Reporting guidance

What is grant reporting and how does it work?

When you receive a grant from us, we will ask for a report at the end of the funded project. Sometimes, we may also ask for an interim report, typically for larger or multi-year grants. For the latter, we may ask you to submit an interim report at the end of each year, before another payment is made.

In the reports, we request information on the outcomes and impact of your project, including the progress you made towards the stated aims of the funded project. We predominantly ask for information on the difference the grant has made, what activities the grant funded, case studies of beneficiaries and project photos.

We understand that non-profit organisations are often working with limited resources and are pressed for time. Therefore, we endeavour to make the reports as easy to complete as possible. We are committed to the IVAR principles for better reporting, which means that we strive to request reporting that is proportionate to the size of your grant and we only ask for the information that we need and will use.

For projects which received grant awards after January 2023, we now offer the option to submit a report that you are already producing for other purposes, to help prevent the doubling of effort. This might be an impact report, annual report, or a progress report for another funder or your Board of Trustees.

All successful grant applicants will automatically be sent a unique link to a template grant reporting form. Here, you can complete the form or upload any existing documents that you might already have for other purposes, as explained above.

We will send you an email 2 weeks before each report is due. If your project is not complete, do not complete the end-of-project report. Please contact us to discuss an extension, by emailing info@cambscf.org.uk or calling 01223 410535.

Why is grant reporting important?

To keep us accountable as funders

Firstly, grant monitoring reports serve compliance purposes, providing assurance that funds are being used responsibly and in line with the terms of the grant. We do not use the reports to scrutinise how you have spent your funds but, instead, we simply want to check that grants were used for the purpose they were awarded for.

To help us take learnings to make us a better funder

We use grant monitoring reports to find out how the work we fund is helping us progress towards a better quality of life for all in Cambridgeshire. What you tell us in your reports can aid our decision-making on how to better support local organisations, to make our collective impact in the community even greater.

To celebrate your impact

The reports also offer you the opportunity to reflect on and showcase your project’s impact. We are proud to support impactful local projects, therefore, we want to promote your project to raise awareness about you, as well as to help us secure more funding for future projects.

We will endeavour to promote what you share in your report across our website, social media, and reports, among other places. However, we are particularly reliant on high quality images when promoting projects, so please ensure you include them in your report. More guidance on this is provided in the section below.

We also enjoy hearing about the progress of your projects before they are complete, so don’t hesitate to reach out to us with project updates via email, or by tagging us on social media.

Project photography

Project photos are the most engaged with form of content for the Foundation because they help to convey the incredible work of the projects we support.

We understand that some of the organisations we fund may support at-risk people in our community, which may pose a barrier to taking photos that identify the project’s beneficiaries. If that is the case, there are creative ways in which you can take photos which help to illustrate what your project involved, whilst maintaining anonymity for beneficiaries. For example, you could:

• Take a photo from behind the beneficiaries doing an activity.
• Focus the photo on what a beneficiary is doing e.g. zoom in on only their hands doing an activity.
• Take photos of the people delivering the project instead of beneficiaries.

Below are some examples of organisations which got creative with the camera to ensure their work was represented in a sensitive way:

Project visits

Our staff, trustees and our dedicated team of volunteer project visitors visit some of the projects we fund. This is an opportunity to engage with your work, reflect on your project’s progress and understand how we can better support you and other grant recipients. We can also use project visits to take photos and videos to help to promote your project across our channels.

If you would like to invite us to visit your project, please get in touch with us by emailing info@cambscf.org.uk or calling 01223 410535.