Learning through the Lottery

The Big Lottery Fund's offices are in an area of London undergoing much change. Farringdon, with its new station just completed in preparation for the arrival of Crossrail in 2018, is a short stroll to the east, while to the west, legal firms in shiny new offices now occupy an area once synonymous with newspapers and publishing. The smell of regeneration is everywhere. Perhaps imbued by this air of renewal, the organisation (which calls itself BIG for short) is about to embark on its own journey of change with the development of a new six-year strategic framework.

Dawn Austwick, chief executive since last November, will be central to this process. In fact, Austwick is due to host the first brainstorming session on the strategy the day after our interview. It marks the start of the lengthy process of deciding the organisation's priorities from 2015-21. When you consider that in 2012/13 it handed out £303m to projects that benefited children and young people (44 per cent of the overall funding pot), any changes in focus or emphasis could have far reaching consequences for many of the charities that receive funding.

Austwick explains how the new strategy will be developed: "Our current strategic framework comes to an end next year. Within the framework, we have five portfolios, one for each country and one for the UK as a whole, and all of that is up for development at the moment.

"We'll have a series of roundtables over the next few months and into the summer, and then a web-based interaction that we hope will be a bit of a conversation into which people will be able to feed in their thoughts and ideas. Our own teams are also thinking about what's been working - so all that goes into the melting pot in the summer and then we will start formulating what the framework will look like and the portfolio frameworks within that.

"We're setting out a set of building blocks that are the things we're interested in thinking about and discussing, and asking the sector, practitioners and beneficiaries if that sounds about right. We want them to tell us what needs tweaking and what needs changing."

BIG's new approach will be shaped by its four core objectives: to build more social capital, and therefore create dynamic communities; to work with the most disadvantaged; to work in partnership with practitioners and wider funders, the private and public sector; and to fund the voluntary and community sector to help it develop and thrive.

Since its creation in 2004, BIG has awarded nearly £1bn to programmes specifically focused on achieving better outcomes for children and young people, such as Talent Match, Youth in Focus, Young People's Fund and Children's Play. A further £250m has been earmarked for the development of long-term ongoing projects, including the early years programme A Better Start, mental wellbeing initiative HeadStart and a £30m programme to help young people develop green economy skills.

Measuring effectiveness

While the children's voluntary sector has sometimes been criticised for failing to collect robust data on the impact of its work, ensuring funding recipients can measure the effectiveness of what they do is a key part of BIG's funding process.

Austwick explains: "There is no point in allocating significant funds if you don't think it's going to result in some learning. All our funding should be enabling people to make improvement, but it won't always succeed.

"If we are in the business of trying to change lives in social policy arenas, the issue is how can you learn from what works and doesn't work?"

While recognising the importance of showing evidence of effectiveness, Austwick admits she would like to "change the nature of the conversation" surrounding it.

"There's a bit of me that really wonders - and I'm going to go a bit off-piste here - whether applying a strongly analytical framework to complex human problems and interactions is necessarily going to give you the solutions. It may not be the only paradigm.

"The paradigm of story and narrative at a very human level may be as useful an indicator (to effectiveness) as the very strong evidence-based piece of work. That's not to say evidence isn't useful - which it is - and has a value. But it may just be we need a richer framework."

Such an approach hints at wanting to ensure that the voluntary sector's spirit of innovation and creativity is not dulled through a drive to only do what can be measured. It also reflects Austwick's background at the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, a grant-making trust that she describes as "a bit eclectic and takes quite a lot of risk".

The approach to effectiveness gathering she would like to see developed is one she describes as a more "networked model" where those that BIG funds "grow, develop and share learning" rather than seeing it in "competitive" terms.

Rather than dealing in absolutes of what does or does not work, Austwick says a "more interesting question" is for practitioners to understand the circumstances that led to a programme being successful, or not, in one area and decide, based on their understanding of the "peculiar dynamics of their area", what elements of it could work for them.

She adds: "An example of a great model is a Nottingham project we funded through our Reaching Communities programme for the creation of an alcohol-free bar run by ex-users. They had gone to see another similar project in Liverpool, which had helped them take some things away to learn from."

Getting findings about what is and is not effective "out into the world for others to take it up" is something in which Austwick thinks BIG has the potential to play an important role. "Over any given period, we're probably funding every ward in the country. We get data on every grant and look at whether it's achieved what it meant to. We can also look at clusters of grants. Over time, that gives us a really rich resource and knowledge bank about what people are interested in, who is doing what, what's the trend in applications - that is also a resource for others."

The Big Lottery Fund has an evidence unit that commissions and analyses this sector-wide data with the findings available on the organisation's website. "We can probably push that further," says Austwick. "We as a funder can provide some of the networks - the juice - that pumps this stuff around and opens up that learning and knowledge so that people can take advantage of it - so we enable others to cherry pick the bits that suit them most."

Engaging with technology

Harnessing the potential for technology to capture and disseminate useful information for commissioners, practitioners and organisations is something Austwick expects to see feature heavily in the new strategy.

"One of the things I think will come out of the strategic framework that is really exciting is how we engage more with technology and help the sector to use it more to achieve social purpose.

"We can use it to be more open about our grant making - it will help us to be a better funder, but will also enable other people to understand our funding more and ask questions about it."

Some in the sector would like to see BIG's objectives become more aligned with government-funded programmes and initiatives to provide a closer link between social policy and grant making.

"That's a double-edged sword," says Austwick in response. "We operate with the philosophy of being an additional funder - we complement government, we don't substitute it. But one of the things about our money is that we have the freedom to move it around and work in different partnerships in different ways.

"In a lot of those areas where we're doing pilots, there will be a partnership of a voluntary organisation, local authority and other agencies. And we're only just understanding how we might use this to fund over a long period of time."

A number of the organisation's major grant programmes are providing funding over five to 10 years, putting it outside of the political election cycles. "That is very liberating - we're at the beginning of a journey to think how we use that most effectively."

Austwick admits that her and the organisation's thinking on what the future looks like might not necessarily be shared by those it will be consulting over the next six months. She says: "We shouldn't be carving the framework in too many tablets of stone." She also predicts a "potential tweaking" in 2018 to reflect societal changes. "It's hard to say where the world will be in 2021- we don't know what the economy will be like or how the tectonic plates of civil society, charity and public service will have changed."

And if Austwick needs any confirmation of the constant pace of change, she need only look out of her office window at the building sites below.

- 2013: Chief executive, Big Lottery Fund
- 2005-13: Chief executive, Esmee Fairbairn Foundation
- 2002-05: Deputy director, British Museum
- 1995-2000: Project director, Tate Modern
- 1986-94: Principal consultant at KPMG
- 1985-86: Manager, the Half Moon Theatre
- 1983-85: Projects co-ordinator at Arts & Business
- Austwick has an MBA from the London Business School
- She is a trustee of Historic Royal Palaces
- And was a director of Big Society Capital up until September 2013
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