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sector’s reputation for carrying out research is suffering.
Hannah Fearn examines how a lack of investment and the oft-fractious
relationship between charities and academics is to blame,
and what can be done to improve the quality of new research
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Everyone
loves a statistic, most of all the press. Hard, headline grabbing
figures revealing the desperate conditions faced by those
in extreme poverty, for example, or the daily hurdles disabled
people are forced to overcome add weight and colour to any
charity campaign.
If a journalist is looking for a statistic or a soundbite
on any subject matter, speaking to a charity working in that
area would be a productive starting point. So why is the sector’s
reputation for carrying out research starting to suffer? According
to Karl Wilding, head of research at the NCVO, the quality
of research produced by charities is being rightly questioned.
Wilding says the dual problems of a lack of funding for charity
research and the fractious relationship between the third
sector and academia are at fault. The lack of resources, he
claims, is becoming critical. “The sector is not spending
enough money on research as a whole. To give a comparator,
the NHS is spending one per cent of its budget on research
and development. If that was our sector that would be about
£260 million.”
Though funding for cause research can be hard to find, sufficient,
quality research into charity management is most at risk.
Reacting to this lack of funding, the sector as a whole is
marginalising research as a discipline. “I don’t
think it has the status that it should have,” Wilding
points out. “I think too often research or evidence
generation can be seen as either time consuming or too expensive;
what they should be doing is going out and directly delivering
the services.”
But the lack of interest in research, especially among funders,
seems to be going against the grain of change in the voluntary
and community sector. Charities will struggle to form coherent
policy if they do not have reliable evidence-based research
to back it up. The experience of obtaining grants from the
Big Lottery Fund is enough to prove the need for such information,
with the application process demanding quantitative evidence.
“Increasingly, all organisations will have to show evidence
to demonstrate either the need for projects or to demonstrate
their outcomes. I think the [problem] is that we’re
not able to justify where our value is sufficiently by not
having enough evidence to back us up,” Wilding warns.
And a skills gap is also opening up, forcing research onto
a remote backburner. Organisations are being asked to produce
evidence but do not have enough staff with experience in research
methods and dealing with data. Small and medium- sized charities
increasingly have responsibility for commissioning or undertaking
research, but have no trained staff to take the work on.
When academics are brought in on a charity’s behalf,
the relationship between the two is not always a positive
experience. As the UK’s universities are encouraged
to place themselves at the centre of their community, it is
easy for a charity to get them on board. But at this stage,
the relationship can become fractious.
“There continue to be problems in terms of having a
common language and in terms of having shared aims,”
Wilding says. For charities, timescales for delivery are too
long, and they want something that will have an economic impact
rather than a general paper on the issue. Academics fear charities
will only report the findings that best support their cause,
ignoring other important and interesting conclusions.
Academic Ian Bruce, director of the centre for charity effectiveness
at CASS Business School, agrees that in a sector with a ‘roll
your sleeves up and get on with it’ attitude, important
issues such as research to support charities in their work
can get pushed aside. This, he warns, is a problematic approach.
“Funders of charities, for reasons I don’t understand,
are not very sympathetic to funding research. I think it is
to do with the overwhelming image of the sector as very much
‘get on and do things’. There are real dangers
in that because charities can sometimes rush in and not work
out the best answers to problems,” Bruce says.
There is pressure to ‘get on and do things’ coming
from donors, funders and the government, and Bruce says cause
and sector related research is suffering. “No charity
can fulfil their mission unless they understand better what
their customers think. We have got a problem; the sector is
being held back. It will be possible to generalise more than
we currently do on what works and what doesn’t work.”
Bruce maintains that tensions between the aims of charities
and academics working together can be reconciled by making
clear their aims and objectives at the beginning of the process.
Perhaps there is another way to improve this often difficult
relationship between parties. The Royal British Legion recently
worked with consultancy Compass Partnership to form a detailed
profile of the ex-service community in Britain. Sue Freeth,
director of welfare at the charity, says they chose to work
with the Partnership because their staff had backgrounds in
both statistical analysis and the charity world.
The decision paid off, Freeth says. The two enjoyed a healthy
and effective relationship for the duration of the project.
The Partnership also helped the charity shape their research
project so that they would be able to use the results most
profitably. “They encouraged us to take a more scientific
approach in some areas,” Freeth says.
Top
The Royal British Legion needed more information on the profile
of its service users to shape its strategic plan, but ended
up with a coherent piece of quality research that it can now
use to position itself as the market leading provider for
ex-service men and women.
Freeth says their experience is not uncommon, and the largest
national charities are beginning to wise up to the importance
of research. Increased investment from these charities means
they are now being trusted over traditional sources of research,
such as social policy think tanks like Demos. “Evidence
based research is definitely the way to make progress, and
to demonstrate to supporters that we’re making progress,”
she says. “Perhaps more collaboration in terms of financing
research that will benefit a whole series of organisations
[would be useful].”
Research can fall between the crack of the various funding
regimes open to charities and voluntary sector organisations.
One body aiming to address the balance is the Economic and
Social Research Council. The council funds work that will
improve civil society, and has been seeing more and more applications
from the voluntary sector for its funding.
Amanda Williams, impact and policy manager and a member of
the council’s knowledge transfer scheme, says funding
actual research is just the start of her work. Skills transfer
is equally important; the ESRC is funding a project between
the University of Bath and Bath and North East Somerset Local
Education Authority to pass on data analysis skills.
“It’s quite a fundamental problem. It’s
not all about providing research, it’s about helping
them to develop the message,” Williams says. “The
voluntary sector is taking a lot more responsibility in terms
of public service delivery so it’s important that we
put investment into charities through research.”
It’s clear the problems with research have become entrenched.
But those working to improve the quality of research and improve
the sector’s status among academics say a few simple
measures would have a huge impact. NCVO’s Wilding says
the relationship between academics and front line organisations
is antagonised when the two are aiming at different things.
He proposes setting up a ‘dating agency’ service,
partnering charities and university departments with the same
expertise and interests. Another database, tracking and detailing
exactly what research work has already been done on cross-sector
issues, would also prevent charities wasting money reinventing
the wheel, and add weight to future applications for funding
by proving the uniqueness of any new project.
Proper training for voluntary sector research staff is also
a must, Wilding warns. He says many charities using staff
to carry out “a set of activities that have all the
characteristics of research aren’t called so, and those
people don’t have enough knowledge of research.”
Their only research training may have come at the point of
writing an undergraduate dissertation – clearly insufficient.
All three measures would help to encourage a step change in
charities’ approach to research; a change that the British
Legion’s Freeth believes is already underway. If charities
are not already convinced that they must improve their performance
in research, Wilding offers a word of warning. “The
sector cannot run away from this,” he says. “Every
year the evidence hurdle is going to get higher.”
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