Greater London Authority: External Evaluation Case Study

Greater London Authority

The Client

The Greater London Authority is the regional governance body for London and is responsible for delivering a range of services across the city. It is led by the Mayor of London.

 

The Challenge

To evaluate the impact of Phase 1 of the ‘Sport Unites’ Community Sport Investment Programme. Sport Unites is the Mayor of London’s flagship community sports programme designed to support the long-term vision to make London the most active and socially integrated city in the world.

The Project

To undertake a two-year independent evaluation of Phase One of the Mayor of London’s Sport Unites investment programmes.

Over 400 grantees reported the outputs and impact of their work around using sport to tackle inactivity; support mental health and wellbeing; encourage social mixing and decrease social isolation; address serious youth violence; build the capacity of the workforce; and strengthen the community sport sector’s systems and infrastructure. Central to this project was an overarching Theory of Change to inform the programme strategy and an aligned mixed method monitoring & evaluation framework. Grantees collected and reported on both quantitative and qualitative data. inFocus validated this secondary data through additional surveys, key informant interviews, learning events and by conducting ten (13 including MEEF) case studies on grantee projects to ensure a deeper understanding of the use of sport to affect positive outcomes for Londoners. A final evaluation report was produced which included conclusions and recommendations that were drawn from the data in a participatory manner alongside the Mayor of London’s Community Sport team.

What we discovered

The evaluation took place during the Covid-19 pandemic which not only forced the client and their grantees to innovate and adapt to the crisis, but also the methods adopted by inFocus to support them and collect data. We were able to adapt very quickly our data collection to online and remote methods through social media, messaging services and online communication and survey tools. We shared our knowledge and expertise with grantees to help them adapt effectively so they could continue to successfully report on their impact.

The report revealed allowed the Community Sport team to make key decisions about its strategy moving forward for Phase 2. More to add when its done!

Further information

  • –  Sport Unites Final Evaluation report (to be written.  Due to be published start of May but likely delayed because the GLA are very slow hahaha) (You could put the interim report in its place for now?)
  • –  Grantee Case Studies (x14) (some are already completed and could go up now?)

Want to see more?

On the link below you can check out another case study from the Sports Unites project, supported by the Mayor of London. This case study focuses on our work to develop a guiding Theory of Change for Phase 1 of the ‘Sport Unites’ Community Sport Investment Programme and the ‘Major Events Engagement Fund’ (MEEF).