Grant reporting

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 our impact goals, 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.
• We made this change in October 2020 and it applies to everyone with an active grant.
• Ideally this 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.
• If you don’t already have another report you can use our short progress report template.
• 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.
• How openly you report to us, and how you learn and change over the course of our grant, can be key to a further grant.  

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 impact goals.
• 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.

Download the progress report template.

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.