Report writing – introduction

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

  • There’s a huge variation in how important reports and good grant management are to your future chances of a grant.
  • Whether the trust is a gift giver, grant maker or an investor is one related factor.
  • Reports should show you delivered, inspire and build trust.
  • Value for money will get you so far – but given the fact that delivery is important in relationships, setting targets that enable delivery is surely typically more important.
  • The report should be inspiring.
  • The report will be the product of the work you’ve done setting up with Services – over time, as you were developing the proposal and at the time of receipt of the grant.
  • Rhetoricians have a lot of good advice on how to build trust that is relevant to report writing.

How much importance to give reports

In the What Donors Want podcast, Emma Turner, adviser to HNW philanthropists, says ‘Wealthy people expect certain levels of service… no one is asking charities to over-serve, but serve. Do your bit and nothing should ever go wrong.’ She said that would include things like a timely report.

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.

On the one hand… 

  • At (major foundation) the Garfield Weston Foundation, reports are supposed to be taken very seriously and to affect the likelihood and size of a subsequent grant. I’ve come into a couple of charities that were in trouble with them for that reason.
  • Likewise, my Children In Need grants officer told me that reports are scored and are an important factor at assessment of the next grant application. 
  • A trust that had invested mid-five-figures sums for years in a large national where I worked had stopped funding them and never funded them again after they felt the charity handled a grant badly.
  • When I’ve sent reports to some major funders, they’ve clearly checked the content covered the expected ground.
  • Simply as a matter of theory: writing a good report sends a signal that we care about the funder and monitor the work well (even if they never read the report).
  • You may be the latest post holder in a 30 year relationship. It’s your duty to hand that relationship on for posterity. If you do play fast and loose with the reports, it may not just be about your time on the job, it may damage things for generations of service users to come. (So, no pressure, then!)

On the other hand… 

  • At a trust where I worked, reports were barely read. Trusts like to keep admin costs down and a consequence CAN be that the staff barely have time for reports. 
  • Once or twice with big professional grants officers, I’ve re-read reports and noticed a glaring error in the middle, which the grants officer has clearly missed (or at least, not followed up. For context – I tend to write very detailed reports.)
  • The comment I’ve heard most often about my reports is: the Trustees liked the pictures. 
  • At another large national where I did a bit of work, there were no real reports to donors giving four figures – they got a generic newsletter later in the year and a note in the next proposal about how many people had been helped by the previous grant. The charity certainly felt their approach worked.

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 (in which case, they should have some interest in whether they got what they wanted when they made a grant, though 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 (in which case, 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)

What are reports for?

Functionally, reports are about how things actually went in practice. We’ll say a lot more about that in the “Content of a report” web page.

To go more “meta”: I agree with an experienced fundraiser at a 2020 IoF webinar. Reports should show you delivered, inspire and build trust. 

Under the “general proposal writing” pages I discuss the theory of rhetoric (communication to persuade people). It says there are three key parts to persuading others: reason, emotion and creating trust.

Showing you delivered

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.

Sadly, this can be about getting things right at the  proposal stage, more than sorting them at the reporting stage. The easiest time to negotiate something for the report with Services is often when you’re putting together the actual funding proposal. At that stage they can want something from you, so are more likely to give “quid pro quos”.

Bill Bruty highlights that you can group trusts into those who give to you more than once, though maybe years apart, and trusts that only give to you once. Effective delivery of the project is clearly one issue in that choice they make.

We’ll say more about delivering under the “Content of the report” and “When things go wrong” pages.

Inspiring

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.

Success stories (whether successful projects or great case studies and uplifting photos) are usually only available if you have worked with services at earlier stages, to ensure they will be, by the time of the report. I like to negotiate this at bid-writing stage and to revisit it with larger grants as part of a “grant induction meeting” when the bank transfer comes in. Case studies are also the kind of thing where check-ins with Services before the end of the grant, to ensure things will be ready by the end of the grant, are especially useful.

Building trust

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. Rhetoricians would identify several elements to build trust:

  • Delivering what was planned
  • Demonstrating “practical wisdom”. Your charity knows how to get things done
  • The trustees/grants officer can see if the charity’s values really do align with the trust’s own values
  • Caring about the foundation – spending the money as planned, reporting well, etc

(We’ll deal with what to do when things go wrong in a couple of web pages time!)

Good customer service

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.

The wealthy individuals we’re approaching are used to good customer service in their lives. A nice acronym to remember key customer service points by is RATER:

  • Reliability: provide what you say you will, in a timely and dependable way. 
  • Assurance: convey, trust, knowledge, skills and confidence. Reassure the funder by showing them that you care and that you know what you are doing
  • Tangibles: Clear actions speak a lot louder than words.
  • Empathy: Make your “customers” feel heard, understood, liked, respected and appreciated. Treat them as unique.

Responsiveness: Act promptly. When there are problems and misunderstandings, first apologize, and then try to fix the problem while letting the customer know what you are doing.While the customer isn’t always right, make the customer feel right. Don’t try to place blame, rather work to make things right through service recovery. Bend or break the rules if it makes sense for the trust. We’re in a profession – do what you think is right for the funder.