Civil society is one of the UK’s greatest assets. It is driven by innovation, rooted in communities, and committed to tackling some of the nation’s most complex challenges, but it faces barriers that prevent it operating at its full potential. The Law Family Commission on Civil Society brought together experts from within the social sector and beyond to explore those barriers and, concluding in January 2023, made a range of practical recommendations designed to unleash more of this immense potential.
Prominent among these was a call to invest in the infrastructure that enables charities and social organisations to share knowledge, learn from one another, and build on what works. The Civil Society Evidence Organisation (CSEVO)[1] is our answer to that call. Its purpose is to improve the flow and use of evidence across the sector, reducing duplication, spreading best practice, opening up economies of scale, and enabling smarter decisions by practitioners, funders, and policymakers alike.
At its core, CSEVO operates as a hub-and-spoke model, acting as a central coordinating body (‘hub’) that connects three key stakeholder groups (‘spokes’): evidence users (charities, funders, policymakers, and researchers seeking insights to guide strategy and resource allocation); evidence providers (academic institutions, think tanks, commercial agencies, and in-house analysts who generate insights); and data providers (organisations that hold or manage data, including the Charity Commission, official statistics bodies, funders, and charities themselves).
Via this model, CSEVO will undertake three key areas of activity designed to build the civil society evidence base. First, it will engage with civil society actors to understand their evidence needs and the gaps that need filling with the greatest urgency. Second, it will generate and disseminate evidence, thus producing and curating high-quality, openly accessible research that draws on administrative, proprietary, and newly commissioned data. Third, CSEVO will focus on translation and application, thus ensuring that outputs are accessible, actionable, and neutral, helping users make evidence-informed decisions.
In practical terms, this results in a structured five-step process for the CSEVO hub:
- Actively prompt and reactively receive research enquiries, and triage these with reference to a database of past responses.
- Address enquiries in-house if feasible, making use of past work and connections with the data-provider spoke.
- Commission external experts from within the evidence-provider spoke when needed, sometimes working in coalition.
- Share findings publicly and add them to a searchable knowledge base.
- Use insights from enquiries to shape a communications agenda that promotes practical improvements for all parts of civil society.
Our consultation has identified a strong appetite for a model such as this among both potential evidence users within the social sector and the likely evidence providers. For the latter group, CSEVO offers the opportunity to foster coordination in a way that generates benefits for all, by developing shared standards, building an open evidence repository, and creating efficiencies through common methodologies and data linkages.
The benefits of CSEVO are far-reaching. Charities, funders, and policymakers will all be able to make more informed choices. And ultimately, the public – who rely on civil society – will benefit from improved outcomes. However, structural barriers within civil society mean this kind of coordination won’t emerge on its own. The sector lacks the profit motives of the private sector and the central coordination of the public sector. This is why CSEVO must be deliberately built, with co-investment from both the social sector and the state.
We propose locating the hub within a trusted existing organisation, ensuring neutrality and reach. Our central funding case calls for £2.5 million over five years to pilot CSEVO, with steady-state costs amounting to around £600k a year. Our recommendation is that the costs should be split evenly between the sector and the government, with the latter using a matched-funding approach to incentivise social sector funders and philanthropists to contribute. The government and the sector would, likewise, both contribute to the governance of CSEVO, with structures built in a way that ensures the organisation recognises the voices of all users across civil society.
The case for CSEVO is clear. Despite being home to passionate innovators with an aptitude for cost control born of necessity, civil society records lower investment in technology, leadership, and skills compared to the public and private sectors. Organisations are under pressure, stretched for capacity, and too often forced to prioritise short-term service delivery over long-term development. Add to that a fragmented evidence base – much of it inaccessible, duplicated, or too technical for practitioners – and the result is a sector of brilliance being held back by structural obstacles.
A central evidence organisation, co-created and co-managed by the sector and by government, has the potential to change this picture and unleash more of the immense potential of civil society. Our consultation process has identified strong demand for the sort of hub-and-spoke approach we have set out here. The next step is to make it a reality.
[1] Pronounced seh-seevo