Big Lottery Fund

The Big Lottery Fund regularly commissions large evaluations across many projects. These studies may focus on particular funding programmes or themes that run across different programmes. This wider evaluation is similar to a self-evaluation in purpose, although its scope is different.

The Big Lottery Fund uses the findings from these evaluations to improve the ways we fund and the ways we work, and to influence policy making and practice. The evaluation of our funding also helps us to be publicly accountable for the funding decisions we make.

BIG evaluations, which sometimes run over several years, usually include case studies. This means that our evaluators may wish to speak to you about your project to gather learning for the wider programme.  The benefits of being involved as a case-study are that you will be able to see independent findings about the worth and quality of your project, as well as understanding how it compares to other case study projects.

Our wider evaluations may also request the use of your self-evaluation findings to analyse particular issues or themes or ask you to capture data at the start of your project (baseline data) and throughout the life of your project.  We are increasingly finding ways for projects within a programme to collect standard data (for example through surveying their users with an identical questionnaire).  This allows you to compare your work against that of others doing similar activities or aiming for similar outcomes.  

Any data that you provide for BIG evaluations will be anonymised by the external evaluators and held separately from the information requested by us for grant monitoring and management.