Your funder asks for results. Where do you start?

It often starts with an email. A funder wants to see in the interim report what your work achieves. Or next year’s application asks for results. In a social enterprise, the board or an investor sometimes asks for it too. And nothing has been measured yet. We come across this a lot, and there is no shame in it. Small organisations need their time for the work itself.

The reflex is to build something quickly. A questionnaire, a dashboard, a list of indicators from a framework. We deliberately do not do that. If you measure in a hurry, you measure what is easy to count. Then you get a report about activities: forty workshops, a hundred participants. That says what you did. It does not say what changed.

We start with the question behind the question

Behind a funder’s questions there are almost always the same three. What changes for the people it is about? How do you know? And what do you learn from it? That is where we start, before there is a number on the table.

Usually we do that in a conversation of an hour. Someone from the team joins, and ideally someone it is about. We write down who the work is for. What is different for them when it works? And how would you notice? That is the start of a theory of change. It fits on one page. Often it is the first time a team writes it down together like this.

What you already have is often enough

Then we look at what is already there. Sign-ups, evaluation forms, emails from participants, notes from meetings. There is almost always more evidence than you think. It is just scattered. In a community group, the evidence is often photos and stories from volunteers in the neighbourhood. For each piece we say how old it is, who collected it and who is missing. A figure from three years ago is fine, as long as you say it is from three years ago.

What is missing, we ask the people themselves. Five short conversations often give more than a survey nobody fills in. We leave frameworks like the SDGs or IRIS+ aside at first. They can come later, once you know what you want to show. For the first year a spreadsheet is enough.

The report to the funder

In the report we follow the order of the theory of change. First the people it is about. Then what changed for them. Then the signals that show it, such as a number and a quote. We also write down what did not work and what we do not know yet. That feels vulnerable. Still, we find that funders trust an honest report more than a polished one. The report ends with what the organisation will do differently. In the end, that is what a funder cares about.

Is the deadline a few weeks away? Then this works too, only smaller. One change, two signals, and an honest sentence about what needs to improve next year.

Would you like us to take a look? That usually starts with a scan or with a single expert question. What that costs is on our solutions page.