The charity sector needs to change the way it thinks about impact, outgoing New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) chief executive Dan Corry told an event in London this week, with recent progress now “plateauing”.
Corry, who announced in May of this year he would be stepping down as the think tank’s CEO after a 13-year tenure, said he felt that charities needed to do more with the resources they have and work together more to improve their impact.
Speaking at the NPC Ignites annual conference on Tuesday, Corry said the sector had “a system that works against impact” and that it is “too precious, too disjointed, too defensive”.
He said: “We have got a long way, but we have further to go. Impact is now much more part of the conversation than when I started at NPC back in the early coalition years.
“But there is a feel that it is sort of plateauing. There is not enough data, not enough good learning and evaluation, and even where there is, it often does not shape decision-making.”
System may ‘work against impact’
Corry said: “So many things militate against a focus on impact. Everyone has to fight against the incentive structures they face and it’s not easy.”
Citing factors such as “crazy” governance; “variable” funders; competitive funding mechanism, and a lack of benchmarking data, Corry said the sector has “a system that works against impact”.
“There are too many people who do not want to engage with – or even say out loud – concepts like effectiveness, efficiency, or value for money,” he said.
Corry also said that the lack of available data that measures impact is hindering the sector.
“Even when people are in a sector where cheap, easy to use tools to assess impact exist – like the Justice Data lab that we nurtured and support and is run by the MoJ - such tools are rarely used and are rarely required to be used by funders,” he said.
“In truth we still find the measurement of productivity for a charity or the sector very difficult.
He noted factors such as problems of definition, data availability, lack of a paid for output, treatment of quality, of volunteers and outcomes and non-pecuniary benefits of working in the sector.
Sector ‘too precious, too disjointed, too defensive’
Charities also need to collaborate more in order to increase their impact, Corry added.
He said: “We have to be realistic that charities and the charity sector are just not big enough to change the world on their own - they need to work with the big streams of influence, regulation, laws and money and with representative democracy. So that means with government at all spatial levels.”
He also added that “impact cannot be achieved through the actions of a single charity or funder doing better. We need to work together and influence government to create major change.”
Describing the work left to do in order to increase the sector’s impact as “a hard slog”, Corry noted that the progress had been made but is “plateauing”.
Corry said: “The sector is still too precious, too disjointed, too defensive. It often pushes back against things that could help – like submitting more data to the Charity Commission or considering mergers more often – not just when you are going bust.
“I’m not naive. The sector will never be a sector dedicated to impact in a way that I might ideally want, any more than we are ever going to get a purely evidence-based government.
“But the sector can improve; can get listened to [and] can work towards system change.”
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