It’s been three months since we relaunched the Funders Collaborative Hub. Since then, we’ve received lots of fantastic feedback about our new website, as well as some useful suggestions for how some aspects of it could be improved.
Our Strategy Group (which you can find out more about here) has been meeting monthly to review how the Hub is being used, and to develop our plans to build on the momentum generated by our relaunch.
We’ve agreed on three priorities for the Hub to focus on in 2022:
· Grow and develop our collaboration opportunities offer
· Develop our inspiration and influencing role
· Integrate the Hub within the wider landscape and develop a sustainable model.
To help us understand how we’re doing so far, we spent some time at our recent Strategy Group meeting looking at our website analytics data. The early indications from this are encouraging – new collaboration opportunities are regularly being added to the Hub, and the average number of pages viewed by visitors to the site is increasing. As well as the collaboration opportunities themselves, our funder collaboration case studies, toolkit and blogs are all attracting plenty of interest.
We also agreed at our last Strategy Group meeting that we would start publishing the progress reports we review each month. You can find the first of these monthly updates here.
The ultimate purpose of the Hub’s work is to help funders achieve more together for the causes and communities that they aim to benefit
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Committing to openness and accountability
Sharing our progress openly in this way will play an important part in how the Strategy Group make ourselves accountable, collectively, for the Hub’s progress towards achieving its goals.
Accountability is a topic of much discussion in the grant-making world at the moment. As Friends Provident Foundation wrote in their recent blog on the Hub, it’s one of the three components of the Foundation Practice Rating (FPR), which will be publishing its first set of results later this month.
In assessing how accountable foundations are, the FPR asks: “How can anyone who wants to examine the work or decisions of a foundation after the event do so, and make their voice be heard?”
We want to apply the same principle to the Funders Collaborative Hub. Not least because we think that funders working more openly will enable more and better collaboration - and if we want to encourage this, the Hub itself should role-model openness in our work.
This means extending our accountability beyond funders. Of course, the Hub needs to be highly responsive to the needs of grant-makers, who are its main direct users. But funder collaboration is only a means to an end – the ultimate purpose of our work is to help funders achieve more together for the causes and communities that they aim to benefit.
So whether you are a funder, or anyone else with an interest in funders collaborating more effectively to support communities and civil society in the UK, we invite you to examine the Hub’s progress via the reports we’ll share every month.
If you have any feedback on our work, please let us know. Email us or connect with us on Twitter – and make your voice heard!
How is the Hub progressing?
Click below to view the Funders Collaborative Hub's first monthly progress update, for February 2022
