(3 minute read)
Published: 30 July 2026
Written by: Sufina Ahmad, Director of John Ellerman Foundation
Background to why we reviewed our reporting process
In June 2025, we launched our strategy for 2025 to 2030, which also resulted in a change to our grantmaking priorities, as stated in our funding guidelines. You can read more about our funding guidelines under our ‘Apply for funding’ tab on our website, which can be accessed by clicking here.
We took this opportunity to design a new approach to reporting in relation to grants made under our current strategy from November 2025 onwards only. These new reporting processes do not apply to any grants made before November 2025.
In deciding a way forward, we wanted to address some of the drawbacks of our approach to progress reporting that applies to grants made by the Foundation before November 2025. These included:
- A significant administrative burden for the Grants Team. Our reporting is not currently integrated into our Blackbaud grants database system, and therefore involves a lot of email contact, manual database updates and additional administrative tasks.
- Our approach was also somewhat inflexible for grant-holders with different levels of capacity; all grant-holders, regardless of size or situation, were expected to report in the same way. Additionally, although our approach prompted email contact, it usually did not facilitate deeper or more meaningful engagement (for example, conversations with grant-holders to ask more detailed questions on points of interest).
- The information we collected from grant-holders was only accessible to a small number of staff and Trustees, and the learning from this work was not easily shared. This meant that our reporting process had some value for internal learning, but little to no wider benefit to other grant-holders or the social sector more broadly.
- The information we received was very difficult to analyse at a portfolio level to identify themes or wider points of learning. Grant-holders under our previous strategy are much more diverse. Meaning that progress reports often covered entirely different subjects and experiences, which were effectively incomparable. This means that, although individual reports were interesting, it was very difficult to pull out wider learning from our grants portfolio as a whole.
- The quality of reporting was sometimes variable, with some grant-holders providing very generic reports and others providing excessive detail.
We also know that more grantmakers are reviewing their approach and trying to decrease the reporting burden on grant-holders where it is unnecessary, as well as address historic and continued power dynamics between funders and grant-holders, including reporting by the Center for Effective Philanthropy and by IVAR (specifically through their Open and Trusting Grantmaking initiative). Our progress reporting approach hasn’t been reviewed for at least six years; whilst our Perception Audits in 2021 and in 2023 do not flag our progress reporting as an area causing significant issues for grant-holders, it is something that is sometimes queried in the perception audits and in correspondence between grant-holders and Foundation staff.
What are our hopes for our new reporting process
Our ambition was therefore to design a new approach to progress reporting that is more streamlined, generates higher quality insights, facilitate better portfolio-level analysis, enables some external sharing of learning and insights (where appropriate), and is a better experience for all grant-holders – as well as being designed with our new strategy in mind. As previously, our new approach was also designed to enable the following:
1. Ensure effective due diligence to support the release of the Foundation’s charitable funds.
2. Gather analysis and insights that are used internally and externally about the challenges and opportunities our grant-holders are facing, and then using this as tools for advocacy, networking and improving our impact.
3. Increase the Foundation’s transparency, accountability and effectiveness: transparency in being clear on why we seek progress reporting information, accountability in terms of showing how the information received informs our work, and effectiveness in terms of using what we learn in service of the Foundation’s strategy, and to benefit our grant-holders (both individually and collectively), as well as the wider sector/s we operate in.
How did we conduct our review
Our review involved the following activities:
- Internally, we discussed ideas for improvements to our progress reporting process, as well as the content and format of progress reports.
- We designed and facilitated two focus groups with grant-holders that will be impacted by our new approach. These were attended by five organisations in total. A further two provided written feedback.
- We then developed our approach incorporating grant-holders’ feedback, for implementation from November 2026 onwards (when the first grant-holders approved under the new strategy are due to share their first 12 month progress report).
What is our new approach to reporting
Our new approach has two parts and only applies to grants that we have made from November 2025 onwards.
Any grants made before this are subject to our previous reporting requirements, and can be accessed by clicking here on our website. This means that there will be a period where both approaches to reporting are in place at the same time for different grant-holders. We expect the previous grant reporting approach to end in December 2028.
The new approach asks grant-holders to complete a progress report in two parts every 12 months, coordinated via our grants database Blackbaud. The same format will be used for their final report at the end of their grant period.
What is covered in part one
Part one will ask grant-holders four questions that will help us to understand more about the learning that is emerging from their grant. This will relate to learning for their organisation and the work they are doing and learning that supports the work we are championing and prioritising through our strategy for 2025 to 2030 and associated funding guidelines. We will ask them to provide a maximum of two sides of A4, and they can choose how much space to allocate to each answer. For each question they will be asked to tell us what they have done, what they have learned and how this has influenced their work.
1. Your progress as an organisation
How have your goals or strategy developed over the past year? What has driven this progress and/or changes? Feel free to share, if applicable, the kinds of activities and work you have been doing.
2. Your approach to changemaking
What have you been doing to make change happen? What have you been learning and noticing about what works (or doesn’t)?
3. Your approach to advancing justice with individuals and communities
How have you involved individuals and communities with personal or direct experience of the issues? What have you learned about doing this in meaningful and effective ways?
4. Any further reflections
Is there anything else you would like to share with us about your work or the story of your work over the past year (e.g. challenges, changes, or key reflections)?
Grant-holders will also be offered prompts to help shape their responses, and will also be given the option to share as uploads any documents they feel capture their work over the last year that they want us to be aware of. They will have the option of sharing a maximum of three documents.
What is covered in part two
Part two will ask grant-holders to tell us about their organisation and to provide their assessment of their confidence in the organisation’s ability to deliver their work in the coming 12 months.
We will ask grant-holders to share in a maximum of 500 words an overview of the organisation based on any (major) changes they wish to let us know about, e.g. staffing changes, management or leadership changes, governance changes, restructures, beginning or ending new projects or programmes of work, changes in policies or delivery of their work. We will also ask for an update on their financial status (including submitting their latest Annual Report and Accounts, or equivalent, and/or a recent set of management accounts if the accounts document is over 10 months old).
Grant-holders will be asked to review their three outcomes and RAG rate them as red (not on track), amber (partially on track), or green (on track), and provide a maximum of 100 words for each outcome explaining why they have chosen this rating. Grant-holders will also be provided with the option to update or replace any of their outcomes, which they can then discuss with their Grants Manager. The text will also include an acknowledgement that some outcomes may require more or less time, and that alterations are acceptable particularly if there have been changes in the external context.
What will we do with the reporting that we receive
We will analyse and use grant-holder progress reports to produce an annual report that shares themes and trends from grant-holder progress reporting about things like changemaking, advancing justice, their goals as an organisation and any other learning they wish to share. We will do this in an anonymised way and hope that over time these reports will build a learning series exploring topics related to changemaking and our four strategic areas of interest.