Z/Yen, together with Cass Business School Centre for Charity Effectiveness, has just completed a research study to trial PropheZy as an anomalous grant detector. The study used grants from The New Opportunities Fund (now part of the Big Lottery Fund) and City Parochial Foundation. Over 1800 grants were included in the study.

Three post-hoc evaluation questions were used; all questions that can reasonably be asked of any funded project and organisation:

• Did the funded work mostly achieve its objectives?
• With the benefit of hindsight, was it the right decision to have funded that work?
• Did you fund that organisation again or would you recommend funding it again?

The study proved that PropheZy demonstrated statistically significant predictive capability on The New Opportunities Fund data but not on the City Parochial Foundation data, indicating that these predictive techniques are mostly applicable to relatively large, structured grant-makers such as Government bodies and large philanthropic foundations.

The research has just been published in Strategic Change [15: (2006)]: “Predicting the Effectiveness of Grant-Making”, by Ian Harris, Michael Mainelli, Peter Grant, and Jenny Harrow. For more information on this groundbreaking study, please contact Ian Harris.