Grant reporting

In common with most funders, we collect impact and learning reports from every organisation and project we fund, and visit every organisation at least once in person during assessment. The information we gather through reports, visits, phone calls and via email is crucial for us to understand and improve our impact and to guide our future policies and programmes, but we have worked hard to streamline these processes to reduce the burden our reporting places on organisations.

We require every organisation we fund to complete an Impact and Learning Report on an annual basis. A member of our team will contact your organisation to ask you to fill the report in. We can help you to complete these forms on a phone call if that’s easier for you.

The report is an opportunity to set down the key progress and setbacks of the project or service we’ve funded your organisation to deliver, including:

• what you’ve achieved

• the challenges you’ve faced

• any key lessons

We hope that preparing this information for us encourages organisations to examine and regularly refine and improve their projects and services.

Crucially, for us these reports help us to check each grant has been used for its approved purpose. They are also designed to help us to respond to changing needs and to champion good practice in London by:

• identifying the wider trends or changes affecting communities and funded organisations’ work

• understanding the effectiveness of different projects or approaches and highlighting innovation

• measuring the difference our grant-making programmes make

We regularly arrange learning visits: meeting funded organisations to find out how things are going, extend any additional support we might be able to give and to learn more about their work. We aim for these conversations to be open, honest and reflective, and to provide a space for grant-holders to give us feedback on our work on an informal, face-to-face basis. We allocate learning visits annually and prioritise those organisations that may not have had the opportunity. We aim for a minimum of 50 visits a year.

As well as collecting information about our funded organisations’ activities, we actively seek feedback from them on the quality and effectiveness of our funding offer, interactions and processes so we can continually improve. We analyse and act on the insights about our work that we gather through:

• feedback, case studies and learning visits

• the free, anonymised review service GrantAdvisor UK

• contact through our funding managers

You can learn more about measures to make impact and learning processes more proportionate, transparent and helpful for funded organisations at the IVAR Better Reporting Initiative, of which we are a signatory.