Report contents

This webpage is for trust fundraisers with three or more years’ experience. Beginners should use this page instead.

Depth of the report

As with all areas of trust fundraising, a key challenge is to judge what “gear” to be in: low (going methodically through the detail, maybe working harder to make the report extra compelling) high (skimming to a quick report) or somewhere in between. Then, you have to be able to execute that.

How do you know how much effort to put in? Are you trying to fill out a story and deepen the relationship, or to tick a box?

• Are they “gift givers” (smaller, more scattergun grants) versus “grant makers” (carefully trying to maximise their impact)
• How big is the actual grant?
• What staffing does the funder have? (You can tell from their accounts, if you’re unsure.) Also, are they what Bill Bruty would call a “Zombie trust” making the same grants every year or a “Tigger” – excitable and energetically involved?
• Is this a one-off obligation that needs to be done, or part of a long-term relationship that you’re developing
• What’s the culture of the organisation? (The trust might give you a clue. I worked at a staffed trust that very lightly reports for basic compliance, others have more interest. A grants officer at City Bridge once told me that if the charity had messed up, it could be unfair to allow future judgements to be too biased by that, whereas there are various stories of the Garfield Weston Foundation seem to take delivery pretty seriously.)

How is the report framed

Time consuming though it is, you need to get back in the mind of the trust, their interests and how you wrote the application, remembering the lines of argument you take. A great tip can be to ring them when they give and ask why they gave – if you did, you’ll be clearer about what to bring out in the reports.

The chances are that your report is selling the work again. However, it’s also a chance to develop trust with the funder. In order, the most important aspects of trust are:

• Benevolence towards the trust: it should be clear that their interests were a consideration in the inevitable decisions taken along the way and if possible the report should bring out a bit the shared values between the trust and your charity.
• Honesty: it’s worth looking out for disclosures you can make.
• Ability: they way the charity went about things and the achievements reflect the charity’s strengths. Problems are dealt with well and ideally there’s learning, that’s acted on and shared.

Assumptions about the reader

Most of the time, I’d write the report so it makes sense to someone who’s never seen the project before or at least only gave it limited consideration a year ago and hasn’t thought about it much since – and who really doesn’t want to make time in a pressured job to re-read the application.

How the activities proceeded

You need to cover this. I’d cover:

• An overview
• Key variations – especially if there are easy things to pick out from the proposal, such as milestones
• I’d write in a way that brings out excellence (at least, competence) at the charity and from the perspective of the Service Manager – i.e., it’s a more strategic presentation, though with compelling detail to bring it alive.
• When people work on smaller trusts, reports might reasonably be largely about inputs (the staff member and volunteer team) and outputs (we did X much work in the following locations) but with very big ones, a strong report can add in a lot more about the project management issues (in view of the changes of other local providers, we varied our model in the following ways and had to change the person spec, which was fine given the background of the postholder; we addressed an unexpected rise in demand by training the volunteers to handle more issues and focused the work of the staff member on the hardest problems – that kind of thing).

Outputs and outcomes

Again, an overview and comparisons with targets are needed. (It’s clear from the shape of reports and comments by some grants officers that they’re at least looking at the latter.) With new projects, the report is often the first opportunity to give a proper, evidenced, human sense of the impact of the work.

“Human” evidence

Photos: I expect we’ve mostly had instances where the only evidence that they liked the report was that they loved the photos! There’s a long video on good photos. However, I’ve had positive comments about very ordinary pictures.

Quotes and case studies: Again, I can think of grants officers who’ve mainly enjoyed and commented on these. It’s an intellectually demanding job, but case studies and quoptes are easy and impactful for the grants officer.

Comments on the style and “feel”

A lot is the same as a proposal:

• You’re trying to satisfy criteria, demonstrate impact, move people and encourage trust and belief.

• Although there’s a place for amazing detail, a report where it’s easy to get the key points will be appreciated.
• Be positive. We can work so much on addressing details of under-performance, or feeling disillusioned with the effort we’ve made to collect the detail, that the essential enthusiasm and positivity towards the work can get lost. It’s always worth re-reading at the end to check this.
• Finish on an emotional high. The impression of things that people go away with is an average of the “peak” or “trough” from reading and how it ends. Also, people aren’t going to really open up to you emotionally until you’ve convinced them intellectually.
• There’s emotional power that comes from contrasting the “before” and “after” in people’s lives.
• Once difference would be that if proposals are written with a strong sense of concern, I’d write the report with a sense of enthusiasm and of gratitude to the trust for making that possible. For example: in my all time favourite report that a colleague wrote, one thing that jumped out was that all the service users in the photos were smiling infectiously.