure bodies that were part of consortia included “better collaboration, efficiency savings, more appropriate services, improved standing with the statutory sector, greater funding opportunities, increased stability, and greater focus on ‘hard’ issues”. However, the researchers even qualified these benefits, saying they were “slow to emerge, patchy in their achievements, and not always attributable to ChangeUp”.
On the issue of funding, the researchers said: “The funding available through ChangeUp was never intended to cover the full costs of service delivery but instead invest in improvement to the ways in which support services operate. This was not always fully understood within the sector.
“The expectations of what the funding would achieve were very high and this has led to a perception that the funding was insufficient to meet needs for support of frontline organisations....this often led to disappointment with the programme.”
Local infrastructure sector ‘changed up a gear’
Nevertheless, on a positive note, the report also said that evidence of better partnership working among local infrastructure organisations, and clearer strategies for changing the capacity of the local voluntary sector, “suggests that the local infrastructure sector has indeed been ‘changed up a gear’”.
The evaluation was conducted by the Third Sector Research Centre, BMG Research, GuideStar Data Services and Sustain Consultancy. They used existing literature, economic data, 12 area case studies and survey responses to draw their conclusions.
