Evaluation of the Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise COVID-19 Emergency Funding Package
On 8 April 2020, the Chancellor announced an unprecedented emergency funding package of £750 million for the Voluntary, Community, and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector. The funding aimed to ensure that charities and other VCSE organisations (the ‘grantholders’) could continue day-to-day work during the pandemic and meet any increased demand to support people in need (the ‘service users’).
The Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) commissioned NatCen Social Research, in partnership with RSM UK Consulting LLP, to carry out an evaluation of the funding package. The evaluation aimed to assess the impact of the funding on grantholders, and on people and communities in need (impact evaluation); as well as assessing how well the scheme worked and if it was implemented as intended (process evaluation). The evaluation also sets out key lessons and practical recommendations to inform how government interacts with the VCSE sector and how it can best implement future emergency funding initiatives.
The evaluation takes a theory-based, mixed methods approach. It combines primary research and secondary data analysis covering eight of the funding package’s nine funding streams (for more information on the funding streams see Overview of the funding streams section below).[footnote 1] Primary data collection took place between September 2021 and February 2022, during which:
over 40 documents[footnote 2] were extracted and synthesised
2,594 organisations completed a survey of grantholders
540 individuals completed a survey of volunteers
103 grantholder interviews were conducted
3 group discussions were held with sector representatives
4 group discussions were held with funding bodies
19 case studies were conducted involving interviews with 20 strategic and 20 operational staff, 11 volunteers and 31 service users[footnote 3]
A quantitative value for money (VfM) assessment was not planned for this evaluation, due to data limitations across some of the funding streams and a lack of a readily identifiable counterfactual. However, the main report does include a qualitative assessment of VfM, set out in ‘VfM spotlights’ and summarised in the concluding chapter. A quantitative VfM analysis was conducted for the Coronavirus Community Support Fund as part of the programme-level evaluation of this funding stream.[footnote 4] Further information of the wider methodology and study limitations are provided in the main report.