Reporting and Evaluation

We know that organisations that reflect and learn from their work do better – and we want to support you to be able to use monitoring and evaluation tools to improve your work, and better tackle poverty and inequality.

At the Trust, we also really value and use the reports you send us – they help us understand how our funds are being used, and identify learning for ourselves or others doing similar work.

We offer training and provide simple templates which you can use. If you are reporting on the same project to another funder, or use another approach we are happy to accept different formats that include the key points. Please contact your grant manager to discuss. You’ll find the templates below, and the step by step process for reporting on your grant.

Full details of our reporting and evaluation is available here. Please use the online grants portal to send us reports and accounts.

When your funding has been agreed we will offer you a fully funded place on a course run by the NCVO Charities Evaluation Service. The course covers the essential information you need to plan your evaluation, understand key principles of monitoring and evaluation, and complete an evaluation plan.

Within six months of your grant starting you will need to submit an evaluation plan. The release of your next grant payment will be dependent on you submitting this plan. If this is likely to cause you a problem, please discuss this with your Grants Manager. You don’t need to to wait 6 months to submit the plan – you can send it as soon as it’s ready.

If you are funded as part of the Connected Communities Programme you do not have to send us an evaluation plan. We do encourage you to take up the training, and send us a plan if you can as we think it will help your project.

If you have been funded for more than a year, mid-way through your grant you need to send us an interim evaluation report. We need to receive this report in order to release your next payment.

We will remind you when it is due and give you three months notice to write it. The outline for the interim evaluation report is available to download here.

If you are funded for one year you only need to refer to Stages One and Three.

At the end of your grant, you will need to submit a Final Evaluation Report either within three months of when the funded work has come to an end, or 9 months from when your final instalment was paid. We will remind you when it is due, and the outline for the final evaluation report is available to download here.

In addition to the interim and final reports, each year of your grant we ask that you send us your annual report and accounts.

Please use the online grants portal to send us your evaluation reports, annual report and accounts.

To send us a document you need to follow three steps:

1. Upload to 'add' the file;
2. Click to save it;
3. Click the submit button to send it to us.

You will then be emailed an automatic confirmation. If you don’t have these options, make sure it’s the project lead that is signed in.

What will we do with the information?

Your Grant Manager initially will read your reports and accounts to understand how the project is going, and ensure that the funding is being well spent. Leads for each programme area, and/or the Learning and Evaluation manager will also read your reports to look for any trends, changes in the issues or environment, innovative approaches and to identify key lessons. We summarise this for other staff and trustees and use it to help us reflect on our funding priorities and to share learning. You can see our annual reflection for 2018 here and how we include grantee work in our annual review here.

Second visits

During the period of your grant, you may be visited by one of our members of staff. The purpose of this second visit would be to discuss the issues arising from your work and progress. We will contact you to arrange this, if you are selected for a second visit.

Additional support

If you require any additional support or anything is unclear, please contact us.

Conditions of grant

More information on the conditions of grant here.