Impact Accelerator: Initial Insights Report

Introduction

This report shares early learning from the first 2 phases of the Impact Accelerator. It also highlights learning from the recruitment, selection and participation to date of organisations taking part in the scheme.

It helps funders, programme teams and delivery organisations strengthen evidence informed practice.

Findings

The report sets out 3 recommendations.

The first recommendation is:

Be clear about the goals of funding organisations that are not solely, primarily or historically focused on delivering social action.

Those organisations in the cohort that are delivering social action programmes for the first time:

• believe that their evidence-confidence would be stronger for their core activities

• tend to need more work on the “design” areas of their work to ensure that logic models have been adequately defined, and to draw on existing evidence

• are reluctant to invest limited learning resources into non-core activity, even if that activity is seen as positive and impactful for the organisation

They may also be more curious and open to sharing failure, as they see the success or failure of these activities as lower stakes for the organisation.

The second recommendation is:

Help to codify and disseminate best practice from those organisations that are most invested in delivering, evaluating and improving youth social action.

A distinction may be needed between organisations that are committed to youth social action as a core part of their work and those that offer social action alongside other priorities.

The first group is more likely to invest in learning, evaluation and continuous improvement. Supporting these organisations to generate robust evidence and identify effective practice could create valuable insights for the wider sector.

Capturing and sharing this learning would enable other organisations to adopt proven approaches without needing to make significant investments in evaluation themselves. Currently, there is limited support for identifying, documenting and sharing best practice across the sector.

The third recommendation is:

Treat evaluation and learning as an organisation-wide process for youth organisations and assess grantees on their capacity to do this well.

The Evidence Confidence framework suggests that some organisations are consistently better at measuring outcomes and using evidence to improve practice. This appears to reflect organisational effectiveness rather than size or type of provision.

Impact should be seen as everyone's responsibility. Funders should assess how organisations embed learning and evaluation across their work, not just within individual projects.

This could include using elements of the Evidence Confidence framework within grant assessment processes or through independent validation. Funding models should also recognise the costs of organisation-wide learning and evaluation.