Rethinking

Ask a foundation what portfolio reporting costs and most will point to staff time during collection season. That figure is real, and it is also the smallest and most visible part of the bill. Picture a foundation with 40 grantees, each submitting quarterly. Even at a conservative 90 minutes per submission, that comes to 60 hours a quarter spent turning inconsistent PDFs, decks and spreadsheets into one board-ready view. Across a year, that works out at roughly 240 hours, or s

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

A fair amount of what gets written about impact reporting assumes a big communications team and a real budget. Most charities do not have either. So it is a reasonable question whether a system like this makes sense for a small organisation, or whether it is built for someone larger. Here is an honest answer, including the cases where the answer is no. When a living report is not worth it yet If you produce one short report a year, it goes to a handful of people, and it genui

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tables that looked almost identical to last year's. It includes the agency invoice for a document that starts going out of date the week it's published.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