Photos: Seth Doyle and (inset) Christin Hume, on Unsplash
The material on this page is for beginners. if you have three or more years’ experience, you may find more useful the pages on reports in the menus associated with this link: https://goodgrantfundraising.org.uk/report-writing-introduction/.
It’s hard to know how important your report will be. There’s a chance it will be extremely important, there’s a chance it will barely be read. Given that a lot of money comes from the people who funded you in the past, it’s sensible to taken your reports seriously. Most charities can’t afford to alienate their existing donors with poor reporting.
When considering the report, it’s useful to think of whether the trust is:
A gift-giver (maker of lots of small gifts – in which case they may barely have time to read the applications, never mind the reports)
A grant-maker (working a lot harder to ensure their money makes the maximum possible difference – e.g., by having a grants staff team) in which case, they should have some interest in whether they got what they wanted when they made a grant. (That said, the capacity in some trusts can be very loaded onto the initial assessment, leaving a lack of time to read reports.)
An active investor in organisations (delegating to your charity the decision making about how to make the most difference with their money, but keeping an eye on whether you do). Clearly, reports should be pretty important.
A “zombie trust” that makes the same grants each year (in which case, it’s not clear what you can get out of the situation if you do more than appearing to have met the basic requirements)
Functionally, reports are about how things actually went in practice. To go more “meta”: I agree with an experienced fundraiser at a 2020 IoF webinar. Reports should show you delivered, inspire and build trust.
This is why it’s so important you don’t over-promise to try and secure the grant! It’s also why it’s so important you negotiated with Services when the grant was set up to ensure that monitoring appropriate for this funder will be in place.
Your report should show seriousness of intent but where possible be a fundamentally positive, happy document, full of smiling people and uplifting stories. Even a failing project should have success stories and positive learning coming through. The chances are your work is wonderful for the people you work with. This needs to come through.
Behavioural science says that people are motivated to give by the sense of lack or threat, but that what stops them developing compassion fatigue with you is a sense of hope. Your reports are key to this.
Reports can provide the best evidence of trust. With a new applicant, when you make a grant, you may barely know them from a hole in the ground. The report stage is where you find if your trust in them was justified.
As the Performance Research Associates say in Knock Your Socks Off Customer Service, ‘Customers don’t distinguish between you and the organization you work for. Nor should they. To your customer’s way of thinking, you are the company.’ I think that’s true in our field as much as any other.
This means being consistent, reliable and giving a strong sense that you care about delivering things that are important to the trust.
Trusts can care quite a bit about very significant lapses in customer service. For example, I was fairly new to a charity and grant managing a very large capital grant. Due to poor handover, I’d not realized that the project had actually changed significantly and I only actually discovered and told the trust at the last minute, several months after they should have heard. They were very angry with me. We managed to keep the grant, but at one stage it threatened to significantly damage the relationship with the funder.
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
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.
Photos: I’ve had positive comments about even 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 quotes are easy and impactful for the grants officer.
It’s good for the reader to finish the report with a sense of reward, that they did the right thing by funding you. Direct human stories are often a great way to encourage that sense of making a difference.
You may well need to submit your application a month before the end of the financial year, if it’s a one year long grant. Some of your trusts will only meet once a year. With others, if you slip to the next meeting, at some stage you or your successor wont get a grant in the year.
This is another reason not to over-commit in terms of outcomes. It’s good to be able to say you’ve met the targets in the proposal – or to be able to say you are well on course for that and be able to give a figure to date that shows it.
The culture is that you tell the trust about any significant change.
If there are problems, the Fundraising Code of Practice says, ‘If there are likely to be serious problems with the funded work, you must tell the grant-making body as soon as possible, and keep them informed as the matter develops.’
Trusts are normally fine with changes to projects, as long as you have a good reason and you speak to them first. It’s therefore vital that you get your Services team to commit to flagging up any changes to you at the earliest point.
I haven’t heard of a small trust coming back and asking you to account for the money. Occasionally the last of a small gift might get spent slightly after the year. If it’s a big delay, the Fundraising Code of Conduct commits you to tell the trust about significant changes like that.
The situation is different with big, professional trusts. It’s more common to under-spend because there’s a lot more full funding of things for defined periods. Some will expect you to account for the costs and there’s more of a culture of expectation that you talk about these things. It’s part of the process being more detailed.
If there are changes needed to expenditure, you need to work that out with the trust. It’s unusual for money to get clawed back by the trust (although I once had a mentee who had this happen despite her seemingly doing all the right things). Normally, if you come back with a proposal that you can show fulfils the original aims of the grant, it should be okay.
The first thing to reiterate is that the Fundraising Code of Practice says, ‘If there are likely to be serious problems with the funded work, you must tell the grant-making body as soon as possible, and keep them informed as the matter develops.’
Let’s suppose, though, that you’re at the stage of writing a report and you have to report that things have gone wrong.
Much the best way to tackle things is often to sort things out internally first and then communicate with the funder. The reason is:
That you’ve sorted things out can be an important part of the message: it can be good news, it can show you care and it sometimes can even be a selling point (everyone has problems, but the charity has shown its skills in sorting things).
If things aren’t sorted, it’s easy to create a situation where the next report is even worse. For example, suppose you promise a solution and then it doesn’t work.
There’s more impetus internally to sort things when there is a report hanging over everyone.
Some guidelines for how you communicate to the funder:
If it’s not actually your fault, make that clear. There’s plenty that the service cant be expected to know or to be able to control. If it was a reasonable reasons for things to go wrong, that needs to be clear
It’s clear that you take the donor’s needs seriously
Showing how you’re a skilled, knowledgeable and committed charity and this came into play when sorting things out
You learnt everything you can and made appropriate changes (that should preferably ensure the problem doesn’t repeat)
At the end, re-read your report and ensure it’s as positive as is reasonable. It’s very easy to get bogged down in the negativities and in trying to justify things. If your report on a negative situation is overly positive, that can look a bit ridiculous to the trust
With problems like these, it’s often advisable to keep your manager onside. When you get very good and experienced, you might start to question whether your manager really has the knowledge and skills to handle these issues. However, they may see such decisions as what they’re paid to take and the risks of hiding things that then come out, or blow up on you can be higher. As a beginner, I also found that my manager’s wisdom and skills in these difficult situations were very useful at least in the first period of my career.