Where things haven’t gone to plan

In this impact report we also wanted to highlight when things have not gone quite to plan, and what we had learned from this. 

Flexible Finance Design and Deployment

One set of lessons is from the design of our Flexible Finance programme. Our recent Flexible Finance Use of Subsidy report outlined how setting up a fund under the programme took an average of two years, longer than we have seen on other programmes and longer than expected. Designing complex and bespoke funds turned out to be more time-consuming than expected, with many of the delays linked to the time it took for partners to raise co-investment and finalising contracts. Going forwards we are considering how we can best streamline these processes to speed up the set-up part of new funding. 

Another clear lesson from Flexible Finance was around our attempts to apply a codesign approach to the development of the programme. We invited our partners to participate in a series of workshops to design the products the programme would deliver. While we had intended this to be an effective way of bringing our partners together to codesign, an evaluation of the process revealed that this hadn’t worked well for all our partners, with some partners not feeling comfortable sharing their ideas in such a public forum, with some natural feelings of competition for a fixed pot of funding. This is not something we had effectively considered in advance, and for future programmes we have taken a consultative approach, but on a more individual partner level. 

EDI - progress can take longer than expected 

Progress on some of our EDI goals has been slower than hoped, highlighting that meaningful change takes time—particularly in a small organisation like ours. In 2023, we aimed to conduct a diversity audit and analyse our gender and ethnicity pay gaps. While we completed the diversity audit, we encountered challenges around balancing transparency with confidentiality and interpreting data meaningfully with such a small team. We learned that external support was key: bringing in consultants helped us overcome capacity constraints and added valuable expertise, and allowed us to complete a new diversity audit, and the gender and ethnicity pay gap analysis. As a result, we’re now more realistic about timelines, clearer on the limits of certain data, and committed to continuing this work with a long-term, sector-wide view.

The Impact Management Programme – where best to target our capacity building

An early lesson for Access as an organisation was around the best way to design programmes to help more organisations to be ‘investment ready’. In reviewing previous programmes like the 2014 Impact Reediness Fund we hypothesised that organisation’s lack of ability to effectively demonstrate their impact was a barrier to them being able to raise social investment. We therefore deigned and commissioned the Impact Management Programme that ran from 2016-2019. The delivery of the programme demonstrated that there was high demand from charities and social enterprises for support on impact practice, and some high-quality work was funded. However, crucially the programme did not demonstrate a tangible link between an organisation improving its impact management and increasing its chances of securing investment or winning contracts. We concluded that impact management capability was not a major barrier to organisations taking on social investment. Rather to expand the reach of social investment it was much more important to focus on enterprise development, which much better reflected the stage of development that many charities and social enterprises were at. Our 2018 strategy therefore included the development of our Enterprise Development Programme (EDP).