Reporting to Esmée should be easy for you and valuable for both of us. We will only ask for information we need and use. We will give feedback and follow the principles for better reporting.
Our approach to reporting
We use progress reports to find out how the work we are funding is going and understand how it's making progress towards our shared goals.
The reports also help us to decide what more we could do to support your work, whether there are connections we could help with, and how we can improve our support in future.
- Outcomes
- When you apply for funding, we'll ask you to tell us the outcomes you hope our support can contribute to.
- We will discuss how these outcomes map to the ones in our strategy, and mutually agree outcomes and indicators of progress for you to report on during the course of the grant.
- We expect these to change! Especially if you are co-creating work with communities.
- You can read more about what we mean by outcomes and indicators here.
- Reports
- Following IVAR’s principles of better reporting, we encourage you to submit a report you're 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.
- Ideally this report will cover your progress towards the agreed outcomes for the work, and make reference to the indicators, but if we need more information, we can give you a call.
- If you don’t already have an existing report you can use our short progress report template.
- We value open reporting and we don’t just want to hear about your successes. We want to know when things don’t work out; why they don’t go well; and how you learn from it and use that knowledge to move forward.
- Learning conversations
- We hold mid-grant and end-of-grant learning conversations with you to reflect on the progress of the work, key changes in the context for it, and what more we could do to ensure the work contributes to our shared outcomes.
- We will use what we learn to inform our strategy, as well as share with our sectors through our Insights Reports.
- Changes to your work
- We are a flexible funder, but as a charity ourselves we must keep track of material changes to the grant-funded work, or serious incidents that should be reported the Charity Commission.
- This means you must tell your Funding Manager about any significant changes to the grant so that they can discuss and agree to your future plans.
- An explanation of what we consider to be "material changes" in points 4, 5 and 6 of our Terms and Conditions.
How reporting works
- For most grants
- Annual progress reports, to be submitted one month before each grant payment is needed, and when the grant is finished.
- You can submit a report you're already producing (an Impact Report, a report for your trustee board, a progress report you’ve written for another funder, or your Annual Report). If you don’t already have another report you can use our short progress report template.
- Ideally your report will cover your progress towards the agreed outcomes for the work, and make reference to the agreed indicators, but if we need more information, we can give you a call.
- We’ll send you an email 8 weeks before each report is due, with a unique link to upload to our system.
- Once we’ve received your report, we will review it within a month and give you feedback.
- We’ll hold mid-grant, and end-of-grant, learning conversations to reflect on progress, and find out what more Esmée can do to increase the impact of the work.
- For some large grants, and social investments
For some large grants where we will be involved in the work and meet regularly, and for all social investments, we will agree an approach to reporting at the beginning of the relationship that fits in with your existing plans and reporting to other funders and investors. We won’t ask for any additional reporting.
- For small, project grants
For some small project grants, we won’t ask for any reporting but will just have an end of grant learning conversation instead.
