Open and trusting reporting

Let’s make grant reporting more proportionate, simple and useful.

Funders and charities alike have long expressed frustration with the way grant reporting works.

Charities often struggle to manage onerous, disproportionate requirements; and funders feel frustrated by overly positive accounts, which do little to help them understand how best to improve their own contribution.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

The last two years have generated practical innovations across a range of funding practices – not least around reporting. We are working with funders and charities to explore what an agile and light-touch approach looks like, and why it matters.

Why review your grant reporting?

Avoid wasted effort

Reporting arrangements can be burdensome rather than useful. Our goal is to address and reverse that, by supporting funders and [tip description=”We use charities as shorthand for all kinds of social sector organisations, from unincorporated community groups to social enterprises.”]charities[/tip] to co-design a new approach that works for them both.

Focus on what really matters

We want to translate intentions of being light-touch into action for the longer term – so that funded organisations can focus even more on what really matters to the people and communities they serve.

Recognise funders’ power

The power to make change happen – to do things differently – largely rests with funders. The design of reporting arrangements – format, frequency, content – is in their gift.

How does this link to Open and Trusting Grant-making?

The ideas shared on this page link to the eighth commitment to Open and Trusting Grant-making:

Open and Trusting Grant-making is a community of over 100 funders who are committed to making and managing grants in a way that reflects their confidence in the organisations they fund.

Find out more and join the community by visiting:

About Open and Trusting Grant-making

What is the purpose of reporting?

Grant reports generally serve one or more of three main purposes. For many funders, an essential first step towards lighter-touch reporting has been taking apart and scrutinising each element in terms of its value.

Accountability

Impact

Learning

Accountability: ‘What have you done with this money?’

This first level of reporting is concerned with compliance, providing assurance to trustees that a foundation’s resources are being used responsibly and in line with the terms of the grant. If funders start from a position of confidence in their own application and assessment processes, and in the integrity and skills of the charities they are supporting, the responsibilities of good stewardship can be exercised very lightly. Funders are not auditors. And the trustees of the charities they support have their own duties of responsible management under charity law.

Impact: ‘What has been achieved?’

Everyone cares about making a difference. But foundations are far from uniform in their understanding of what ‘impact’ looks like, whose impact they are judging, and what they want to know about it. Some are concerned with tangible outputs – the number of activities provided, the number of people reached and so on. Some want to understand direct outcomes from the work – the short-term changes delivered or contributed to. Others are concerned with impact in its formal sense – the progress that is being made towards longer-term systemic and structural change (of which the work they are supporting is usually a very small part). Each makes different demands on funded organisations and calls for different behaviours from funders in agreeing realistic and meaningful reporting agendas with them.

Learning: ‘What can you tell us that will help us to do a better job?’

A commitment to more flexible, lighter-touch reporting does not mean Open and Trusting funders are giving up their responsibility to make purposeful, intelligence-informed decisions about strategy and practice. But it does mean they are not ‘pushing down the responsibility for “Are we doing a good job?” to the people we are funding’. Rather, they are taking responsibility for thinking deeply about the critical questions that will help them to make informed judgements about how to improve their contribution to the complex ecosystem they inhabit.

A grant reporting system designed primarily to hold individual charities to account for what they have done is unlikely to make much contribution to strategic questions for a foundation about ‘so what’ and ‘what next?’. Social change is complex and uncertain – we are all ‘swimming in murky waters’. Foundations become a stronger partner in this process by respecting the expertise and intelligence of the organisations they support, rather than setting and imposing rigid agendas. And by ‘thinking out loud’ and sharing what they have learned, they give value back to the organisations they support and the wider field.

What charities think – the best and worst of grant reporting

We invited charities to share their views on the best and worst of grant reporting; and five key messages emerged about what funders can do to help make it a more mutually beneficial experience.

Let’s reframe reporting as a joyous experience – we all care about the same things. Let’s celebrate what’s working and explore what we could be adapting.

1. Reduce the collective cost of reporting

2. Respect the demands on staff and service users

3. Be clearer and more transparent

4. Pay attention to the funding relationship

5. Be more flexible about how and when reports are made

1. Reduce the collective cost of reporting

Charities have many funders. Their different demands and requirements are onerous and too often force charities to focus on ‘what the funder wants’ at the expense of ‘what our organisation needs’. It makes a big difference when funders take account of this wider context in determining their own reporting needs.

2. Respect the demands on staff and service users

Heavy reliance on project funding means that charity monitoring and evaluation systems have to speak to many different funder targets and outcomes. This makes them cumbersome for operational staff and volunteers, and frustrating for beneficiaries, who often feel ‘assessed to death’. A bigger shift to funders looking at the overall performance of an organisation, not just their bit of the picture, would have huge benefits.

 

3. Be clearer and more transparent

Charities need funders to be upfront about what they expect from the work and how they will make judgements about what they fund. They need to understand when funders are monitoring performance and when they are interested in learning about challenges and progress. And they want to know what funders do with their reports and get meaningful feedback. Without this clear framework, reporting is ‘a leap of faith’.

4. Pay attention to the funding relationship

Charities appreciate the opportunity to build relationships with funders. It helps ‘to know the person on the other side’, and many find conversations and visits more satisfying than written reports. But relationships with funders are complex and framed by power differentials. And time is tight. Clarity about the nature and limits of the relationship a funder is offering enables charities to make informed judgements about how best to manage it.

5. Be more flexible about how and when reports are made

Funders can reduce inefficiencies simply by tailoring their reporting dates with charities’ own cycles. But a greater willingness to share control is also needed. Particularly when communicating progress and impact, charities can feel constrained by traditional reporting methods and by having to translate their activities, outcomes or the experience of beneficiaries into ‘funder language’. Having more choice about how and when to report adds value to charities, rather than simply taking up time.

Testing six principles for grant reporting

In 2018, IVAR and Esmée Fairbairn Foundation brought funders and funded organisations together to tackle ‘the problem of grant reporting’, and to do it in a way that respected the challenges and concerns of both. A group of 16 charities and funders committed to work together to find practical ways of making grant reporting more proportionate, simple and useful. By early 2020, we had tested six principles to support better reporting and were poised to call for widespread change.

Covid-19 stopped this project in its tracks. But the last two years have generated practical innovations across a range of funding practices – not least around reporting. Many more trusts and foundations found they could be lighter, more agile and more open in their thinking and ways of working.

In reflecting on the actions that funders are taking to become more open and trusting in their approach to grant reporting, we see six principles emerging that are helping funders of all types to improve their practice. We see these as an evolution from those published in December 2019, and our next step is to test and improve them with funders and charities.

Getting started

1. Be rigorous: Take the time to agree what you need, why you need it and how you will use it

2. Be realistic: Reporting alone cannot answer strategic questions about ‘what next’

Moving to design

3. Be respectful: Do everything possible to lighten the burden

4. Make it useful to charities, not just to foundations

5. Allow greater choice in how and when reports are made

Communication

6, Be explicit: Minimise the risk of confusion or second guessing by listening and responding to the needs and preferences of your grantees

Get involved

Share examples

If you have examples of things you are doing, or materials/templates that bring Open and Trusting reporting to life, please do share them with natalie@ivar.org.uk

Participate in our research

If you are doing something about reporting or have experience of reporting relationships that you would like to share as part of this study, please get in touch with vita@ivar.org.uk

Join Open and Trusting

Please join us in this collaborative effort to create more equitable and effective funding relationships that will help us all make our best contribution to the communities and causes we serve.

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With thanks to:

With thanks to the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust/Ashley Gilbertson for the photo used at the top of this page.

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