Strategy review process

Our work reviewing strategy has been a major theme of the year. The process of strategy development has been fluid, taking place at various levels and locations, physically and virtually. We have sought input from grantees and partners, friends and critics. And we have tried to learn through the process about how we can be a better foundation.

Our new strategy, to be launched later in 2014, will say a good deal about openness, transparency and a desire to learn. In that spirit, we publish here some highlights from the process and outline some of the ingredients that have contributed to our thinking.

What we have done

‘PHF should…’ – external perspectives

Between September 2013 and January 2014 we ran an initiative called ‘PHF should…’, in which we invited input to our strategy review from a range of stakeholders. The primary aim was to generate ideas for consideration as part of the review and to begin conversations about the shape and direction our work could take in future. The concept was simply that participants should complete the statement ‘PHF should…’ and send it to us.

We set up ‘PHF should…’ to open up our strategy review. It produced more than 80 detailed contributions and prompted hundreds of smaller pieces of activity on social media. Several led to more in-depth conversations offline, and analyses of the data received have played an important part in our internal debates about future strategy. We published about half of the responses on a blog (www.phfshould.wordpress.com), where they can still be read and commented on.

Findings

At its broadest, the content received can be divided into suggestions about what we fund, and suggestions about how we fund. Both are instructive for the new strategy. Many contributions made cases for support for particular issues. For example, perhaps unsurprisingly given our areas of focus, young people emerged as a strong theme across contributions considering all kinds of aspects of our work. Contributions from people involved in Special Initiatives were quite common – often urging the continuation of aspects of this work, or proposing new activities building on the achievements of initiatives to date.

Others were more general in considering our approach to funding. Examples include the notion of the Foundation as ‘convenor’, using its influence and networks to bring people and organisations together to share learning and experiences; the importance of impact and evaluation to our work; and styles of funding such as long term vs short term, relationship vs project-based funding, and the funding of individuals.

There was discord around the issue of innovation – an area on which we placed considerable weight under our last strategy. While some contributors indicated that they favoured a focus on innovative work, others argued that this should not be at the expense of funding to scale up work, or simply to maintain organisations’ work amid difficult financial circumstances.

Internal – staff and trustee meetings

‘PHF should…’ was only the most public part of a wider process. In parallel to external conversations was a series of internal activities in which trustees and staff held wide- ranging conversations about how the Foundation works and what could be improved. These sessions were deliberately fairly unstructured but took as their starting points a set of five key issues: PHF’s values; its assets; its voice and influence; its programmes; and its grant-making.

Within each area we sought to bring a range of internal voices to the table to try to obtain, collectively, a deeper understanding of the issues at stake. In the first group, for example, we worked together towards developing a fresh articulation of the Foundation’s values, seeking to make them clearer so that the new strategy can easily be located within them. In ‘Assets’, developing an exhaustive list of the tools available to us to effect change was a useful step before next being able to consider how best to ‘sweat’ those assets to have maximum impact. Aside from the endowment, our people, intellectual capital, relationships and the physical space we inhabit, were all among the assets that we might seek to exploit more in order to achieve more in our mission and increase the benefit we bring to our clients and their beneficiaries.

Young Leaders’ Day – young people’s perspectives

As mentioned, a clear theme within the ‘PHF should…’ contributions was work with young people. Supporting young people has been at the heart of the Foundation’s values since the outset. The Social Justice programme has worked consistently to ensure that young people’s voices are heard, and our principle of participation, which has been a strong current within Open Grants funding, is rooted in the belief that beneficiaries should be active participants in decisions that affect them, rather than passive recipients of work designed to help them. It is therefore fitting that a deliberate focus on young people should form part of the activity surrounding our strategy review.

A team of staff volunteers worked with 12 grantee organisations from the three UK programmes, alongside young people working with each of the organisations. The event was led by a team from Creative Experts, who are part of PHF Arts grantee Contact in Manchester. The day aimed to generate answers to the question, ‘How can PHF improve opportunities for young people?’; enable participating young people and grantee staff to learn from each other and have fun; and experiment with working directly with young people supported by PHF grants.

Haz, a 15 year-old peer mentor from Arc Theatre, a grantee based in East London, wrote afterwards: “I thought it would be PHF people sitting around a table in suits and we would be asked about our progress and what we think our projects are doing for us. But no, this wasn’t the case at all! Eleven other companies were taking part in the day and everyone was so involved… I feel the day educated us all: we helped one another develop ideas on how we can do more by working together, both on the day and onwards.”

“Hi, I’m Haz. I’m 15 years old (nearly 16!) and I’m a peer mentor with Arc Theatre in Barking and Dagenham. At Arc we tackle subjects such as sexual exploitation, girls in gangs, sexting and sexual abuse.

In a sense you could say I’ve grown up with Arc. In the last two years they have changed me and opened my eyes, and I feel, now, wiser, and more confident. The work with Arc has impacted on me, my friends and others around us. Arc gives us an opportunity to be heard – as cliché’d as that sounds! No matter what, we will continue to let our voices be heard on issues that affect us, because we are making a difference.

On Saturday 9 November my friend and I went to the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Young Leaders’ Day. When I was first told about it, I thought it would be PHF people sitting around a table in suits and we would be asked about our progress and what we think our projects are doing for us. But no, this wasn’t the case at all! Eleven other companies were taking part in the day and everyone was so involved. While at the start it was a bit nerve-wracking, by the end of the day we were all one big happy family. I feel the day educated us all: we helped one another develop ideas on how we can do more by working together, both on the day and onwards. In one way or another, all of us had things in common. We all shared an aim: to make a change.”

– By Haz, Peer Mentor, Arc Theatre

A number of trustees attended the event, held during a weekend at our offices in King’s Cross. A film of the day was made by another of the participating organisations and, at the request of young people sitting on the steering group for the event, we produced a pack outlining funding and other opportunities for young people.

Other ingredients

In working on our new strategy we have also drawn on existing relevant research. The impact assessment of our former strategy, looking at outcomes from grants between 2007–12, which we published in 2013, provided an important backdrop for considering how we have made a difference, what outcomes we are able to effect, and how we can better consider outcomes measurement under the new strategy. From this exercise it was clear that we have historically had more impact in some areas than others – notably that we have had less impact on practice and policy than we sought under our old strategy, despite some notable successes. As the Impact report in this Yearbook shows, we also need to ensure that our systems for measuring outcomes, and crucially the capacity of grantees, improve if we are to be as effective as we wish.

We also have a trove of data on our effectiveness relative to other foundations, thanks to the Grantee Perception Report we received early in the year. As well as establishing some benchmark data for our performance under the new strategy, it highlighted some areas for improvement in our operations.

Conclusions

The various activities described here did not happen in a neat sequence, but overlapped, clashed with each other and competed with the Foundation’s ongoing activities. It is important to note that in many respects the activities represent starting points for further work and development. Not every conversation has been neatly wrapped up, and we have not discovered all the answers. The new strategy will not reflect directly every suggestion sent to us, but a number of themes picked up through the course of the year will continue to be discussed in the background, and may materialise in future work.

What does this all mean for our future strategy?

Regarding what we fund, this clearly raises a number of difficult decisions. In conversations, through ‘PHF should…’ responses, and internally, all areas of our work, and many areas where we have not worked historically, have been discussed and in many cases passionately and eloquently advocated. Yet data such as the GPR and our own impact assessment indicates that we have not been able to generate the outcomes we have sought in every area, which may suggest overstretch. The strategic review has been an opportunity to think differently and define tighter goals. Sometimes you have to do less to achieve more.

Perhaps the most important and radical changes may be to how we fund. Building on the successes of our previous strategy, but recognising where we need to improve, we want to make a big leap in terms of our processes and how we build learning into what we do. We will seek to be more open about what we do and communicate more about what we learn. This will require us to change and will require grantee relationships to change. There will not be a straightforward divide between Open Grants and Special Initiatives – rigidly enforced with capital letters – but instead we want to be more responsive, less one-size-fits-all, and offer a greater range of approaches to achieving our goals.

What’s next

At the time of going to print, we are finalising the major themes and funds under the new strategy. Following an announcement later in the year, these will be rolled out gradually and carefully, with due care to enable organisations already applying for funding under the existing strategy to complete that process.

What to expect:

  • We will be clearer in our articulation of values and what we want to achieve.
  • We will be launching new grants programmes.
  • We will be seeking to learn more and share more.
  • We will look different online. A new website is in development that will support our new activities and help all our stakeholders to learn from one another.
  • We will continue to be active in seeking feedback and dialogue.