What funders actually look at

There's a particular kind of dread that sets in when the funding cycle comes round. A grant application is open and the deadline is closer than you thought. A community trust wants an interim update by the end of the month. Last year's main funder needs an annual report before they'll consider the renewal. And you're trying to figure out, from a year's worth of WhatsApp messages and a paper logbook, how many people you actually fed.

Reporting isn't the work that drew you to a foodbank. But the work won't continue without it. Here's what tends to be true about the numbers funders actually pay attention to - and how to make them easier to produce.

The three numbers almost every funder cares about

Once you cut through the application-specific jargon, almost every funder wants to see some version of:

  1. How many people did you serve? - usually counted in parcels distributed and individuals fed (often split into adults / children).
  2. How did demand change? - month-on-month or year-on-year. They want to know whether the need is rising, and whether you're keeping up.
  3. How was the funding used? - cost per parcel, cost per person, or the percentage of expenditure that went directly to food vs overhead.

Specific funders also want demographics (age, ethnicity, suburb), referral sources, dietary or cultural needs met, food-rescue diversion volumes, volunteer hours. But those three above are the spine. Get them right and almost every other number is a derivative.

Capture once, report many

The most common cause of reporting pain is that the data is captured for one purpose (running the parcel today) and then has to be reconstructed for another (the funder report next year).

The fix is to capture slightly more than you strictly need at the moment of the parcel - but at the moment, when it's cheap - and let that data answer the reports later.

A parcel log that captures:

  • Date
  • Household size (and whether children are present, ideally a count)
  • Suburb or referral source
  • A rough category breakdown of what went in the parcel

…answers most of the questions above without anyone having to remember what happened in February.

A small upgrade: when someone first registers (their first parcel), capture a few demographic basics once. Then for every subsequent parcel, you only record the parcel itself. That's how the year-end "we served 1,240 people from 380 households" number gets built - not from a heroic counting effort in December.

Make demand visible as it changes

The "how did demand change" question is the one most foodbanks struggle with, because it requires comparing this month to last year, and last year's records are in a different format or a different volunteer's head.

A few suggestions:

  • Pick one number and track it monthly. Parcels distributed is usually the easiest. Even a single number plotted on a simple chart, kept up to date, lets you answer "are we busier than last year?" in seconds.
  • Annotate the spikes. When a big donor pulled out, or when winter hit, or when a benefit-payment date moved - write it next to the line. That's the context that turns a number into a story funders can connect to.
  • Don't wait until the report is due. If you only look at the chart when you're applying, you'll miss the trend that's been building. A 5-minute check at month-end is enough.

Cost per parcel: the funder's favourite question

If you have any sense of your monthly food spend (including donated food at a notional value, if you're being thorough), divide by parcels. Even a rough number lets you say "we run at around $X per parcel" - which funders use to compare you with other applicants and to size their grant.

You don't need a finance degree. You need the spend, the parcel count, and a calculator. The number will move around - that's fine. Show the range and the trend.

What funders don't want

A 40-page PDF nobody on the funder's side has time to read. Most funders are looking for:

  • The numbers above, in a clear table or short paragraph
  • A one-paragraph human story (with permission)
  • A short statement of what changed since the last report - what worked, what didn't, what you'd change next time

If you find yourself writing pages of background, ask yourself who the audience is. The funder usually already knows the context. They want to see what their money did.

Where software helps

If the parcel log is on paper and the demographics are in someone's head and the food spend is in a shoebox of receipts, the gap between "what you do" and "what you can report" is going to keep being painful no matter how good your spreadsheet skills are.

The piece of software that helps isn't the one with the prettiest charts. It's the one that captures the parcel log, the household details, and (optionally) the stock movements in one place - so the report at the other end is a query, not an archaeology project. That's the design HelpingHand is built around; if you're at the point where the reporting pain has finally tipped past your tolerance for change, have a look at helpinghand.nz.

But the bigger shift is the habit: capture once, at the moment of the parcel, slightly more than today needs. The reports will write themselves.