Background
Grants to voluntary organisations play an essential role in society by supporting activities and projects that promote social inclusion, health, culture, the environment, and other community-beneficial purposes. To ensure these funds are used effectively, knowledge-based evaluations are necessary to document the relationship between the grants and the desired effects. Grants enable activities in line with the organisations' goals but can also lead to distortions and adaptations that affect their scope of action and distinctiveness. There is significant variation between grants, from basic support to narrowly defined projects, making it challenging to define a dependent variable applicable across different grants. Organisations report on grants, but formats vary and often focus on documenting that the funds have been used for the intended purpose. This project will develop a method to evaluate the impact of a wide range of financial grants to voluntary organisations and assess how these funds contribute to achieving societal goals.
Project Approach
The project will use quantitative methods to evaluate the impact of grants. The data includes all government grant schemes reported in tilskudd.no, which covers various types of voluntary organisations. The project will gather information from tilskudd.no to identify organisations that receive grants and develop a survey to measure the impact of the grants. The survey will be sent to organisations that are recipients of grants and to organisations that have not received grants, to compare the effects.
Main Research Questions:
- Which voluntary organisations receive government grants, how do allocated amounts vary between different types and fields, and how have allocations evolved over time?
- To what extent do government grant schemes hinder and promote voluntary organisations' roles in addressing societal challenges?
- To what extent do distortions and adaptations arise due to the goals, criteria, and control mechanisms of government grant schemes, and how does this affect the ability of voluntary organisations to address societal tasks on their own terms?
The project will also examine the relationship between grants and desired effects by developing and testing a method to evaluate how grants impact the organisations' ability to execute their projects and achieve their goals. The data will be analysed to identify success factors and develop specific recommendations on how grant schemes can be improved to increase their impact.
The project will culminate in a report to be delivered in 2028.
