Narrative reporting: Not a big deal if…

By: Jelena Brkić

Are you one of those CSO professionals or activists who despises project report writing? Are you anxious before reading an email from the donor, knowing that comments on the report are attached? If the answer to any or both of these is YES, continue reading. 

As a civil society organization, it is necessary to cultivate and maintain relationships with the donor community to uphold its sustainability. Led by this thought, we mapped narrative reporting as an important part of donor stewardship and the most common and resourceful tool to communicate and celebrate your achieved results. Therefore, we created a list of advice based on the most common mistakes CSOs make when submitting narrative reports. The list below is based on SMART Balkan’s experience in the past months, and we believe it can be helpful for the future reporting efforts of CSOs with other donors as well. To avoid mistakes in reporting and nurture fruitful relationships with donors, put an effort to:

• Carefully read the project proposal and reporting guidelines. Do this at the beginning of the project to be aware of what is expected of you as a CSO implementing the project. This will help you plan your data collection and record your results. When reporting, reading the project proposal and project guidelines again will help you write meaningful reports and think of the concept of the report before putting everything on paper. If you are wondering why this is important, well, often, it happens that the text in the subsections of the report does not have a logical flow or is even contradictory.
• Often, grant-awarded organizations do not announce changes in project implementation beforehand (in the context of implementation, in staff, etc.). Learning about major changes in the budget and/or agreed activities from the report is a serious breach of contract with financial consequences. To avoid such an unpleasant situation, inform your donor of changes that might occur in the project implementation.
• Remember that changes in the implementation context are not unexpected; therefore, if you need a budget reallocation, inform your donor in time, as they need to make mindful decisions on its support.
• When developing the report concept, define key messages you want to communicate with the donor. These messages should be guiding thoughts throughout the whole report. For example, if you want to emphasize that your team has excellent capacity, link it in the description of the results; if you want to say that your strength is in community development and how you built great relations with community members, this must be seen in the report. Emphasize what you were most proud of during the reporting period. You are the one who creates the donor’s opinion about you through reporting, so why not pay more attention to writing the report?!
• Start preparing the report and supporting documentation in time. Many times, grant-awarded organizations start the process a couple of days before the deadline and forget to submit complete documentation or miss signing one of the documents. It even happens that some parts of the reporting form are not filled in. Show respect towards the project you wrote, your beneficiaries, and the donor by submitting the complete report;
• Keep a record of your activities, successes and unsuccessful stories, and results. This way, the report writing process will go smoothly as you will have all data in one place. Often, CSOs neglect results-oriented reporting, which is of utmost importance to justify your work. Also, bear in mind that donors are happy when they read that the project helped your organization to grow and develop, so why leave out that information!?
• For the donor, it is less important to read how many activities you implemented with how many people (although this is important). Still, the focus should be on the results you achieved during the implementation. Before writing the report, read the project proposal and logical framework (or milestone plan) to see what was agreed upon regarding results. Put the focus on them, and feel free to use storytelling. One of the most common mistakes grant-awarded organizations make is mixing activities and results instead of observing the activities as a tool to achieve results. Focus on people, explain how your project contributed to changing someone’s life (use personal story), or how it contributed to some institutional change, how the access to information is more accessible, etc.
• Pay attention to the length of the report. The quality of the text is the priority over quantity. Instead of decorating the report with too many adjectives, focus on tangible results, lessons learned, problems, and challenges you had during the implementation.
• When it comes to the writing style, in many reports we have read, generalization is one of the most common mistakes (e.g., most of the participants have accomplished…, young people are not interested in decision-making processes…). When writing the report, be specific and refer to concrete, measurable, and justifiable data, whether you will reference an academic study or offer an organization’s experience.
• Write about unsuccessful activities or measures that were undertaken. Use them to elaborate on your learnings. It is suspicious that an organization was fully successful in the project implementation, and it is practically impossible to have everything as planned. Donors expect some deviations from the plan to occur; be honest and report those. Especially as unsuccessful stories show your growth and lessons learned.
• Do not wait for the deadline for the report to inform your donor of the results of your project. Grant-giving organizations consist of people just like you. They love to see positive changes and read about developments achieved with their support. This will strengthen your relationship with the donor and, for sure, improve your visibility as the story will be shared on social media.
• Think of your donor as a partner! Not only are you awarded by funds, but together with your donor, you are contributing to the same social cause. Sharing the same vision and values is a great baseline for a partnership, right?

In the end, let’s return to the beginning of this article. Reading about these pieces of advice most definitely will not make you less anxious about writing the reports, and you will not suddenly discover extreme pleasure in composing reports. Still, if you apply these, you might soon notice a shift in your mindset and improvement in your reporting skills.

Good luck and happy writing 😊