2025 Round Up

2025 has felt like a LOT in many ways - politically, globally, and close to home. It’s been a challenging year for the charity sector, with tighter budgets, uncertainty, and a tougher market overall - especially for a small consultancy like ours, where the highs are high… but the near-misses really sting.

But as the year comes to an end, we're feeling reflective and optimistic. Somehow through it all we've managed to start growing Wonder in the way we've always imagined. Looking back we've achieved a huge amount and worked with some incredible social impact organisations. Here are 3 things we’re proud to have achieved this year:

1️⃣ Delivering robust audience insight for grassroots orgs & smaller charities 🌟 

One of our ambitions for Wonder is to make high-quality, mixed-method insight accessible to smaller charities; organisations doing brilliant work, but often priced out of doing big exploratory/foundational research projects.

This year we refined a leaner approach - using existing audience data alongside targeted qualitative research to deepen insight. We applied this approach with Sing Up and Spark Somerset - small but mighty orgs doing brilliant work in education and volunteering. We’re excited to package this up next year and share more widely as a scalable offer for small charities who want strategic insight but don’t have huge research teams or budgets.

2️⃣ Deepening our practice in the mental health space 💜 

This is a personal passion area for us, especially as Steph has been undertaking studies in counselling and psychotherapy. 

A real highlight has been co-producing a Story of Change with the Maternal Mental Health Alliance (MMHA), bringing together lived experience change makers with local delivery partners to build the vision of how their place-based councils can bring about systems change in perinatal mental health support. We’ll be sharing our co-produced Story of Change, along with our learning soon!

We also learnt about the needs of new dads for mental health support in our evaluation of Dad Matters. This research shows what a huge gap there is in perinatal mental health support for dads - we’re inspired to see Dad Matters rolling out nationally with the support of the 1,001 critical days foundation 👏 

3️⃣ Building co-production into MEL 🚀 

We’ve brought participatory approaches into our MEL practice in more meaningful ways this year. We believe that co-production is key to creating MEL systems that reflect real-world complexity and truly capture tangible impact

We’re continuing to support the British Council as MEL partner for a 4-year systems change project to Reimagine and Strengthen English Language Teaching in Palestinian schools, ensuring initiatives are shaped from test and learn cycles and sustainable MEL systems are embedded within the Ministry of Education

🫶 Our longer-term collaborations continue to be some of the most rewarding; we’re pleased to have continued to work with WaterAid and Home-Start UK. Huge thanks to everyone we’ve worked with this year including our trusted collaborators Chemistry Insight, Here I Am Studio, LearnJam CIC, Hala Kabalan, Connie Flude and Rachel Holborow - we love working with you all!