Impact & Learning Lead; Part-time

Job purpose:

To deepen the impact of the charity’s grant programmes for public benefit.

Contract:

Part-time, 28 hours per week

Salary: £35,000–£40,000 per annum pro rata (FTE=35 hours per week), depending on skills and experience

Reports to:

Head of Grants and Engagement

Location:

Bournemouth, Dorset

Hybrid and flexible working arrangements

Talbot Village Trust (TVT) is one of Dorset’s largest place-based funders. Guided by the social purpose of our founders, we support people and communities across south-east Dorset to live well. Over the past decade, we have awarded more than £10 million through over 650 grants to charities and local impact organisations operating across Bournemouth, Poole, Christchurch, Purbeck, and East Dorset.

Alongside grant‑making, we manage a diverse estate that includes the historic Talbot Village, residential, agricultural and commercial lettings, woodland, and an urban heath.

We aim to strengthen learning, insight, and impact, and this new role is central to achieving that goal. We seek to develop a longer‑term, more evidence‑informed and preventative approach to transform the Trust’s grant‑giving. We want to better understand the impact of our grants and our wider work ‘beyond the money’. You will design and establish an evaluation framework to help us do this across our operations.

Guided by the needs of communities in our area of benefit, you will also gather insights and support our learning across the Trust so that our grants are as impactful as possible.

As part of our strategic aims, we are expanding a recent pilot of our Strategic Partnership programme. This will enable the Trust to move from purely reactive grant‑giving to include a more proactive and relational approach that transforms lives and opportunities with local communities over the longer term. Your arrival at this key time will help us create a framework for understanding the programme’s development and longer‑term impact.

Much of our work goes ‘beyond the money’: in addition to making grants, we seek to increase the effectiveness of the local sector by sharing skills and non‑financial resources, convening organisations and making introductions. Your role will help us understand the impact of this wider work. You will also work directly with some of our grantees, helping them to better understand the impact of their work.

By working with our Digital Engagement Creative and our Communications Officer, you will also help charities share their successes and enable us to amplify their voices.

The Impact & Learning Lead will help us understand, deepen and communicate the difference our funding and wider engagement work makes. You will lead on impact measurement, evaluation and organisational learning, ensuring that decisions are evidence‑informed and that funding delivers the greatest possible benefit. You will have experience in social value measurement and facilitating knowledge exchange to bridge grassroots action and strategic philanthropy.

This is a new and pivotal role within TVT, offering the opportunity to shape our approach to learning from grant‑making, support grantees, and enable more effective, preventative, place‑based change.

• Coordinate the design, delivery and refinement of the Trust’s impact and learning strategy.
• Translate insights from grant‑giving programmes and sector research into strategic recommendations for the Trust’s Board.
• Work with grantees to develop practical, sustainable impact frameworks, monitoring processes and data quality.
• Lead TVT’s own impact measurement initiatives, establishing frameworks based on well‑tested tools and models. This will include developing an understanding of our impact over long time frames and…