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 and community connection). To support this ambition, the Impact & Evaluation (I&E) Team is undertaking a project designed to:

• a.develop an pproach for carrying out cross-Fund thematic evaluation
• 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 rollong this approach out more widely.