Guidance 43
What Funders Are Actually Buying: Service Delivery or Community Membership
A funding decision that looks like one choice is often two: pay for a service with defined outputs, or pay for a community with none. Confusing them is what breaks programmes at renewal.
What a Frontline Training Line Item Should Specify
A funding decision, not just a script: what a commissioner or programme manager should require frontline staff be taught to say about loneliness, and what the training budget needs to explicitly rule out.
Evaluating Groups With Roles Versus Groups Without Them
When a group programme assigns members defined roles rather than just facilitating contact, the outcomes look different. A guide to what to measure and what to tell a funder.
How to Write a Funding Case a Commissioner Can Actually Use
A sequenced procedure for translating a social connection programme into the outcome language commissioners are already accountable for, with the evidence that supports each claim and what to leave out.
How to Design a Loneliness Programme Evaluation You Can Actually Run
A sequenced approach to evaluation design for social connection programmes, built around what a small team can realistically measure — not what a systematic review would prefer.
Writing the Business Case Commissioners Actually Fund
Commissioners do not fund loneliness reduction in the abstract. They fund service use, referral volume, and cost per outcome inside a budget cycle — and most social prescribing bids are written for the wrong audience.
The Retention Cliff: Where Attendance Actually Collapses
Funders track enrolment; programmes die on the specific week attendance falls off a cliff. What the social prescribing evidence can and cannot tell you about when that happens, and what to fund instead.
Building an Honest Cost Case for a Connection Programme
How to make a defensible financial case for a social connection programme to a funder, without overstating savings the evidence cannot yet support.
Making the Case to Commissioners: What to Measure and Why
Commissioners fund outcomes, not activity. A guide to picking outcome measures for social connection programmes that survive a funding panel's questions, and being honest about what the evidence can and can't support.
When to Stop Running a Connection Programme
A decision framework for funders and programme managers on closing, not just launching, social connection initiatives — with the evidence thresholds that should trigger a stop.
Building the Cost Case for Social Prescribing Without Overselling It
Commissioners keep asking social prescribing services to prove they save the health system money. Here is what the published evidence actually supports, and where the honest cost case has to stop short of that claim.
Funding Programmes to Reach the People Who Never Apply
A self-referral pipeline will always recruit the people who already have the capacity to ask for help. A practical procedure for commissioning recruitment that reaches the rest.
Fund the Roles, Not Just the Room
A practical test for funders and commissioners reviewing group-based social connection proposals: does the application specify who does what, or does it just describe a room and a schedule?
Are You Funding a Service or a Community
A funding decision that gets blurred constantly: money for a service that delivers connection to people, versus money for a community that people build together. They need different metrics, different timelines, and different exit plans.
Writing a Social Prescribing Business Case Commissioners Will Actually Fund
A sequenced procedure for pitching a social prescribing scheme to a commissioner: which outcomes to lead with, which evidence claims will survive scrutiny, and where most proposals lose the room.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Building a Cost Case for Social Prescribing Without Overselling It
A practical guide to making the financial case for social prescribing to commissioners and funders, without claiming savings the evidence cannot support.
Funding by Mechanism, Not by Symptom
Loneliness funding often targets a diagnosis rather than a cause. A look at how commissioners have sorted interventions by the specific deficit they address, and what that means for procurement decisions.
Fund the Role, Not the Founder
A practical guide to structuring roles inside a funded peer group or social prescribing activity, so it survives the departure of whoever started it.
Digital or In-Person: How to Cost and Choose a Group Format
A funding decision, not a preference. How to work out whether a digital group, an in-person group, or a hybrid model is the better use of a fixed budget, and what the evidence actually supports.
Building a Cost Case for Connection Training That Survives Scrutiny
A practice note on how to justify training budgets for social prescribing and connection-focused staff without borrowing mortality statistics that don't belong to the intervention you're actually running.
How to Report Attrition Without Hiding What It Means
A practice note on reporting programme dropout honestly: what to disclose, how to frame it for funders, and the specific phrasing that tends to conceal rather than explain.
Writing a Connection Programme Bid Commissioners Will Actually Fund
Commissioners do not fund loneliness reduction. They fund service use, cost avoidance, and outcomes that fit their frameworks. A guide to translating the evidence accordingly.
Training Frontline Staff on Loneliness: What to Say and What Not to Say
A look at how social prescribing and health-system programmes have approached the specific problem of language: how frontline staff should raise loneliness with someone, and the phrases that undermine trust before the conversation starts.
Who Pays for the Group at the End of the Referral
Health systems have funded the link worker role in social prescribing; community organisations delivering the activity itself have mostly been left to absorb the demand. What published evaluations say about fixing that.
Funding Applications When the Evidence Base Is Thin
A case approach to writing funding applications for social connection programmes when the underlying evidence does not support the outcomes a funder wants claimed.
Funding Reach, Not Just Delivery: A Framework for Recruiting the People Who Won't Sign Up
Most social connection programmes are funded to deliver sessions, not to find the people who never apply. A framework for budgeting, staffing, and measuring recruitment as its own line of work.
Writing the Case for Support in Commissioner Language
How social prescribing services and connection programmes translate loneliness outcomes into the risk, cost, and service-use language commissioners actually fund — and where that translation runs ahead of the evidence.
How to Split Roles Inside a Group So It Outlives the Grant
A sequenced approach to assigning distinct roles inside a funded peer or community group, so the group keeps running when the paid facilitator's hours end.
Building a Cost Case for a Connection Programme Without Overselling It
A step-by-step approach to costing the case for a social connection programme that survives scrutiny from a finance director, built around what the evidence can and cannot support.
Digital or In-Person Groups: What to Actually Require in an Evaluation
Before funding a digital or in-person connection programme, decide what evidence you will require to compare them — because the literature on modality itself is thinner than most bids imply.
What a Volunteer Programme Budget Should Actually Fund
Most connection-programme budgets over-fund recruitment and under-fund supervision, which is the wrong split. A practical guide to allocating a volunteer budget so people stay past the six-week mark.
Funding Informal Social Programmes Without Signing Off on the Risk Blind
A funder's checklist for building safeguarding into grants for befriending, walking groups, and other informal social connection programmes, where the evidence base is strong on benefit and almost silent on risk.
Writing Your Outcomes Case in the Commissioner's Language, Not Yours
Commissioners fund risk reduction and service use, not warm feelings. A practical guide to translating social connection outcomes into the terms a funding panel actually scores.
Funding the Handoff, Not Just the Referral
Commissioners fund the referral into social prescribing far more readily than the handoff out of it. The evidence on where social prescribing works points at the second gap, not the first.
Scaling a Connection Programme Without Losing What Made It Work
A sequenced approach to scaling a social connection programme, for funders and programme managers deciding whether to expand a pilot that worked.
When the Ask Outruns the Evidence
A framework for handling the moment a funder or commissioner asks you to promise an outcome the social connection literature cannot actually support.
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.
The Venue Line Item Funders Cut First — And Shouldn't
Grant budgets treat venue and logistics as overhead to minimise. For attendance, they are the intervention. A practice note on the line items that quietly decide who shows up.