A fresh approach to impact and learning

For more than 100 years, the Carnegie UK Trust has helped improve the lives and wellbeing of people through the UK and Ireland through investments in everything from libraries and further education to public spaces and rural development.

Today, Carnegie UK seeks to improve understanding of society and social progress, and aims to tackle issues that threaten collective wellbeing through a combination of research, policy and practice. With such ambitious goals, the Trust wanted to transform how it measured its impact to support a new organisational strategy. 

Journey of change

“We wanted someone to join us on a journey to understand better what we are trying to do; and how improving the way in which we measure our impact could help us make the changes we want to see,” explains Jennifer Wallace, Head of Policy at Carnegie UK Trust. 

“What attracted us to Lucent was their deep knowledge – they are a team of people who’ve done this themselves in their own organisations and that gives them a genuine sense of how to lift things off the page into the real world,” says Jennifer. “It was their ability to bring staff along with us that has been most valuable.” 

Bringing values to life

Lucent worked alongside the whole staff team to help them reflect on their current methods and to make the shift to a new approach. They reviewed best practice from others in the sector through a literature review and in-depth interviews and then designed a series of workshops for staff. Key to the success of these workshops was embedding the team’s values in their design. 

“This process was really transformative for us,” says Jennifer. “Lucent helped to bring our values to life and put them into action. Lucent curated a safe space for staff to work together so that the whole organisation was ready to make a shift on impact. For the first time we were able to say ‘this is who we are and what does that mean’.” 

Confidence and engagement

As a result, staff gained greater confidence and engagement with impact measurement and are fully equipped to take the next steps to embed a new approach that supports the new organisational strategy.  

“This work has really exceeded my expectations,” says Jennifer. “We have a re-engaged staff team who are keen to put in place the things we’ve talked about for our new programmes. We also have a team poised to relaunch the new programme to the board with confidence.” 

The project with Lucent has also brought additional benefits: “By connecting us with other Trusts in the sector, the Lucent team has introduced us to a wider community of interest that we can benefit from in the future. 

“I was surprised at how much working with them felt like they were a natural extension of the staff team – above all it was their kind, agile and generous approach that has made the whole process of working with Lucent feel both collaborative and instinctive.”