Esmée gathers and analyses learning from its funding activities, uses data and staff insights to guide decisions, and openly shares its findings to improve accountability, transparency, and impact.
Esmée’s people and systems are equally important in how we learn as an organisation.
People
Funding Managers read reports, and hold learning conversations. They summarise key learning from both in notes on our salesforce database.
Esmée’s Learning Manager reads all these notes every quarter, aiming to spot key progress, barriers, opportunities, and changes in context. She summarises themes and copies in examples, and shares this with all staff. The quarterly learning reports are discussed by each team, and a shorter summary is shared with Trustees twice a year.
Systems
For grants, social investments, and roadmap actions, we will use dashboards to show where progress is on or off track at aim, priority, and long-term outcome level. Where progress is going well or poorly, we can dig into the qualitative data to help explain why that might be, and shape our response.
Sharing what we learn
For Esmee, a key part of being an Open and Trusting funder is sharing our insights, struggles, and successes openly on our website.
Sharing what we learn keeps us accountable to the organisations we fund but also opens our thinking up to challenge. We try to make our insights and findings as accessible as possible, tailored to the audiences we most want to reach.
You can find all of our research, reports and mid-strategy reviews INSERT LINK.
If there’s something you think Esmee has a unique perspective on that you would like to hear from us, let us know on communications@esmeefairbairn.org.uk.
Settled
Next: Feedback
We gather regular, anonymous feedback on the way we work at key points, and survey all applicants and organisations we fund every other year.