- Our Impact
- / Chapter 6
Our impact on charities and social enterprises - Reach
Increasing reach and resilience
We help charities and social enterprises to access the right finance and support, especially those in underserved places and communities or led by marginalised leaders. This helps them to trade, build resilience, and increase their impact.
Working with our partners
Throughout this Impact Report, data is from 2015 to the end of 2024, unless noted otherwise.
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64%
of the organisations we support are in the 40% most deprived parts of England
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2707
charities and social enterprises supported
Total investment by intervention type
Access delivers funding using four intervention types.
Blended finance accounts for 81% of all investment delivered to charities and social enterprises.
Expanding the reach of social investment
Why small deals matter
One of the key tools we use is blended finance, enabling smaller deals that better serve the needs of charities and social enterprises, particularly smaller organisations or those based in more deprived areas.
In 2023, Access blended finance deals enabled investments 7x smaller than the rest of the social investment market.
The Social Enterprise UK biannual survey data has been a key part of the case for Access’s role in the market. It helps us understand the challenges faced by social enterprises in the UK, and where we are making progress. In 2011 the access to debt or equity finance was the number one barrier for 44% of social enterprises, and by 2021 this was the case for just 6%.
In 2023, social enterprises were typically looking for investments of around £80k, yet the average deal in the wider social investment market in 2022, excluding Access investments, was £837k– ten times the size. The average Access deal, by contrast, was £116k, and in 2022, £81.5k.
What we’re measuring - Access to Finance
This Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is about understanding whether our funding is helping social investment to reach the right organisations, and therefore widening access to social investment. This is measured by comparing our data to that of the wider social investment market and also through analysing our own data to understand whether our blended finance funds are reaching organisations who have not received social investment before.
This KPI matters to us because charities and social enterprises are often not being served by social investment market, and therefore need different products. If our work is not helping finance to reach the organisations traditionally excluded from social investment, then we are not succeeding as an organisation.
We are currently rated green for this KPI. See our full set of KPIs here and our progress against them.
Reaching underserved places
Our blended finance and enterprise development funding is reaching charities and social enterprises in the most deprived areas, which have historically struggled to access suitable funding, whether through social investment or grants.
We measure the reach of our funding using the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) and compare it to the broader social investment market to assess our impact. While IMD is not the only way of measuring deprivation in England, it is the most comprehensive and consistent data set.
A review of grant subsidy for blended finance, commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, found that these funds have opened up social investment to smaller, community-level organisations working predominantly in the 30 per cent most deprived places in the country. This has enabled many of these organisations to scale up, expand their reach, and better achieve their social and environmental goals.
"Blended finance is an effective way to help small VCSEs take on social investment and grow, become more resilient, and help more people."
In 2023 (the most recent dataset we can use to compare our reach to the rest of the market), Access reached more deprived communities, delivering 58% of its blended finance to the top three most deprived areas (IMD 1-3).
In comparison, the rest of the social investment sector delivered only 18% of its deals to these high-need areas.
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22%
of Access grant goes to the 10% most deprived areas
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65%
of Access grant goes to 40% most deprived areas
Total Investment by IMD
We measure how much of our money reaches more deprived places and communities using the Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). IMD 1 represents the most deprived areas, whilst IMD 10 represents the least deprived.
Total investment by region
Reaching underserved communities
We want to ensure our funding reaches organisations led by diverse individuals (‘led by’ means that more than 50% of the leadership team identifies as being from that group).
We’ve recently significantly increased the amount of data we collect on this. Reaching diverse-led organisations matters because these are groups that have historically struggled to access the finance they need.
We also have more recent data from our Flexible Finance programme (data current up to March 2024) which intentionally targets underserved parts of the market, such as Black and minoritised communities. Early analysis shows that it has delivered 3.5 times more investment to these communities than other Access programmes, with 34% going to organisations that are Black and minoritised led. Noting that all of our programmes are at different stages of deployment, which makes a like-for-like comparison challenging.
We benchmark whether our funding is reaching organisations led by minoritised individuals against the demographics of the most deprived parts of the country. For example, the 2021 census data shows that 26% of the individuals in these areas identify as black and minoritised, far higher than the England-wide average. Our current data shows us that we are meeting this target on Flexible Finance, but have work to do on other programmes across our portfolio.
Across the programmes we have data for our investments have gone to:
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20%
Black and minoritised-led organisations
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6%
Disability-led organisations
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2%
LGBTQ-led
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43%
Women-led
What we’re measuring
Reaching underserved groups
This KPI looks at the other side of our reach, whether our funding is flowing to underserved communities and organisations led by protected groups. This matters to us because again, we have a mandate to make sure that organisations that have been historically excluded from funding, such as those led by black and minoritised individuals, women, LGBTQI+ individuals and those with a disability are able to access funding. Additionally our funding should be reaching the most deprived parts of the country, here defined as the 30% most deprived areas as rated by the index for multiple deprivation (IMD).
The KPI is based on two metrics, one measuring whether 50% of our funding is currently going into IMD 1-3, with IMD decile 1 receiving the most. We are currently meeting this target.
The second metric is focused on whether the proportion of our money going to organisations led by protected groups is increasing year on year, benchmarked agains the average demographics of IMD 1-3. We are not currently meeting this, but are close on some protected groups, specifically women, and black and minoritised individuals.
We are currently rated green for this KPI. See our full set of KPIs and our progress against them.
We’ve also focused on reaching black and minoritised communities in our enterprise development work, with one of the focus sectors specifically working with organisations led by diverse leaders to develop their trading models. This has resulted in £1.29m of grant being used to provide specialised support to 50 different organisations. Early results from the Enterprise Development Programme evaluation showed that 97% of organisations who had participated in the programme rated their confidence and understanding around trading and enterprise as positive or very positive in comparison to when they started the programme.
We also recognise that there are limitations to using IMD as a measure of reach, and are continuing to explore other ways of understanding it. This will likely include trying to understand if we are reaching underserved areas, more rural communities, and if we have a good geographic spread to our funding. We will build this work into future versions of data dashboards and our impact report.