
The Social Impact Team at Nominet is excited to welcome you to our new Blog. We’ve set it up as a collaborative space to share updates and learning from Nominet’s Social Impact programme. The intention is to give an honest ‘under the hood’ look at our social impact work – revealing the strategic thinking, dilemmas, operational challenges, and practical lessons we know are part of every initiative aiming to achieve positive social change. We intend the blog to be particularly useful to our peers working in funders and charities. who – like us – have a geeky interest in the design

Effective monitoring of the projects and programmes that Nominet funds is vital to enable accountability, learning, continuous improvement and evaluation. Nominet’s overall approach to monitoring grants is relatively standard – reflecting well established practices in the charity sector. At the beginning of a new grant, inFocus, Nominet’s independent social impact monitoring partner, will work with the grantee to confirm their ‘Theory of Change’. A Theory of Change describes how, why and under what conditions positive social impact is expected to happen..

In late 2022 Nominet invited a new round of applications to our Countering Online Harms Innovation Fund. We’ll be announcing grantees in the coming weeks and months, once formalities are all confirmed – but in the meantime I wanted to reflect on the design of the application process for the Fund. The Social Impact team at Nominet have all worked in charities, and we’re acutely conscious that when funders impose poorly designed grant application and management processes, it drains non-profits’ resource and undermines their ability to have a positive impact.

Over the coming weeks and months we’ll be announcing several grants being made through Nominet’s Countering Online Harms Innovation Fund. This fund is fairly unusual in its approach, so we wanted to share some of the research and design thinking that sits behind it. Launched publicly in 2019, the Innovation Fund responds to an alarming increase in illegal online harms affecting children. Taking online child sexual abuse (CSA) as an example, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) investigated 361,000 reports of suspected criminal material in 2021 – more than it dealt with in its entire first 15 years of existence. WeProtect’s Global Threat Assessment for CSA shows the increase seen by IWF reflects a wider trend.