What does our funder actually want?

England and Wales: This page sets out the position in full. What a funder wants in a report is a condition of that funder’s grant, not a rule of charity law. Scotland: the same position, with no difference in principle; The National Lottery Community Fund runs its own Scottish programmes, and the other funders here work mainly in England and Wales or across the UK. Northern Ireland: the same position, with no difference in principle; the same funder note applies.

What do funders ask for in a report?

When reporting to funders, expect four questions, near-universally: what you did, what difference it made, what you spent and what did not work. This page starts from the report you made when you wrote your impact report. The report as a condition of the grant is covered in deliver against the grant and report on it.

This guide read the published reporting requirements of eight major UK funders side by side:

• The National Lottery Community Fund
• Esmée Fairbairn
• Lloyds Bank Foundation
• BBC Children in Need
• Garfield Weston
• The Tudor Trust
• Comic Relief
• Paul Hamlyn

The four questions below are our own synthesis of what they ask. No funder publishes this list.

1. What you did. Funders want to know whether you did what you said you would do. The National Lottery Community Fund, Garfield Weston, BBC Children in Need and Comic Relief ask this almost word for word.
2. What difference it made. What changed for the people you work with, in outcome language, not just counts. Every funder in the set asks a version of this as its headline question. Two of them, The National Lottery Community Fund and BBC Children in Need, also require figures rather than narrative.
3. What you spent. Spend against budget, differences explained, any underspend disclosed. The Tudor Trust asks for the charity’s full accounts, not just project spend.
4. What did not work. Half the funders ask for this explicitly, in their own words.

Most funders also ask what you learned and what comes next.

And at least four of the eight do not rely on the written report alone. Esmée holds learning conversations. Lloyds requires meetings with a Regional Manager as well as the report. The Tudor Trust works through contact.

The form is one part of a relationship, not the whole of it.

Do funders want to hear about failure?

Four of them say so, in their own words, and the fourth question surprises people. Esmée Fairbairn, verbatim:

“We value open reporting and we don’t just want to hear about your successes. We want to know when things don’t work out; why they don’t go well; and how you learn from it and use that knowledge to move forward.”

The other three:

• The Tudor Trust: “As well as hearing about key achievements, we also want to know about things that haven’t gone to plan or which worked differently from how you expected.”
• Garfield Weston: “If you didn’t achieve what you had hoped to, what contributed to this? We want to learn from your grant as much as you do!”
• The National Lottery Community Fund: “We don’t expect things to always go exactly to plan, that would be pretty unrealistic.”

Be precise about what that shows. It shows what funders say they want.

No funder publishes what happens next to a charity that reports a missed target — no renewal rates, no follow-up study. That question is open. Handle inconvenient findings honestly covers how to write it up.

Is there a standard UK funder report form?

No: a standard UK funder report does not exist, and it was never the plan. It seems as if one ought to. Charities and funders have discussed reporting reform since at least 2018.

The Institute for Voluntary Action Research, IVAR, began that work with Esmée Fairbairn in 2018. IVAR wrote this about its first workshop, verbatim. “We did not set up this workshop so that funders could come up with a common reporting form or system.” The aim was principles for how each funder designs its own system.

Those principles live on in IVAR’s Open and Trusting Grant-making. It is a community of over a hundred UK funders, and joining is voluntary. It is a community of practice, not a certification and not a standard anyone can enforce. Better reporting is one of its eight commitments.

That absence is exactly why the four questions are worth having. A single shared form is not coming. One report built around what they all ask, then adapted, is the realistic answer.

Funder by funder

The table shows what each of the eight asks, as each one publishes it. Funder requirements change often, so check the funder’s own current guidance before every report.

Funder	Form	What stands out
The National Lottery Community Fund	Published template	Narrative, then a “key numbers” block that requires figures, not text, then finance. On frequency: Grants over £20,001 running 2+ years report annually. Records kept 7 years.
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation	Published template	Outcomes and indicators are agreed with the funding officer and can change over the grant. Esmée accepts a report you already wrote for someone else — an impact report, a board report, another funder’s report.
Lloyds Bank Foundation for England and Wales	Not published; the form sits behind a login	A short monitoring report, plus a required conversation with a Regional Manager at least twice a year.
BBC Children in Need	Published template	Asks for “the three most important differences (outcomes) their project is making”. Publishes worked example reports.
Garfield Weston Foundation	Published template	The only published length limit among the eight. Its guidance says, verbatim, “aim for around two sides of A4”.
The Tudor Trust	None at all	Verbatim: “There are no standard forms to fill in – we simply ask you to tell us about the work you have done and how it has made a difference.”
Comic Relief	Published template	A three-level system scaled to the grant. It is the only funder here that rates grant holders’ performance, each year and at the end.
Paul Hamlyn Foundation	Guidance per fund	Explicitly proportionate: “light touch” reporting for some grants, more evaluation where there is more to learn.

Two limits on this table, stated plainly. Several funders publish downloadable templates, and this guide found them but did not open them. So word and page limits are unpublished, as far as this guide knows, for seven of the eight. And Lloyds’ own form was not seen.

Part of The National Lottery Community Fund’s guidance above is written for its larger grants. Many small charities first meet it through National Lottery Awards for All. In England that programme gives grants from £300 to £20,000 over up to 24 months. Your grant agreement sets what you report.

How to adapt one report for each funder

These numbered steps turn your impact report into each funder’s report.

1. Start from your impact report. Built on the four questions, it is most of every funder’s report already.
2. Open the funder’s current guidance. Not last year’s. Check the form, any figures they require and any length limit.
3. Map your sections onto their questions. Use their headings and their words.
4. Put the figures where they ask for figures. Some funders want numbers in a block, not in the story.
5. Include what did not work. Most of these funders ask for it.
6. Ask whether they will take an existing report. Esmée says it will. Others may not say either way.
7. Book the conversation if the funder has one, and prepare for it like a meeting.

Template: Impact report skeleton (planned).

Will a better report win the next grant?

Nobody knows, because nobody independent has looked. This is what most charities want to know.

There is no good UK evidence that better impact reporting improves a charity’s chances of the next grant. This guide searched for it.

Every claim that strong reporting leads to renewal traced back to consultancies, grant-writing services or sellers of reporting software. They state it as obvious and show no data. They also sell the thing they are recommending.

What IVAR’s research does document points the other way. Funders worry that their reporting systems push charities towards overly positive accounts, because charities believe the report affects future funding.

So report because the grant requires it, and because the learning is yours. Do not report to improve your odds.

You will also meet a figure for how many hours charities spend on funder reporting. It is quoted everywhere and often credited to NCVO or IVAR.

It comes from neither. The figure is a reporting-software company’s estimate, scaled up from about ten people, and this guide does not repeat it. The solid evidence on reporting burden is IVAR’s own survey of more than a thousand charities.

How open are funders about their own decisions?

Not much. The same funders who ask charities to evidence their outcomes publish little about their own decisions.

Of eleven major UK funders surveyed for this guide, only two publish success rates or reasons for rejection at all. Esmée Fairbairn publishes a full funnel, from expression of interest to award. BBC Children in Need publishes five named reasons why projects are not funded. The other nine publish neither.

Garfield Weston commissioned its own research into how applicants experience it. Only a minority of its unsuccessful applicants rated its reasons for rejection as clear. That was below the benchmark across the thirteen funders in the same survey.

So a charity following this hub in good faith is held to a standard of openness its funders largely do not meet. That is not a reason to report less honestly. It is a reason not to read silence from a funder as a verdict on your report.

And it is why this guide will not quote a sector-wide grant success rate. Nobody measures one.

This is the last step in this hub. When you apply for the next grant, the same material feeds the monitoring and evaluation section of the bid.

Common mistake: assuming there is a standard UK funder report

Reporting reform has been discussed since at least 2018, and a community of over a hundred funders exists, so a shared form seems likely. No shared form exists, and IVAR says in terms that creating one was never the goal. Its initiative is voluntary. Check the specific funder every time, and build one report on the four common questions that you then adapt.

Common mistake: writing a fresh report for each funder from scratch

Each funder’s form looks different, so each report gets started afresh. But every funder in the surveyed set asks the same four things, and Esmée explicitly accepts a report already written for someone else. Build once, adapt per funder. What each funder requires is a condition of its own grant; the four common questions are this guide’s synthesis.

Common mistake: believing a better report improves your odds of the next grant

The claim is a truism in consultancy, grant-writing and reporting-software marketing. No good UK evidence exists for it. What IVAR documents is the reverse worry — that reporting systems push charities towards overly positive accounts. Report because the grant requires it and because the learning is yours, not for renewal odds.

Common mistake: quoting the reporting-burden statistic

It is everywhere and is routinely credited to NCVO or IVAR. It is a reporting-software vendor’s extrapolation from about ten people. Do not repeat it. If you mention it at all, call it an unverified vendor estimate. IVAR’s own survey of more than a thousand charities is the solid evidence on burden.

Worked example

Saltmarsh Trust holds grants from several of the eight funders. Two of them ask for year-end reports in the same month.

No shared form exists, so Saltmarsh starts from its impact report. The report is built on the four questions: what was done, what difference it made, what was spent, and what did not go to plan.

Then it adapts. One funder requires figures in a set block, so the numbers move out of the narrative and into that block. The other has no form at all and asks for full organisational accounts, so the accounts go in with a short narrative. Neither has published a length limit, as far as this guide found, so Saltmarsh keeps each report to what the questions need.

Both reports include the project that stalled over the winter, and what the team changed as a result. Both funders invite that in their own words. What they do with it is not published anywhere.

Saltmarsh does not expect either report to change its odds of renewal. It checks each funder’s current guidance before submitting, because funder requirements change.

The outcome: one core report adapted twice, each submitted in the funder’s own format. Everything here is a funder’s requirement for its own grant. None of it is charity law.