Rethinking

If you run an impact or evaluation consultancy, your deliverable is usually a report. Months of rigorous work, a polished PDF at the end, an invoice, and then the relationship goes quiet until the next commission. It is a respectable model, and it is also one where your revenue is tied entirely to hours worked, and where the thing you hand over stops working for the client almost as soon as they receive it. There is a second model sitting inside the first, and most consultanc

For years, an impact fund could meet expectations with a well-designed annual impact report: a PDF, published once, sent to LPs, filed. That is quietly changing. The standards, the regulation and the investors themselves are all asking for impact reporting that is more rigorous, more comparable and more current than a yearly document can be. If your reporting is still a once-a-year artefact, the gap between what you produce and what is expected is widening. What actually chan

Foundations are caught in a tension. You need evidence of what your grants achieve, both to learn and to account for the money. At the same time, the sector has spent the last few years agreeing, loudly and correctly, that the reporting load placed on grantees is too heavy. The two pulls seem to point in opposite directions: better data usually means more asked of grantees, and lighter reporting usually means less. The way out is not to choose between them. It is to change ho

If you run an impact fund, you already know the annual impact report is one of the harder things your team produces. Not because the impact is hard to describe, but because it lives in so many places. Every portfolio company, every underlying fund, every investee reports on its own terms, on its own schedule, in its own format. Once a year, someone on your team has to pull all of it into a single coherent report for your LPs. That job is where most of the effort goes, and it

Most trustees see the annual report once, as a finished PDF in a board pack, the week before the meeting where they approve it. By then there are only two real choices: approve it, or delay it. So it helps to know what you're putting your name to. Every trustee is responsible Charity Commission guidance is clear on this. The trustees who sign the annual report and accounts sign on behalf of the whole board, so every trustee is responsible for them. That includes the one who j