Most charities know their funders want outcomes data. The problem is not a lack of ambition. It is a lack of infrastructure. Fundraising data lives in one system, case records in another, and survey results on someone's laptop. Compiling a single funder report can take three weeks of manual work. SORP 2026 now makes impact reporting mandatory for all tiers. This article shows how to build the data structure that joins your service work to the reports a funder wants. It also says which software can help.
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There is a gap between what charities report and what funders need. Only 36% of charities feel sure they can measure their impact. Yet 89% of funders ask for outcomes, both in the application and at the end of the grant. The numbers tell the story: just 8% of charities report their impact comprehensively, while 68% give some outcome information that rarely meets funder expectations.
The root cause is a confusion between outputs, outcomes, and impact. These terms are not interchangeable.
Most charity reports stop at outputs. Funders want outcomes. The best funders want to understand the connection between what you did and what changed, with evidence to support the claim. "We helped 500 people" is activity reporting, not impact reporting.
A funder usually asks for five kinds of evidence. Numbers for what you delivered. Outcomes measured against a starting point. Proof of how you spent the grant. Case studies that follow one person. What the people you helped said about the change.
Not all funders ask for the same thing. The reporting burden varies enormously depending on who funds you, and most charities report to several funders simultaneously, each with different frameworks and timelines.
| Funder Type | Grant Range | Reporting Frequency | Key Evidence Required |
|---|---|---|---|
| National Lottery Community Fund | £10,000 to £1m+ | 6-monthly or annually | Outputs, outcomes, beneficiary feedback, case studies |
| Large trusts and foundations | £10,000 to £500,000 | Annually or 6-monthly | Theory of Change alignment, outcome data, financial evidence |
| Small and family trusts | £1,000 to £25,000 | End-of-grant only | Outputs, basic outcomes, narrative |
| Local authority commissioners | £50,000 to £2m+ | Quarterly | KPIs, outcome measures, demographic breakdowns, PROM scores |
| Corporate funders | £5,000 to £100,000 | 6-monthly or annually | Outputs, stories, photos, social media metrics |
| Government departments (DCMS, DHSC) | £100,000 to £10m+ | Quarterly or monthly | Standardised outcome frameworks, financial returns |
Grant admin costs about £6,600 for each grant when you account for the full cycle of application, reporting, and monitoring. A charity with ten grants at once therefore carries £66,000 of admin cost. That is before the staff time spent building reports from systems that do not talk.
There is a positive trend worth noting. Over 150 funders (collectively making grants worth over £1 billion in 2023-24) have signed IVAR's Open and Trusting commitments, pledging proportionate reporting requirements. But "proportionate" still means evidence-based. It means fewer metrics, not no metrics.
The Charities Statement of Recommended Practice (SORP) 2026 applies to accounting periods starting on or after 1 January 2026. The most significant change: impact reporting moves from "nice to have" to a mandatory element of the Trustees' Annual Report for all charities.
The Tier 2 requirement is the one that will catch most charities off guard. It is not enough to describe what you did. You must disclose the measures and indicators you used to assess performance. If you do not have a measurement framework, SORP 2026 requires you to explain why.
This connects directly to the Charity Commission annual return. Charities with income over £25,000 must already submit their Trustees' Annual Report, accounts, and an independent examiner's or auditor's report. From October 2026, the audit threshold rises to £1.5m and the independent examination threshold increases from £25,000 to £40,000. The reporting requirements are shifting towards fewer charities needing formal audits but more charities needing structured impact evidence.
Before you choose software, you need to decide what you are measuring. An outcomes framework gives you the structure. Several are in common use across the UK charity sector.
The foundation of most impact measurement. A Theory of Change follows a chain. Inputs, what you put in. Activities, what you do. Outputs, what you produce. Outcomes, what changes. Impact, the difference that lasts. It puts your assumptions in writing. You put in these resources. You do this work. You reach these people. You then expect these changes, for these reasons.
Theory of Change is promoted by NPC, NCVO, and required by most major funders including the National Lottery Community Fund. Most charities have one on paper. Very few have operationalised it into their data collection systems.
A simpler, more linear version of Theory of Change. Logic models map inputs through to outcomes on an if-then basis. Government departments use them, in the DCMS Outcome Delivery Plans and the HM Treasury Green Book. They work well for one programme. They work less well across a whole organisation.
Specific tools that measure specific changes in a standardised way:
The Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 requires commissioners to consider wider social, economic, and environmental benefits in procurement. For charities competing for council-commissioned contracts, this means being able to quantify your social value in monetary terms. The UK Social Value Bank, from HACT, puts a money value on a social outcome through wellbeing. The Social Value Engine is the only approved SROI platform in the UK. It holds more than 300 money proxies that other experts have checked.
NPC recommends focusing on 3-5 well-chosen metrics measured consistently, rather than 20 sporadic ones. The temptation to measure everything is strong. Resist it. Choose the outcomes that matter most to your beneficiaries and your biggest funders, then measure those properly.
This is the core technology problem. Most charities operate with at least two, often three, disconnected data systems.
Fundraising CRMs (Beacon, Donorfy, Access Charity CRM) manage donor relationships. They track who gave what, when, and how to ask again. They handle Gift Aid claims and campaign management. But they cannot track beneficiary outcomes, case notes, or service delivery data. For more on what these systems do well, see our charity CRM comparison.
Case management systems (Lamplight, Charitylog, Views) track beneficiary work. They record referrals, service usage, support plans, and case notes. Some include outcomes tracking modules. But they do not connect to fundraising data. For a detailed comparison, see our guide to charity case management software.
M&E tools (Upshot, Makerble, Outcomes Star Online) measure outcomes and generate impact reports. But they often sit separately from both the fundraising CRM and the case management system, creating a third silo.
The problem is structural. Each system uses different identifiers for the same people. A beneficiary in your case management system may have a completely different record ID in your survey tool. There is no shared key linking a funder's grant to the services it paid for to the outcomes those services produced.
This three-layer problem breaks down as follows:
The digital skills gap compounds the problem. The 2025 Charity Digital Skills Report gives one figure. 39% of charities call themselves poor at website and analytics data. The year before it was 31%. Only 18% rate their use of digital in service delivery as "excellent." And 69% cite strained budgets as the biggest barrier to digital progress. The same pattern runs through all charity data, including donor management and Gift Aid. The data you need most is held in tools that were never built to talk to each other.
The market splits into three categories: dedicated M&E platforms, CRMs with built-in outcomes tracking, and enterprise solutions. None of them solve the full problem on their own.
| Software | Focus | Strength | Limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Upshot | Youth, sport, community outcomes | Purpose-built for funder reporting. Used by 1,400+ organisations across 60 local authorities. Tracks 315,000 sessions and 1.3 million participants annually. | Limited Theory of Change support. Less flexible outside the youth and sport sector. |
| Makerble | Impact measurement dashboards | Free tier available. SROI calculator, geographic heatmaps, real-time dashboards. | Limited case management. Better for reporting than daily service delivery. |
| Outcomes Star Online | Outcomes Star framework | Purpose-built for Star measures. Over 1,000 organisations globally. | Only works with the Outcomes Star framework. Limited general M&E capability. |
| Software | Focus | Outcomes Capability | Limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lamplight | Charity CRM (700+ UK orgs) | Supports WEMWBS, Outcomes Star, Core 10, PHQ-9, GAD-7. Scatter plot reporting. Customisable fields. | No AI-powered reporting. No Theory of Change features. Basic dashboards. |
| Views | Case management (voluntary sector) | Person-centred support planning. Outcome tracking. Strong for disability services. | Niche market position. Limited integrations with other platforms. |
| Salesforce NPSP | Fundraising CRM (10 free licences) | 70+ pre-built reports. Custom dashboards. Basic grant tracking. | Outcomes management requires upgrade to Nonprofit Cloud. Significant configuration needed. TCO typically £50,000+ in year one. |
The selection criteria should follow your reporting needs, not the other way around:
For most charities, the answer is that no single off-the-shelf product covers fundraising, case management, and impact reporting in one place. You either accept two connected systems or you build something bespoke.
The architecture follows the same logic regardless of platform. Here is a practical seven-step approach.
Take your Theory of Change. Write one if you have none. Then find the exact point in your work where somebody records each piece of data. For every outcome you claim, there should be a specific moment when that data enters your system. If there is no collection point, the outcome is unmeasurable.
Look at the reporting requirements of your three largest funders. Identify the measures that overlap. If the National Lottery wants wellbeing outcomes and your local authority commissioner wants WEMWBS scores, that is one measure serving two reports. Consolidate where possible.
Data collection must happen as part of the work, not as an afterthought. Front-line staff may see the data as a separate job for the end of the week. The quality will then be poor, and some of it will not get done. The intake form, the session record, and the exit survey should be part of the service delivery process itself.
If a person appears in your case management system, your survey tool, and your attendance register, they need the same identifier in all three. Without this, you cannot link a person's journey from referral through service delivery to measured outcomes. This is the single most important architectural decision you will make.
Do not wait until a funder report is due to discover your data is incomplete. A live screen can show how much data you have, how many outcome measures are complete, and how each programme is going. You then see a gap at once, and not three weeks before a deadline.
Each funder has a different reporting format. Build templates that map your data fields to each funder's requirements. When a report is due, the template should populate automatically from your database. The three-week manual compilation exercise should become a half-day review process.
The best architecture in the world fails if staff do not understand why they are collecting data. Frontline workers need to see the connection between the session record they complete and the funder report that secures next year's funding. This is a culture shift, not just a training exercise.
Look at what funders ask for. A baseline, a change, a number of people reached, a group breakdown. Almost every funder wants the same handful of things, in a different format.
Every charity therefore builds those measures again, in its own system, in its own words. Two charities that run the same programme cannot compare their results, because neither can be sure they counted the same thing. A funder that holds both reports cannot add them together.
On engage.re an outcome, a measure and a person are declared once, in a shared dictionary that every charity system uses. Two charities that use the same measure are then using the same measure, and each one can prove it. A funder format becomes a view of that data, not a new collection.
Each charity still owns its own system and its own data, and shares only what it chooses to share. We explain how a whole sector shares one foundation in bespoke software for a whole sector. We describe the market it creates in what does an interoperable software market look like.
The structural problem is clear. Fundraising data, case management data, and outcomes data sit in separate tools built by separate vendors for separate purposes. Off-the-shelf platforms solve one or two layers of the problem, but none solve all three.
A bespoke system can connect all three layers into a single data architecture. One beneficiary record that links to the grant that funds their support, the services they received, and the outcomes they achieved. Funder reports that generate automatically because the data was structured correctly from the start. No manual Excel consolidation. No three-week compilation exercises.
This is not the right approach for every charity. A small organisation with a single funder and straightforward service delivery will be well served by Lamplight or Upshot. Some charities hold several grants, and each funder wants a different report. They run several programmes. They must now meet SORP 2026 for the first time. Their separate systems cost them staff time, late reports and poor data. That cost is often higher than the cost of one system that works as a whole.
For a fuller exploration of bespoke versus off-the-shelf charity software, see our charity software guide.
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