• PROJECTS’ LEARNING AND SHARING FORUM

This is a note sent to all the funded TSCF projects about the Learning and Sharing Event held on 8th September 2011. The session was facilitated by John Griffiths, Cherri Blissett and John Halliday from Rocket Science with Tracey Mellor from One North East. The presentation used is available here.

Please also do not hesitate to call us on 0191 230 8078 should you want to follow up on any aspect of the event, or the management of the Fund.

Introduction

The Third Sector Capacity Fund is coming to an end in March 2011. However, some projects and notably all of those from round 4, are finishing before this. The event was intended to foster new links between those delivering the projects and also to start looking at evaluation processes for projects to use both independently and to feed into the overall programme-level evaluation.

Third Sector Capacity Fund projects at the event

In the first half of the event, each project was invited to talk about:

• what it was that they were delivering;
• how they intended to sustain the activity; and
• any specific opportunities for the other projects to tap into.

A large number of projects found that they had some common ground and several discussed potential opportunities to offer support or to collaborate. Should you want to follow these up please get in touch with the fund management team.

Impact Evaluation

The second half of the event focused on ‘impact evaluation’. The TSCF programme will be evaluated at a programme level and for this we will need each project to provide either a self assessment or an independent evaluation report of their impact which should also be of use when providing future evidence to funders and other stakeholders of the project’s value.

Rocket Science introduced some approaches and tools that projects might use to help describe and evidence their impact. The presentation has been sent to you as a separate file and is available from Rocket Science if you do not have a copy.

The group was then divided into three break-out groups to discuss the following questions:

• Do you have any difficulties demonstrating the impact of your project or your organisation?
• Do you have any personal experience or skills in the field of demonstrating you impact which you could share?
• What data do you collect to assess your achievement of outcomes?

Many projects consider that the major challenge of conducting an evaluation was that it is too soon to report whether there have been lasting achievements; also factors outside the projects’ control have had a large effect on their potential impact and need to be taken into account.  We are more than happy to provide advice on how to articulate, if not overcome these.  A number of tools that might be used by projects to record impact were identified during these break-out discussions, they include:

• The Skills Wheel – developed and used by Keyfund (see above) as a way of baselining individuals positions at the outset and capturing and recording evidence of distance travelled against personal and project objectives;
• Social media platforms for tracking as well as capturing beneficiary experiences, using video diaries and networks such as facebook groups;
• LM3 (Local Multiplier 3) – a tool developed by new economics foundation designed as a simple and understandable way of measuring local economic impact. It helps people to think about local money flows and how their organisation can practically improve its local economic impact, as well as influence the public sector to consider the impact of its procurement decisions.
• The Change Check Model – used by VONNE based on a tool devised by BASSAC (now Locality).

And don’t forget the Third Sector Capacity Fund Capacity Assessment Tool available to download from the Fund’s website (www.thirdsectorfund.org.uk).

Almost all projects are collecting data, often using some of the tools alluded to, or their own approaches such as bespoke scorecards. Each project has a unique set of indicators of impact over and above its contribution to the programme level outputs required under the framework of ONE’s regional economic strategy.  A few projects suggested that they need to collect more data or update the baselines they have started, but in most cases it is clear that we will be able to access some high quality evaluation data from most, if not all projects.

While the Third Sector Capacity Fund programme is ending in March, there seemed to be enthusiasm from several attendees for further opportunities to network and come together, especially if focussed on finding new opportunities to work in the North East. Do get in touch if think we can help in this respect.

Ross Waldie of the Cyrenians began by giving a short presentation about progress with the Business Action on Homelessness project. Ross’s presentation can be downloaded here.

Aiden Regan (Wood Holmes) who is currently finalising the interim evaluation of the Fund kindly presented the initial findings of the report. His presentation slides can be downloaded here.

John Griffiths, Managing Director of Rocket Science, delivered a presentation on Big Society including a consideration of the threats and opportunities of this new agenda for Civil Society Organisations. John’s presentation can be downloaded here.

Cherri Blissett, Principal Consultant at Rocket Science gave a demonstration of Rocket Science’s Readiness Assessement Tool (RAT). The RAT is an Excel based tool that helps organisations who are delivering projects to plan for the future, setting out issues, barriers and opportunities that organisations, projects or partnerships need to think about in order to plan more effectively. The RAT can be downloaded here.

http://tscf-2011-register.questionpro.com

Good luck!

£1 million of grant will be available, for projects’ delivery between 1 April 2011 and 30 November 2011

Delivery organisations can include public, private or third sector organisations. However, the beneficiaries of the projects must be third sector organisations in the North East.

Activities to be funded may include:

1. Support to enable the third sector to compete effectively to win and deliver public service contracts, including expert support to assist organisations to compete effectively to win and deliver contracts, including: 

• support with identifying new opportunities;
• support with professional bid writing;
• training to embed expertise within the organisations;

2. Expert support to assist organisations with better performance  management, better demonstration of results, application of tools that measure added value and evidence the impact of the sector and improved understanding how to bid for contracts that require payment by results;

3. Support to develop or expand income generation or activities that lead to greater organisational sustainability and reduce grant dependency. Specifically, provision of intensive business development expertise to win new sales and develop contacts and information about new sector opportunities and repositioning themselves in the marketplace;

4. Provision of advice to help organisations with financial remodelling. This may include provision of assistance to help organisations access loan funding;

5. Work to remove barriers to procurement to the sector, including support to facilitate and formalise joint working to enable collaborative bids for work in key sectors. These may include health and social care, offender management, local authority statutory services, GP commissioning and delivery of the big society. This may include setting up Service Level Agreements, Joint Ventures or other partnership agreements;

6. Leadership and management development and strengthening governance arrangements – where these are directly linked to new contracting opportunities, collaboration or partnership arrangements, joint ventures, the development of consortia or sector consolidation and new approaches to commissioning mainstream services.

Projects may be delivered by the public, private or third sectors (or consortiums of these) and may include peer to peer learning. All project beneficiaries must be from the third sector within the North East.

Project Selection Criteria:

 Outputs: number of third sector organisations assisted;

• Outcomes: number of third sector organisations showing a measurable improvement in financial and organisational sustainability; number of third sector organisations adopting new innovative approaches;
• Project size between £50,000 and £300,000;
• Projects must not duplicate existing business support on offer from BENE and social enterprise support projects;
• Projects must build capacity of the third sector, rather than a single organisation;
• Projects must demonstrate value for money;
• Activity must be delivered on a regional or sub-regional basis;
• Applicants must demonstrate that they can deliver all activity within the 8 month period, April to November 2011.

 The timetable for the Third Sector Capacity Fund bidding round is as follows:

Further details and information will be made available on the Third Sector Capacity Fund website, from 31^st January 2011.

If you would like to register your interest to bid into Round 4, please enter your details at the following link and an application pack will be sent out to you on the 31st January 2011.

http://tscf-2011-register.questionpro.com

The situation will be reviewed regularly and we will communicate any new decisions as and when they are made.

Thank you