To ensure that Spirit’s learning and evidence can continues to inspire meaningful change after Spirit has ended, we have partnered with three Legacy Learning Partners.
Learning Partnership
PBE
PBE (formerly Pro Bono Economics) was appointed to explore our wellbeing evidence. PBE use economic analysis to help charities, funders, firms and policymakers to collectively tackle the causes and consequences of low personal wellbeing in the UK. They do this by helping the charities, community groups and other purposeful organisations that work every day to improve the lives of people with low wellbeing to better measure, understand and articulate their impact, to influence and inform policy, and to make best use of their data.
Throughout our grant funding, Spirit of 2012 grantees used the ONS4 subjective wellbeing measure to evaluate the wellbeing benefits of their work. PBE has used this existing evidence to apply wellbeing cost-effectiveness methodology to three former Spirit of 2012 grants:
- EmpowHER (UK Youth, the British Red Cross and Young Women’s Trust)
- City to Sea (Laureus Sport for Good and The Wave Project)
- Get Out Get Active (Activity Alliance)
The results of PBE’s analysis can be found in their report Helping Funders To Measure What Matters.
PBE economists found that:
- EmpowHER delivered around £5 in wellbeing benefits for every £1 spent
- Get Out Get Active (GOGA) delivered around £3.60 in wellbeing benefits per £1 spent
- City to Sea delivered an improvement in wellbeing and that only a small proportion would need to be due to the programme for the benefits to outweigh its cost.
The report argues:
- Funders can help to grantees to overcome barriers to wellbeing evaluation: Getting buy-in and agreement from grant holders for using any measurement framework is vital, and wellbeing measures are no exception.
- There are significant benefits to identifying matched comparison groups: Changes in wellbeing need to be understood in the wider context. The COVID-19 pandemic took place in the middle of many of the Spirit of 2012 funded projects, when subjective wellbeing dropped, especially around specific lockdown events. In these cases, ‘maintaining’ a starting level of wellbeing for participants could well be a positive impact.
- Funders should facilitate access to the right expertise to support charities with impact measurement: While one of the benefits of using the ONS4 subjective wellbeing measure its simplicity and accessibility, there are some elements of impact measurement that require specific technical expertise.
- We need to develop standardised measures to capture subjective wellbeing data from people with learning disabilities and neurodivergence: The ONS4 questions are not accessible for some people, including those with severe learning disabilities and neurodivergence. At the same time, these people may be some of the target group(s) of a particular intervention, for whom it is of particular importance to hear their views and understand the potential impact.
This project is a quantitative companion piece to qualitative research carried out by The What Works Centre for Wellbeing, which brought together practice evidence from ten creative project to draw out ‘how’ and ‘why’ activities support wellbeing, using case study synthesis methodology. Together these reports identify the strengths of our evidence-led approach as funder on both qualitative and quantitative data collection. They set out highly replicable methodologies for proportionate evaluation that can and should be used for many years after we have closed.