Good grantee data without the reporting burden

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 how the data is collected.

The burden is now a named problem

The movement here is well established. IVAR's Open and Trusting Grant-making campaign has been signed by over 140 grantmakers, each committing to eight principles that include light-touch reporting: ensuring formal reporting requirements are proportionate, well understood and meaningful (IVAR, ivar.org.uk). IVAR's own research, drawing on more than 1,200 charities, found that reporting arrangements are often experienced as burdensome rather than useful, and that operational staff and volunteers can feel, in their words, assessed to death.

This is the direction the funding world has chosen, and grantees notice which funders live up to it. A foundation that asks for heavy, bespoke reporting is increasingly out of step with its own sector's stated values.

Why the burden is usually a format problem

Look closely at what actually makes grantee reporting heavy, and much of it is not the substance. It is the packaging. Every grantee is handed a blank template and a rough idea of what you want, then fills it in through their own lens, in their own format, on their own schedule. The genuinely useful information is in there, surrounded by the effort of formatting it, and different for every grantee.

That same inconsistency then lands on you. Your team receives dozens of documents in dozens of shapes and has to reformat all of them into one aggregated picture before anyone can learn anything from it. The burden falls twice: once on the grantee producing the document, once on your team reassembling it.

Collecting into a shared structure lightens both ends

The fix is to stop asking grantees to produce documents and start letting them enter their information into one shared structure that you control. When the fields are the same for everyone and can be filled in a few minutes rather than reformatted into a report, the load on the grantee drops. When those submissions feed one master view automatically, the reassembly work on your side largely disappears.

This is the practical version of light-touch reporting. Not asking for less and learning less, but asking for the same information in a way that is quicker to give and immediately usable when it arrives. Grantees spend minutes rather than days. Your team spends its time reading the data rather than reformatting it.

It also fits the transparency direction the sector is moving in. With grants data worth over 300 billion pounds now shared through the 360Giving standard (360Giving, March 2025), and the Foundation Practice Rating noting there are still no common standards for how foundations report on grants and activities, a consistent, structured reporting layer is increasingly what good practice looks like.

Why this matters now

Foundations are under more pressure, not less. The Association of Charitable Foundations reported that grantmaking reached a record 8.24 billion pounds in 2023 to 2024, and that foundations have seen dramatic increases in application volumes, often 50 to 60% and in some cases much higher (ACF, Foundations in Focus, 2025). More applications and more grants mean more reporting to handle, on teams that have not grown at the same rate. Doing that by hand, from inconsistent documents, does not scale. A shared reporting structure does.

None of this changes what you want to learn from your grantees, or the fraework you use to make sense of it. It changes how the information reaches you, so that better data and a lighter load stop being in tension.

If you want strong grantee evidence without adding to the burden your own sector has committed to reducing, the collection method is where to start. Book a call and we will show you what a living report your grantees feed into could look like.