For the last ten years, we have continually monitored our impact, and commissioned independent evaluations of our own work.
Impact Evaluations
Our Impact
In 2023 Spirit of 2012 published a report to mark our tenth birthday, celebrating our achievements and summarising how we had spent our £47m endowment.
The report demonstrated how legacy programmes can move beyond engaging those that we know will be inspired by a major event, targeting and engaging those that might face the greatest barriers to participation, but for whom the benefit is the greatest.
Here are the headline stats showing Spirit’s impact across the first ten years of its existence:
234
Grant Awards
£48M
Grant Funding
3.2million
People have taken part in our events and activities
60,000 Volunteers
We’ve helped to engage and recruit more than 60,000 volunteers, social action
participants and community helpers
86,000 people
Over 86,000 people have taken part in longer-term, regular physical activity and art
and culture with our grant funding
From the beginning, we were keen to apply the same (or greater) level of rigor to evaluating ourselves as we were to our grant-holders: seeking to aggregate the collective impact of our grants, understand what contribution our approach was having above and beyond the provision of funding, and explore our wider contribution.
We’ve had the support of a range of fantastic partners along the way.
- Between 2014 and 2017, Spirit worked with InFocus as our independent evaluator, setting up our initial grant monitoring approach and outcomes indicators against our Theory of Change.
- Between 2018 and 2019 we commissioned a serious of smaller pieces of research and evaluation into particular aspects of our work such as how grantees thought about who their target audience was and how to reach them, and how event ‘moments’ turn into wider ‘movements’ of social change; we also began a three-year partnership with the Behavioural Insights Team to greater level of evaluation support to our grant holders.
- Between 2020 and 2023, Spirit worked with Renaisi as our independent learning partner.
- In 2023, rather than commissioning a final independent evaluation which we would no longer be around to apply learnings from, we commissioned three Legacy Learning Partners to explore our archive in more detail.