How will we know more people are In a Good Place?
Our Learning OKRs for 2026-27
27 May 2026
The Lloyds Bank Foundation is committed to working in the open – sharing how we’ve made decisions and our learning on how they’ve panned out. We’ve published our ‘Year 1 Learning OKRs’, as a starting point for how we will track and understand our progress.
We want everyone in England and Wales to be in a good place. In a good place personally, in a home that’s a good place to live, and in a community that’s a good place to belong to.
Community organisations that change lives day-in and day-out, and a wealth of research, tell us that there are three things everyone needs to be in a good place: personal resilience, housing, and community belonging.
These are the pillars of the Lloyds Bank Foundation’s strategy. And we can measure them.
Our Enabling Goals
We have set ourselves three big goals to achieve between now and 2035:
- GIVE: Every year, we will grow the giving of time and money across England and Wales.
- IMPACT: By 2030, we will have impact in every parliamentary constituency in England and Wales.
- POWER: By 2035, we will power community-led change in 100 local places in England and Wales.
These are our enabling goals – they will enable us to achieve our vision of everyone in England and Wales in a good place. And, again, we can measure them.
Our Outcomes
Being in a good place is a feeling (though yes, you’ve guessed it, measurable).
When you are in a good place personally, you feel good. When you are in a home that is a good place to live, you have comfort and safety. When you are in a community that is a good place to belong to, you feel part of something bigger than yourself. With these three pillars, you have greater wellbeing.
But not only do the three pillars of our strategy create wellbeing. They also create so much more.
With a home that gives you roots, the personal resilience that makes those roots strong, and a community that allows those roots to spread, you can build trusted connections. When you have those relationships, enough money, and the security of a safe home to fall back on when times get hard or things go wrong, you have what you need for resilience. And when all three of the pillars are in place, you can have choice and control: over what you do, the place you live, and the people you spend your time with. You can have agency.
All this is only possible if you have access to opportunities. That might be access to the job or the chance to volunteer that gives you purpose. To the home you can afford. To warm, welcoming places where you can meet others. The things that we all need, and that make life worthwhile.
Wellbeing, agency, resilience, trusted connections, opportunities. They’re the outcomes we base our work on. And we can measure them too.
But what should we measure, and how?
If we get how we measure and report against our impact right, we think we will be able to:
- Drive better outcomes for people and communities.
- Enable more learning and better governance.
- Increase confidence in our impact, and in doing so, help us make the case to increase investment into communities.
We’ve seen those benefits in the experience of community organisations we support.
How an arts charity understanding that they were wasting money offering to whole classes of children meant they could do focus in on the children who needed it most, and help hundreds more. How a community group won the backing of a new major donor because they could confidently show the difference they were making. How data can challenge assumptions, and in the very settings where the people who are furthest from being in a good place are supported – refuges, shelters, prisons, clinics – can even save lives.
The next step in our test-and-learn approach
We’ve learned a lot over 40 years. We’ve learned about the winding road to long-lasting change in communities. We’ve learned that our organisational development and capacity building support is what makes the biggest difference to charity partners’ future success. We’ve learned how to be wrong.
We’re now going to test a range of Objectives and Key Results – our Learning OKRs. These will help us be really clear on what we’re trying to achieve, and open about the hypotheses that are informing our thinking.
Example OKRs for one of our Enabling Goals
Our goal
IMPACT: By 2030, invest in communities in every parliamentary constituency in England and Wales
Our objective
Ensure communities in every parliamentary constituency benefit from funding, capability, or catalytic support
Our hypothesis
Communities benefitting from support will have increased outcomes, and the Foundation have increased learning and efficiencies to share.
Key result 1
Key result: Deliver meaningful investment (beyond Match Giving, eg. grant funding, capacity building, convening or lending enablement) in 100% of constituencies by 2029.
Baseline: 68% (over 5 years)
How will we measure it?: We already measure this. We will continue to review how we capture the activity of community organisations that work across constituency boundaries, and how we define ‘meaningful’.
Key result 2
Key result: Secure funding partner(s) to deliver shared capacity-building offers in every constituency by 2030.
Baseline: 0
How will we measure it?: We already measure this.
Key result 3
Key result: Resilience in 75% of the community-led organisations we provide capacity building support to is still increased 3 years after the start of our investment.
Baseline: 69% of charities supported by the Foundation between 2010 and 2019 had a positive CAGR
How will we measure it?: We will repeat the analysis of our impact on our portfolio (as in The Charizone Impact Report), and review how we understand and measure resilience in our monitoring - particularly for non-charities that are not captured in The Charizone Impact Report, and to ensure our definition of resilience is more than growth.
We’ll draw in data from a range of sources to understand if we’re making a difference against our key results:
- National sources of data, like the Charity Commission for England and Wales, the ONS, and Lloyds Banking Group.
- Hyper-local sources of data, like that which informs the Good Place Index.
- The assessments of experts, like community researchers, facilitators, professional evaluators, and our Local Systems Leads.
- Existing surveys, like the Third Sector Trends report, and our own new ones where appropriate.
- The monitoring which we undertake, in line with our commitments as an Open and Trusting Funder.
- Informal data, like the insights from the relationships our Community Impact Managers have with organisations and people locally.
But the next year is an experiment. We’re going to find out how feasible, reasonable, and appropriate to measure our Learning OKRs are. We’re going to stress-test which are most meaningful – both to track our progress, but also to the people who use our data. As in all we do that affects the communities and people we invest in, we will abide by ‘Our promises to partners’: staying flexible, and inviting a wide range of perspectives into our thinking, so together we can know that more people in England and Wales are in a good place.
