Greater London Authority: Advice in Community Settings Grant Evaluation
What the GLA needed
We were commissioned by the Greater London Authority (GLA) to conduct a process and impact evaluation into their Advice in Community Settings (AiCS) grant programme. Together with our colleagues at Wavehill, we have been working with eleven advice partnerships as well as the GLA to understand the impact of the funding across the three years of the programme.
The Advice in Community Settings programme aims to improve access to quality, independent advice for Londoners experiencing financial hardship. The project invited advice services to form partnerships with local community settings, such as schools and foodbanks. These partnerships then work together to deliver advice to best support local residents. The GLA wanted to understand the effectiveness of the programme in delivering its aims, as well as the impact of the funding on the partnerships themselves and how effectively they worked together.
What we did
We began by co-creating a Theory of Change with partnership staff, GLA staff, key partners and stakeholders. The Theory of Change established the ultimate goal of the programme and the key inputs, outputs and barriers on the journey to that goal. It then informed an evaluation framework, outlining the key quantitative and qualitative data to measure the individual and collective impact of partnerships.
We developed a bespoke management information system to collect quantitative data on each individual seen by the programme, creating a dataset of over 10,000 participants. This has enabled us to conduct particularly powerful pieces of analysis to understand how the programme reaches and impacts different groups of advice seekers.
These findings were complemented by partnership surveys, workshop and participant interviews to evidence the impact of the programme, understand the processes through which these impacts were achieved and identify opportunities for improvement. We wrote this up into a clear and visually engaging report and infographic, which you can view here.
The impact of our work
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Across the three years of evaluation, our findings and insights have directly informed programme delivery and been used to evidence the impact of delivering advice through community settings and partnerships. Through workshops with key stakeholders, we have used the findings to inform the development of a London Advice Strategy.
Our reporting has been used by partnerships to evidence their impact and opened doors for future funding opportunities, as well as prompting reflections and identifying areas for improvement.
“Mime have enabled us to take output data from a diverse range of delivery partners in the Advice in Community Settings programme and report on the programme as a whole in a standardised way. The team have been a pleasure to work with and have helped us demonstrate the impact of the programme as well as supporting individual grantees to demonstrate the impact of their projects. This has helped the Greater London Authority to understand and demonstrate the value of the work in supporting Londoners in financial hardship.“
Natalie King – Senior Policy and Projects Officer, GLA
“Mime was a great evaluation partner for the ‘Advice in Community Settings’ programme. Their evaluation of this programme was done to a high standard and their bespoke impact reports produced for us at Rooted Finance offered us an impactful overview of our work. They were great to collaborate with and we highly recommend their services.”
Emma Triggs – Projects and Partnerships Manager, Rooted Finance
