Rethinking

A living report is a report your team keeps, rather than a report your team finishes. It holds the same kind of content as any impact report, annual report or funder report: findings, figures, stories, recommendations. The difference is what happens after publication. A PDF is done the moment it's sent. A living report is updated as things change, by the people who did the work, without waiting on a designer, a developer or the next full reporting cycle. The problem it's answ

Ask most charities what their annual report costs and you'll get a design fee, maybe a print run. That's rarely the full number. The full number includes the weeks a team spent chasing programme leads for figures scattered across six spreadsheets. It includes the days a trustee or comms lead spent reformatting tables that looked almost identical to last year's. It includes the agency invoice for a document that starts going out of date the week it's published. Add it up hones

If you run an evaluation practice, an impact consultancy, or an agency working with charities and social enterprises, your reports probably follow a familiar shape: months of work, a polished PDF or slide deck at the end, an invoice, and then quiet until the client needs you again. That's a perfectly workable business model. It also ties your margin entirely to hours worked, and the moment a project ends, so does your visible presence in the client's world. There's a second m

If you fund, invest in, or partner with more than a handful of organisations, you already know the drill. Quarter end arrives, you send the same request to every grantee or investee on your books, and what comes back is a mix of PDFs, slide decks, spreadsheets with different column headings, and the occasional email that just says it's going well. Somebody on your team then has to turn that pile into one coherent view for your board or your LPs. By the time it's finished, the

Most impact reports get read once, in the week they're published, usually by the people who wrote them. After that they sit in a folder until next year's version replaces them. We spent a morning at the Royal Society of Arts in London unpacking why that happens. The session was hosted jointly with Ethical Good, who work on evidence, evaluation and organisational learning, and it brought together charity leaders, funders and evaluation specialists who see the same problem from