Outcomes and reporting guidance

We are changing our approach to tracking how the work we fund contributes to our strategy. This guidance is for organisations applying for Youth-led creativity funding, where we’re introducing the new approach.

What we want to know

When you apply for funding, we want to know how your work will contribute to the long-term outcome(s) in Esmée's strategy. Over the course of the grant, we will ask for evidence of progress towards the outcome(s). For our youth-led creativity funding, the outcome is:

Youth-led culture and creativity enhances young people’s lives, and enables them to influence change in their communities or wider society.

We will ask you to tell us your 'planned contribution(s)' to this outcome, along with what evidence of progress you will be looking for over the grant period.

How we’ll use this to understand progress

We will use your planned contribution(s) and evidence of progress to monitor and understand your grant, but also to track progress towards our long-term outcomes across all of our funding. We will combine your learning with other evidence for each outcome, so that we can understand and share what’s making progress, and why.

What does this mean for you?

2. Assessment of your application

Applicants and Funding Managers will discuss and agree the planned contribution(s) and potential evidence of progress towards Esmée’s long-term outcome(s) for each grant. We want to ensure that:

• Applicants have full flexibility to deliver the work in the way they need to, and
• There’s a realistic plan to understand what contribution the funded work could make to the long-term outcome(s) in Esmée’s strategy.

3. Reporting on the grant

• We learn from our grants in two main ways: written reports, and conversations.
• We ask funded organisations to submit an annual progress report, ideally one that you are already producing. This could be an Impact Report, a report for your trustee board, a progress report you’ve written for another funder, or your Annual Report.
• We would like the report to cover your planned contribution(s) for the work, and include any evidence of progress towards the outcome(s) in Esmée’s strategy.
• If your report doesn’t cover these specific things, we can give you a call to get more information.
• If you prefer, you can use our progress report template – we are currently updating this and will link to it here in the next few weeks.
• We expect progress to be bumpy, and future grant payments will not depend on you meeting targets or deadlines.
• We understand that your planned contribution(s) and evidence of progress may need to be revised over the course of a grant.

4. Understanding progress

• Reflecting on your planned contribution(s), and gathering evidence of progress, will help us both understand how the work is contributing to the long-term outcomes we’re all working towards.
• Funding Managers will ask for and note down key evidence of progress - including how and why it happened - towards Esmée’s long-term outcome during and after the funding period. This can then be combined with other learning and shared through our insights reports.
• Funding Managers will rate progress towards Esmée’s long-term outcome as on/off track both during and after the funding period for all funding. This will help us understand where there is most and least progress towards our strategy, and why.
• We are not just expecting positive change. We want to understand the context for the work, and we know that sometimes issues are so difficult that it is a challenge to stop things getting worse.

What we mean by 'planned contribution'

We want to understand how or what your work will contribute to the relevant long-term outcome(s) in Esmée’s strategy.

Please note: we are just introducing this approach to understanding the contributions of the work we fund, and will use what you tell us to develop our guidance further.

What we mean by 'evidence of progress'

For each planned contribution, write in one sentence what evidence you will be looking for that would demonstrate what progress is being made towards the long-term outcome in Esmée’s strategy. If you have targets for the work, you can include them, as this helps us understand the scale of your work.