The Nationwide Foundation is offering funders the chance to learn from their Supporting Families funding strategy experience at a free seminar on 26 July.

The areas under discussion include:

• applying theory of change models to grant making
• bringing together grantees
• providing grant exit strategy support.

The aim of Supporting Families was to reduce crime and violence, strengthen families and make communities safer. The foundation provided grants of up to £5,000 to charities with incomes of under £500,000. It also ran an investor programme giving three-year grants of £150,000 to larger organisations.

The foundation will discuss its approach, the challenges it faced and the lessons learned. It will consider the benefits and drawbacks of:

• visiting recipients of large grants every quarter
• engaging consultants to work with grantees
• encouraging grantees to work in partnership.

A summary report, which is already available to download, shows that benefits include the development of strong relationships between the funder and grantee. This resulted in more accurate reporting and issues being addressed at an early stage. Drawbacks were the amount of time involved, especially in setting up partnership working between the grantees.

A recommendation is for charities to conduct longitudinal studies of beneficiaries to capture wider benefits of their work to feed back to funders. An end of grant interview would also help funders to learn lessons. The report suggests that funders should help grantees to raise awareness among policymakers of their work. Funders should also develop a communications strategy to raise their own profile.

Nationwide Foundation manager Leigh Pearce says: "Evaluation allows us to identify where and how our funding is most effectively deployed and it is an important element of our grant making strategy. Independent evaluation also monitors the usefulness and value of the additional support we provide to grantees - such as exit strategy consultancy and promoting partnership work.”

To book a seminar place  visit: http://grant-making.eventbrite.com/

To download the report, visit: www.nationwidefoundation.org.uk/evaluation-findings-2006-10