Rocket Science has designed a set of measurement tools to help place based giving schemes to capture their financial impact. Each year, the operational schemes complete a financial survey, looking at where funding is coming from and how it is spent. On completing the survey, schemes get their own online interactive data dashboard which captures financial information and visualises it in a way in which they can use to share their impact. An overall aggregated dashboard is made publicly available. You can access the dashboards here:
The headline findings are:
But placed based giving is not just another way of giving grants locally, it’s about changing HOW people work together in communities.
Supplementing the financial data, there is an additional survey completed by all those involved in the scheme - the Chair and committee members, partners, and the staff team, to capture perceptions on how the scheme is living the principles of place-based giving. This survey is attempting to measure the change in behaviours stakeholders are seeing and asks questions about the principles of place based giving- i.e. improved collaboration, use of evidence to understand and respond to need, importance of independence and the way in which institutions are behaving to respond to change. Our hypothesis is that by living these principles, schemes are:
- Facilitating behavioural and institutional change in the way in which local stakeholders come together to collectively address local need in the most effective way
- Catalysing greater investment into places and achieving better outcomes for places.
Between 2017 and 2020 we are tracking how working together in place brings about this change, which is very difficult to measure, but likely to have equal if not greater impact on local places than focusing simply on increasing investment.