Practice
Guidance index
Everything the Institute has published for practitioners. 219documents, most recent first.
2025
Why Social Prescribing Referrals Fail by Week Four
The most common social prescribing pathway is a single referral to a community group with no follow-up. Here is why that design fails predictably, and what a sequenced pathway looks like instead.
Matching the Intervention to the Need: How Programmes Have Approached Targeting
Befriending, group activities, and skills training address different problems. A case-approach look at how organisations have matched intervention type to isolation versus loneliness versus deficient social skills.
Scaling a Connection Programme Without Losing the Thing That Worked
A funder asks you to take a successful small programme to three times the size. What you measure and staff at that stage decides whether it still works, and most scale-up plans get the sequence backwards.
The Third Session Is Where Attendance Collapses
Attendance in group-based connection programmes does not drop off gradually. It drops off at a specific point, and different organisational models handle that point differently.
How to Choose Loneliness Outcome Measures a Commissioner Will Sign Off
A sequenced procedure for picking outcome measures for a social connection programme that will survive scrutiny from a commissioner, funder, or NHS integrated care board — and the measures that keep getting rejected.
Designing the Handoff: What Happens After You Refer an Employee for Loneliness or Isolation
Referring an employee to an EAP or social prescribing pathway is not the same as connecting them. A practice note on where workplace referral handoffs fail and how to close the gap.
How to Report Attrition Without Hiding the Failure Rate
A step-by-step approach to reporting who dropped out of a connection programme and why, so the numbers survive scrutiny from a funder or a skeptical board.
Give People a Job: Why Roles Beat Icebreakers in Social Prescribing Groups
The evidence on structured versus unstructured group activity suggests that assigning members a task or role does more for loneliness outcomes than open-ended mingling. A practice note for anyone designing a referred group.
Counting Who Showed Up Is Not the Same as Counting Who Got Better
A practice note on why social prescribing reports need a reach number and an outcome number, kept separate, and what happens to programme decisions when they get collapsed into one.
2024
How to Tell If You're Measuring a Service or a Community
A step-by-step way to check whether your programme's evaluation is only capturing service delivery, and what to measure instead if the goal is durable community.
Making the Case for Connection in the Language Commissioners Already Use
A framework for translating the connection evidence into the terms that actually move a budget decision — absence, turnover, and risk registers — and where that translation runs out.
When the Evidence Base Doesn't Support What You're Being Asked to Fund
A practice note for programme managers asked to prove a social connection intervention reduces isolation, prevents disease, or cuts costs, when the underlying trial evidence cannot support that claim.
When to Close a Group Down
A decision framework for programme managers and link workers on ending a social connection group well, rather than letting it run past the point it does any good.
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.
Training Frontline Staff to Talk About Loneliness: What the Evidence Supports
Funders now pay for isolation screening in social prescribing and primary care contracts. What frontline staff are trained to say matters more than whether they screen at all — and the published evidence points to a specific script problem.
Recruiting the People Who Won't Sign Up
Standard recruitment for community programmes reaches people already inclined to join. Here is what changes if your target is the people least likely to self-select in.
Room Layout, Timing, and Transport: The Logistics Decisions That Decide Attendance
Venue budget lines that never make the funding narrative — parking, room shape, start time, and the walk from the bus stop — are often what determines whether a connection programme fills a room.
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.
The First Four Weeks: A Sequencing Framework for Social Prescribing Referrals
What a link worker or programme manager should actually do, week by week, between referral and the point most people drop out — and why the order of activities matters more than the activities themselves.
The Week Four Problem: Why Drop-In Social Groups Empty Out
Most open drop-in social groups launch strong and collapse within a month. A sequenced procedure for building a group that still has people in it by month three.
Matching the Prescription to the Need, Not the Referral
Isolation, loneliness, and lack of purpose are different problems with different fixes. A guide to diagnosing which one you are looking at before you prescribe a group.
Why the Loneliness Toolkit Built for Retirees Doesn't Work on Your 27-Year-Olds
Gallup's new global data shows loneliness is a young person's problem, not an old person's one. Most workplace interventions were designed for the opposite population.
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.
Safeguarding in Social Prescribing: How Programmes Have Approached the Risk
Social prescribing puts vulnerable people into unsupervised group settings run by voluntary and community organisations. Here is how the sector has approached the safeguarding gap this creates.