Thematic Evaluation - Community Connection

Our Evidence and Impact Strategy sets out an ambition to increase the proportion of our funding supported by independent impact evaluations. A key way for achieving this is through commissioning and publishing cross-Fund impact evaluations on themes linked to our missions (e.g. environmental sustainability or community connection). To support this ambition, the Impact & Evaluation (I&E) Team is undertaking a project designed to: a. develop an approach for carrying out cross-Fund thematic evaluations b. test this approach through a pilot thematic evaluation c. make recommendations for embedding thematic evaluation into future practice. While the Fund regularly commissions evaluations for specific programmes, undertaking an evaluation focused on a theme cutting across multiple portfolios is new. This pilot evaluation will therefore generate both impact evidence on a theme, and methodological learning from the process to support in decisions about rolling this approach out more widely.