Frameworks
Structured guidance
Longer pieces that lay out a way of approaching a whole problem rather than answering one question. Each is written to be worked through.
01
How Informal Connection Programmes Handle Safeguarding Without Killing the Informality
Volunteer-led social groups sit awkwardly between clinical services and pure informality. A look at how organisations in this space have set safeguarding thresholds, trained non-professional facilitators, and decided what a volunteer is not responsible for.
02
What the WHO Report Changes for Health and Community Partnerships
The WHO Commission on Social Connection has given health systems a mandate to treat connection as a clinical concern. The bottleneck is not referral volume — it is whether community organisations can absorb it. Six decisions to make before you sign anything.
03
Count Who You Missed, Not Just Who Improved
Community connection programmes almost always report outcomes for the people who turned up and nothing about the people who did not. A practical method for building a reach denominator you can defend to a funder, and why outcome data alone will mislead you.
04
Should You Run This Group Online Or In Person?
A decision procedure for choosing the delivery mode of a connection group, what the evidence does and does not support about digital delivery, and why attendance registers hide the people who never get spoken to.
05
Measure Your Volunteers the Way You Measure Your Participants
A step-by-step method for tracking volunteer recruitment, training and retention in a connection programme, including which numbers to collect from the first cohort and which claims the evidence will not support.
06
Designing a Loneliness Evaluation You Can Actually Run
A six-step framework for evaluating a community connection programme with one part-time coordinator and no research budget — including what pre-post data can and cannot support when you put it in front of a funder.
07
What to Fix and What to Flex When You Scale a Connection Programme
A group that works at one site is about to be commissioned across thirty. Guidance on writing a fidelity specification before the contract does it for you, and the funding mechanic that quietly destroys dose.
08
Five Structural Tests for Whether You Built a Service or a Community
A service delivers an activity to people who arrive as recipients. A community is a set of relationships among the people who arrive. Five tests to work out which one you have, and what each costs to run.
09
What the Surgeon General's Advisory Changes for Workplace Referral Pathways
The 2 May advisory gives employers the numbers to justify acting on loneliness. It does not tell you what happens in the ten minutes after an employee discloses. A guide to designing the handoff between a manager, an EAP, and a community destination.
10
Designing Groups That Survive Week Four
Most connection programmes do not fail at recruitment. They fail between the third and fifth session, and the causes are structural rather than motivational.
11
Designing a Connection Evaluation You Can Actually Run
Social prescribing schemes have produced the largest published body of evaluated connection work. What their evaluations actually measured, what they got wrong, and how to design a study your team can complete with the staff you have.
12
How To Write A Loneliness Programme Bid A Commissioner Will Fund
Commissioners buy risk reduction, service demand, and defensible measurement. A guide to translating a social connection programme into the terms a funding panel actually scores against, including what to do when your evidence is thin.