Understanding the true scale of grant monitoring reports

Everyone knows monitoring reports for funders are a hassle. They take ages to complete and often are hard to understand and learn from. Because of this grantees don't like filling monitoring reports and funders don't like reading them.

This is a problem as they take up to 15.8 million hours of charities' time to complete.

This is a hidden cost imposed on grantees by funders - money and time that should be better spent. 

To work this out we combed through the websites and the publications from the country's biggest funders to work out what a typical grant monitoring report looks like. We then asked 10 people from various small to medium sized charities that together report to 6 different local authorities and over 50 different funders to estimate how long it would take to fill out this "average report". 

Financial breakdown

Outcomes

Evidence of own learning?

Attendance data

Description of project

Details of successes and challenges

Future plans

Case Study of individual/s

Organisational update

How monitoring was done

Progress made against aims

Funder's reputational risk survey

Feedback for funder

Continuation funding?

What surprised us when we first started talking to small charities about reporting was the amount of time it takes to know who their beneficiaries are. We thought that would be easy. 

But then it was explained to us. Imagine if a funder asked you for the number of total unique people that have used your service. Even if you take a register every day, you can't just add up the number of people on each register, as they probably aren't unique. So you have to start making a register from those registers, going through each one individually and adding a new name every time a new person arrives.

If you then try and break that down by demographic data (information that people often don't want to give you) and where they've come from - the time really starts to add up.

Frustratingly, it isn't just us who are surprised to hear this. When we speak to funders they are also surprised. This might be because grantees are often uncomfortable admitting to funders how long this all takes, because they think it's their fault. It isn't, it is hard and the tools that have been available to help with this are expensive.

Luckily, attendance information is one of the most commonly requested items on the monitoring reports. Unsurprisingly, this is the case for lots of the requirements:

In theory this is good news. If all funders want roughly the same thing, it must be easy for grantees to do their reporting - they only need to copy and paste information between forms. 

Funders all want roughly the same information, but they want it presented differently and at different times of the year. If one grant started in March, that grant reporting will be based on a March year end, even if all an organisation's other grants have a December year end. 

Some grants require answers to very specific questions related to them - such as a breakdown of beneficiaries by ward. This is great for making grants very locally focussed, but very hard to monitor!

To add to this, charities often have a lot more funders than you think - the number increases pretty much linearly with income.

In fact, if a charity has enough income to have at least 1 FTE member of staff, they probably will have between 5 and 10 different funders. That means between 5 and 10 different reports. Even if two funders were to have exactly the same reporting requirements, it would still take a couple of hours to copy and paste between reports. 

Even if two grants do require the same information, they will often ask for it in different ways. Grant report question writers love synonyms.

Ways reporting requirements are asked for

Some people will ask for differences, others will ask for progress towards outcomes. Some people define outcomes as targets others as changes noticed in a beneficiary.

This just adds an extra unnessesscary layer of confusion to something that is already confusing enough!

Different types of funders mean different requirements

Luckily, you can guess from funders what sort of information they are going to be interested in. 

Local authorities grant monitoring reports often ask for a very detailed breakdown of who your beneficiaries are no matter what the size of grant, as for 

. This is likely since Local Authorities have a much greater pressure to show the value of their grants than any other funders, particularly in the climate of austerity. Having said that, other Councils, e.g. 

, ask only for pictures, expenditure and some outcomes for larger grants. Common across almost all of the reporting requirements for Local Authorities is the need to use a form specific to that grant programme.

Charitable Foundations tend to be more varied in what they want. They are still interested in a breakdown of beneficiaries, but tend to be interested in outcomes and what organisations have learnt from their grants. 

The format of the monitoring reports themselves varies massively between foundations. Some, such as 

, are happy to receive their monitoring information in any format, so long as it containts the key criteria.

Foundations are also more likely to ask very specific questions related to that grant. 

 is a good example of this. They ask for "what our money can buy" as a requirement for every grant, which is a question we have not seen elsewhere.

What's worse - some funders don't even share their monitoring requirements.

But in many ways, these are the good guys - they actually publish their monitoring requirements. This lets potential grantees assess how much time monitoring and reporting will take for a particular grant.  

This is important as monitoring and reporting is a significant enough part of delivering a grant, that they should be taken into account when preparing the budget. If you don't know what that will be, you can't properly plan when bidding for funding, which is a real factor in choosing whether to apply for grants:

We've stopped applying for funding from [big national funder] because their reporting requirements are just way too onerous.

By not publishing monitoring requirements, funders are not giving potential grantees the whole story.

So monitoring reports clearly take a lot of time. In order to properly quantify quite how long, we decided to estimate how this affects the sector as a whole. To do this we had to estimate the number of grants handed out every year. This is where the 

 came in handy. First, we worked out the total income from grants by adding up income from government and foundations. We then removed grants for research and to schools, as they have different reporting requirements. This gave an income of ~£18bn a year from grants and contracts. Dividing this total by the average grant size (~£50,000), we were left with a total number of grants of approximately 391,280 per year. (If you want to see our working for this, it can be found 

Combining this with the average grant time of 40 hours, we find that charities spend 

every single year just filling out reports for funders. 

. Or approximately the same amount as the lottery gives to organisations that work in Health, Social Services, the Environment, Village Halls, Housing, Employment and Training, Umbrella Bodies, and Playgroups and Nurseries.

Clearly, this is just an estimate. In particular, local authority reporting requirements (the way many organisations are funded) are hard to find, and we have not altered the grant requirements depending on size of grant. We have also assumed that organisations are using the kind of improvised paper registers-spreadsheet combination that is very common across smaller charities.

As monitoring reports take so long to complete, they get in the way of learning

Monitoring has the possibility to make a real difference. If done properly, both funders and grantees can learn what is and isn't working, which can then be used to improve future work. 

This is due to the variety of questions asked and time taken to do:

Because each funder asks for different things, it is impossible for grantees to compare     between projects funded by different funders.

Because of the time they take, grantees seem to see monitoring reports as a tick box exercise for the funder and not an opportunity to review what they have achieved with their grant. 

, a lack of learning is a problem in the sector. 

One way to cut down the reporting time, and therefore encourage learning, has been a move to allow grantees to send in their reports from other funders.

This is great, it saves grantees loads of time. The problem is that funders then get monitoring reports in thousands of different formats. This makes it impossible for funders to learn from the reports they receive, which means they aren't learning from their grants. 

Funders not learning from grants is a real issue. They have the most input on the future of the sector and the sharing of best practice. After all, they spend the most amount of time thinking and discussing how to make the most of grants.

We think that there should be an easy to use and free way for small charities to record the things that grant reports most need - attendance and outcomes.

We think that a charity's own data should be easy for them to analyse and learn from.

We think charity's should be able to easily share their monitoring information so they can share their impact.

We think funders should be able to easily build aggregated reports from all of their charities so they can inform best practice and better understand the grants they give.

But rather than just talking about it, we have built something that does just that. If you would like to know more about it email us on hello@timetospare.com. We'd love to chat.

 application released under the terms of the 

Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license (CC-BY-SA)

Charities spend too many hours filling out monitoring reports for funders. This gets in the way of learning. We tried to quantify that effect and understand why.

Charities spend 15.8 million hours reporting to funders - that's too much

What are the test, track and trace requirements

The government has instituted similar advice to that of Guernsey and New Zealand put in place when they began to reopen their economy. The exact wording of the guidelines is 

"The opening up of the economy following the COVID-19 outbreak is being supported by NHS Test and Trace. You should assist this service by keeping a temporary record of your customers and visitors for 21 days, in a way that is manageable for your business, and assist NHS Test and Trace with requests for that data if needed."

Our whole business involves supporting charities to safely and securely record who is using their services and when. This involves taking down people's details, registering when they have arrived and left, and storing all that information in a secure way that can be analysed easily later. When we read about the requirements, we realised that with a few small tweaks, we could use our current system to meet the needs of test, track and trace, so we did just that!

, this isn't going to go away quickly. So we needed to build something that works for a long time. To do that, we need to know what the UK is going to look like in 6 months time.

We have read a lot in the press that every pub and restaurant is now going to have their own Wetherspoons' app. Don't get me wrong, we enjoy ordering a pint of Ruddles with a side of lettuce on the Wetherspoons app, it is a good app and pleasant experience. But no matter how tech savvy you are, no one likes having to download an app. They clog up your phone, use up your data and take time to get your head around.  

Initially, everything is going to be fully booked and the information on the booking will match the ones that turn up. However, as time goes on this will change. Businesses that are used to accepting walk-ins will start to do so again, the people that turn up won't always match the booking and not everyone will be able to give people's phone number.

For test, track and trace to work, people need to trust it

Test, track and trace will only work if once people are contacted by NHS test and trace they get tested and self isolate. This will only happen if they truly believe that they were at risk and there haven't been too many false positives.

 Test, track and trace is the main way countries such as 

 have been able to manage and contain their outbreaks, allowing life there to return to relative normality. This suggests that of the new guidelines, the test and trace requirements will last the longest.

Using our experience of working with charities, we have built our system to get around these problems in a user centred way.

- our system is entirely web based, so there is no need to download an app. If customers don't have a smartphone, they don't have to use the system at all - staff can register them directly.

- customers are only recorded once they have arrived at the venue in just a few clicks - allowing for last minute changes. It has the flexibility and ease of use of pen and paper, but it is much faster (we have tested it!).

- the exact time people arrive and leave is recorded, this means when a test and trace request is made, a list can be pulled up that only shows the people most at risk, or everyone, depending on what NHS test and trace require.

- as time goes on and the guidelines change our system will continue to work. 

Finally and most importantly, privacy. The new guidance means that businesses will now be data controllers of all of their customer's information under the GDPR, something that they will not necessarily be experienced with or have the tools to manage. 

In New Zealand, the lack of experience and training that businesses have had in this area has been a real headache and even led to some serious 

. We don't want this to happen in the UK, so we have made our system extra secure and GDPR compliant. And this is how:

All the data is encrypted both in transit and at rest and all our sites use the https protocol. 

Before entering their data, customers are made aware of what they are signing up to and directed to the privacy policy. This ensures that businesses that use us remain GDPR compliant.

People's phone numbers are hidden unless needed for track and trace

The only time staff can see someone's phone number is when they first record it and when making a track and trace request. However, only the account owner is able to make track and trace requests and each request is monitored. This keeps customer data secure and ensures that it is only used for the right purpose.

We think we have come up with the best long term solution for businesses to re-open whilst fulfilling their test, track and trace obligations. Sign up 

If you have any questions, please get in touch at hello@timetospare.com

Our process in using our existing platform to help businesses comply with test, track and trace.

Solving the GDPR headache of the reopening requirements

 on levelling up communities, particularly the sections on better data and measurement of the sector, is a sensible blueprint for improving social infrastructure across the country.

However, it’s one thing to project a sensible vision for the future, quite another thing to build it. At Time to Spare, we have been building exactly this kind of software infrastructure for the voluntary sector for the past 2 years. So we wanted to give our own interpretation on what needs to be done, and what needs to be solved before it can happen.

Keeping track of the money is the easy, and least valuable part. Charities have limited time and resources, if you’re going to require more reporting to add to the 

, focus it on what they’re doing, not what they’re spending.

Any community group delivering services should collect “bums on seats” data - who is benefiting, where do they come from and what are they doing. For big grants, this should be combined with a small number of consistently collected outcomes e.g. “started employment”, “achieved XYZ qualification” or something like 

 scores. Smaller grants or contracts shouldn’t require this data, otherwise 

the cost is often greater than the value of money received

Specifically, groups should collect postcodes so that outcomes and interactions can be mapped onto publicly available data. Where possible and sensible, local and central government agencies should ask to map the individual beneficiaries to their existing databases for their statutory services.

Each funder, from private foundations to Government, has to make a political decision about how much data to ask charities to provide in return for their money. Ask for more information and you can better measure your effectiveness, but the time it takes to collect actually reduces your impact. Will likes to call this “Schrodinger’s Impact”. Alternatively, you can refuse to collect any information, give charities more time to actually deliver services, but then you’ll never find out what worked and what didn’t, and you can never improve.

At its best, technology solves these kinds of tradeoffs. For example, in ancient times, it was almost impossible to transport large amounts of food to cities, because you’d need to feed the horses that pulled wagons so much that they’d 

. The very act of transporting food destroyed it. Ancient Rome solved this tradeoff by sailing most of its food all the way from Egypt, using wind power instead of hungry horse power. The same problem is so clearly solved by “modern” technology in the form of railways and freight transport that we don’t even think about it.

To solve the tradeoff between collecting information and destroying impact, we need better technology that’s built specifically for charities to use. The technology can’t just be a reporting tool. That will add more work to already time-poor charity staff and volunteers. The technology itself should save the organisation time in their day-to-day work. That’s more than possible. Most physical centres already have to collect fire safety registers - why don’t they double as reporting data? Most online work is managed by tickets/sign ups (or should be), why can’t you use that ticketing data directly for monitoring? With new Covid regulations, details need to be collected for track and trace, charities should add the option to use these for reporting too.

If the tool is embedded in daily operation, working as a combination of a CRM, a case management tool and a reporting platform, by default the data will be live-updating and accurate.

Don’t get hung up on the phrase “volunteer passport”

A “volunteer passport” is a meme that’s been around for a number of years, but it can be misleading. From our experience managing a pool of emergency volunteers in Camden and from elsewhere, by itself a simple identity document is not enough to match up supply and demand for volunteers.

Volunteers’ skills and interests are highly varied and often can’t be helpfully standardised. More than a standard form of identification and background checking, what’s needed is a set of “

”. These platforms should combine training materials, matching, expenses with vetting. In times of emergency, coordinating volunteers and working out exactly where they are needed (even within an organisation) is a larger bottleneck than finding willing volunteers. A “deep platform” should provide software for charities to help with this, for example directly matching befriending volunteers to beneficiaries or automatically creating adverts for activity-specific roles based on calendar/website details.

In corporate recruitment there is a simple business model for these emerging deep platforms. That doesn’t exist in the voluntary sector, but the platforms are no less needed. They should be funded directly by Local Authorities, managed by Volunteer Centres/CVSs, but built by dedicated independent software companies and bought on a SaaS basis so that the platforms keep improving.

If the NHS or Government need access to these platforms, it should be done on the voluntary sector’s terms. Only 

 have worked with the public sector. As the report points out, the remaining vast majority should not be treated as a “resource to be tapped” for free labour in Government departments. The 

, in terms of the community benefits, should be enough to justify this expenditure on platforms, especially if these platforms better demonstrate this value through better reporting and data collection.

“Big tech should be persuaded to provide, for free, the wiring of our social infrastructure. They could contribute expertise and resources to the challenges of data, referenced above; they could help with the digital innovations that are connecting volunteers and funders and charities,”

Asking big tech companies to build this technology isn’t going to work. For this to work across the country for charities with limited budgets, it does have to be free for them to use. However, the typical “free” products built by American tech companies rely on an advertising business model that would be highly inappropriate in this sector.

The other “free” products are CSR projects without real corporate backing. They won’t be given the time and mind-share of senior executives required to make a system that genuinely works for charities and collects the kind of data on the sector that’s needed. No doubt in a matter of years they will be abandoned.

Don’t ignore the business models that do exist

There is a business model for this kind of data project. Most funders pay for some kind of grant management system. Most local authorities pay for databases to track their statutory services. None of these systems are particularly well liked. There’s clearly space for some improvement and evidence that people are willing to pay on an ongoing basis for software tools to collect this data.

This kind of sustainable business model, free software for charities and paid-for insights for funders, would mean the technology could be continually developed in the UK without requiring favours from California. It could make sure the user experience for community groups continues to improve, and could develop more interesting and useful ways of analysing the data. It also doesn’t necessarily contradict the idea of developing open standards. Even proprietary technology can still “print out” in an open format. It would however mean that new ideas can be tested more quickly.

If this all sounds like wishful thinking, we’re already doing this in 4 London boroughs and we’re growing rapidly.

We really liked most of this report. Some of its phrases could have been lifted directly from our website. But if you're reading Danny, when you're looking for how best to implement it, our Time to Spare software has the crucial benefit of actually existing.

 on data@timetospare.com, or you know, just watch this space.

Danny Kruger’s report on levelling up communities is a sensible blueprint. We've got some implementation suggestions.

Danny Kruger’s 'Levelling up our communities' report is good. Here’s how we'd implement it.

Lamenting the state of charity digital skills has long been a popular past time for the sector. Fortunately, in the past couple of years, it seems we've found a theoretical cure-all in the form of "Big Tech" corporate social responsibility.

However, despite months of gesturing in the vague direction of California, nothing much seems to have happened. We've tried asking nicely, and we've tried politely suggesting, but to no avail. There's still no magic Google volunteer matching platform. Still no Facebook volunteer passport. And still no Amazon volunteer currency. People are still on the eCampaigning Forum mailing list asking for alternatives to Salesforce.

Part of the problem is that "Big Tech" is too broad a category. Being so non-specific obscures the fact that no individual company actually makes sense. It's a kind of governmental 

. You can only remove the perception filter by looking at each "Big Tech" company separately.

; but they are almost all the result of acquisitions. Apart from its flagship retail site, Amazon rarely builds its own customer-facing software from scratch. In software, Amazon's leading light is 

Amazon makes far more money from selling access to its platform than it does building end-to-end products from scratch.

Microsoft is clearly more famous for its software products than Amazon. There's probably been a copy of Microsoft Office and Windows in the majority of businesses, schools and households at some point.

With respect to software, however, they are similar to Amazon. Windows, Azure, Github and VS Code are all Microsoft-run tools built to help other developers. The "

" describes the idea that a platform should provide more value to other people than it captures itself. It's not altruistic, they just earn more from taking a small slice of a bigger pie.

Whoever does build these volunteer tools will probably use the Amazon or Microsoft platforms, but it won't be Amazon or Microsoft themselves.

Apple is primarily a hardware company (even if their software is a big differentiator). Their biggest products are phones, laptops and headphones. Apart from iTunes, they don't build stand-alone software. It seems extremely unlikely we're expecting Apple to build tools to encourage volunteering.

Google may well build some volunteer tools. They build all kinds of 

 stuff. But it seems mostly so that individual engineers have something to put on their performance reviews. As a result, Google abandoning projects has 

. Remember Google Wave? No, me neither. Relying on Google to build something 

 is a big gamble that we shouldn't be taking with something this critical.

Facebook are probably the best bet. Their core competency is collecting information on people. That could certainly come in handy for matching volunteers.

However, Facebook has hardly been at the forefront of new developments, and new things they have tried haven't really caught fire. They set up a 

, but both have been troubled from the start. What they have done very effectively is to acquire the "hot new thing" as fast as possible. They bought Instagram and WhatsApp and tried to buy Snapchat. In reality, Facebook are probably tech's "fastest followers", but it's hard to imagine them building a successful volunteer infrastructure off their own backs.

And, even if they did build something, are they really the company you want running your volunteer infrastructure?

I think this mistake is a result of non-technical people thinking that "building something" is the hard part. In reality, because of all the tools that "Big Tech" have created, building something new has never been easier. It's no exaggeration to say that an 

 could throw together a volunteer matching tool in less than a fortnight. The challenging problem is building 

 and distributing it to the right people.

The experience from the rest of the tech sector suggests that "Big Tech" are not the best at building the right thing:

Time after time, start-ups demonstrate that a dedicated small team can do a far better job than a big technology company. As a result, the "What if Google did this?" question regularly makes it onto 

If we actually want to build working digital infrastructure for the voluntary sector, we should forget "Big Tech". Software is cheap. Building is easy.

Instead, we need people willing to risk working with small tech companies dedicated to the task. Chances are, the first versions won't be ideal. There will be glimmers of excitement, but piles of crap. We need charities, Local Authorities, Volunteer Centres and Funders willing to persevere with it and to help shape it. The focus should be on the speed of improvement; which we'll only increase if we create more opportunities to connect start-ups with these organisations.

If we're serious about building this, practically it means a few things. Firstly, these organisations need to stop hiring digital consultants. A "dedicated small team" is capable of outdoing "Big Tech", a team of consultants on a fixed term contract are not. The sector needs to stop paying consultants for 6 weeks to put together an MVP and then abandon it. The sector needs to be building products that can be maintained and iterated on.

Secondly, we need to create spaces to connect start-ups with charities. Funders could provide "software credits" with their grants. They could offer to bear all or some of the cost of new software for charities they fund. This would reduce the risk for charities, and provide a valuable distribution channel for software companies. If we were really serious, and thought a piece of software would only work at a critical mass, funders could even pay charities directly to try it out (

If instead we sit around waiting for "Big Tech" to deliver the perfect fully-formed tool, nothing will ever get done.

Big Tech companies aren't going to build the digital tools we need to encourage volunteering. We need to look elsewhere.

"Big Tech" won't save the voluntary sector

Understanding the hidden costs of grant making

Every month we speak to charities frustrated with the difficulties of grant applications and reporting for their existing grants. Some organisations have raised the question of whether particular grants were even worth it? Would it have been better to just not apply? To answer that, we've got some numbers for you.

We wanted to estimate the "all-in" cost of a grant process - the time taken to apply, do impact measurement and other monitoring. We have also included the costs to the funder, the costs imposed on rejected applicants, and even the costs incurred by charities who decided not to finish an application. Including all these extra costs ("externalities"), means that even a grant that looks perfectly sensible for the organisation that receives it, could actually have cost the sector more in staff time than it received in money.

At this point, in many sectors, we would be at a loss - most companies don't announce exactly how they spend their money, but thanks to 

 we had really easy access to more information about funders and where their money goes. For the rest, our estimates are based on our experience of working with small charities (feel free to mentally adjust if you think we've got it wrong!).

We know this section will get the least sympathy from people in cash-strapped charities, but it is an important consideration. The reality is that writing grant requirements, sorting through grant applications and visiting grantee organisations can be a lot of work. For sure, some do it better than others, but there is a very real cost to this exercise.

To do all this, you need to employ people. Fortunately for us, any foundation set up as a charity (i.e. all of them), lists their employees and volunteers with the Charity Commission. We looked at 29 of these foundations (chosen based on their reports to 360Giving). To get their total staff costs, we took employee numbers, and assumed that volunteers would work 1 day per week.

Camden Giving

Wates Family Enterprise Trust

Wates Foundation

John Moores Foundation

Cloudesley

Somerset Community Foundation

Wolfson Foundation

Walcot Foundation

United St Saviour's Charity

Two Ridings Community Foundation

Essex Community Foundation

Barrow Cadbury Trust

Indigo Trust

Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust

True Colours Trust

Oxfordshire Community Foundation

Trust for London

Heart Of England Community Foundation

Seafarers UK

Power to Change Trust

The Henry Smith Charity

Esmée Fairbairn Foundation

Cheshire Community Foundation

County Durham Community Foundation

Community Foundation for Surrey

Guy's and St Thomas' Charity

Devon Community Foundation

Lloyds Bank Foundation for England and Wales

Suffolk Community Foundation

FTE staff at each funder

It turns out some funders have a lot more employees than others (don't worry, we've some more insightful things coming...). More interesting is the number of employees per grant delivered. If you exclude some crazy extremes - Camden Giving we're looking at you - there's not that much variation. Interestingly, we found that statistically, funder costs in grant making are driven more by the number of grants than the size of the grants. 

So we assumed an average wage across funders (and their volunteers) of £30,000 per year, and then estimated the staff cost per grant for all 29 foundations:

Understanding the hidden costs of grant making - how complex monitoring and unsuccessful applications can outweigh the value of a grant

Charities spend 15.8 million hours reporting to funders - that's too much

Solving the GDPR headache of the reopening requirements

Danny Kruger’s 'Levelling up our communities' report is good. Here’s how we'd implement it.

"Big Tech" won't save the voluntary sector

46% of grants cost more than they're worth

Weeknotes 17th April

Working with communities in a lockdown - theory and practice

(Three) weeknotes 3rd April

Systematic racial bias in COVID-19 testing?

Social Mobility in London - is it really that bad?

What is a CRM and why should I use it?

Why good data is important for funders