Rethinking

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

You open the report. Twenty-five pages of data, charts and careful language, and the question actually on your mind is what you're supposed to do with it. Most reports are written to summarise what happened. They aren't written to say what happens next, and usually nobody writes that second document either. Here's a way to build it yourself, from a report you've already published, in one hour. It works for any report you're sitting on: impact report, annual report, funder rep