Helping us evidence the impact of our funding

At The National Lottery Community Fund, we believe it is important that we learn from our funding so we can improve the way we support organisations and communities in the future.

To do this, we often commission external independent research agencies to carry out research and evaluation. We have recently commissioned independent research agency IFF Research to carry out research with some of our grant holders to help us better understand our impact and support us to learn from our funding.

For this research we will contact grant holders with grants that ended between January 2019 and June 2020. We will only contact a sample of grantholders so if you do not receive an email about this, you don’t need to do anything. If you do receive an email, we would be grateful for your support with this research, see below for further information.

IFF Research may send you a survey.

From 4 May 2021, IFF Research will email those grantholders we would like to take part in this research with a link to complete a survey. The survey should take about 10 minutes to complete.

The email invite to the survey will not be sent from an email address associated with The National Lottery Community Fund. It will come from this address TNLCFsurvey@iffresearch-dm.com and will explain the information that is needed.

This is a legitimate piece of research and we are sharing this information to reassure those who receive the email invite IFF Research have been commissioned to deliver this survey by us. We are also encouraging people to complete the survey and participate where possible. IFF Research will follow up with non-responders by email or phone.

If you have more than one grant with us, the email from IFF Research will make clear which grant the survey relates to.

If you have any questions about the survey, email: TNLCFsurvey@iffresearch.com

You may need to pull together some information to answer the survey

The survey contains questions on the topics listed below. Don't worry if you do not have all this information, or if some of it is not relevant. You can still complete the survey. Information that will be asked for includes:

• type of activity or support that you used your funding for
• types of people the funding helped to support
• number of people that benefitted from the project or took part in an activity your organisation ran using the funding ('beneficiaries')

• the difference the funding made to your beneficiaries and community
• if relevant, the number of volunteers involved and how many were new to volunteering
• if relevant, the number of staff that were recruited or retained because of the funding

And last, but not least – thank you

Thank you for everything you do to support your community.